@Dawala282 : I am just making the point that referring to the “facilities” is often trickery and that it is indeed tempting for us to fall for it as “momentum”(however sometimes facilities improvements were needed for years, but a good department just has made less than ideal accommodations work really well. Emory psychology is like this, however, undergraduate education there was always strong and more rigorous than normal and certainly did not change once psychology consolidated into the one single building). Like, take for example the thing you said about jobs. Were they not getting jobs before? If they were not, then it is actually much more worth investigating what the program is doing differently at a deeper level to find out what its career center is doing. Departments don’t move into new digs and then suddenly students are more employable. Often folks are naive and do make these associations. It is very common to do, especially if all you know about the past of a department is: “It was not located in the shiny new building” What if Tufts engineering was performing as well as it was today (no I don’t count “lots of majors” as performance…biology departments, for example, should know that high enrollment is a double edged sword as a performance and quality indicator)? People just tend to attribute better attributes (including those that already existed) to newness and new facilities. Again, I think they impact morale and people’s satisfaction with the space their education takes place in, but often beyond that…not much more for undergraduates.
I will actually give an Emory example: Physics, Math, CS, and environmental science moved into a brand spanking new building in 2004 or so. The reputation for those departments, except for maybe math and environmental sciences has increased so marginally. However, even before the building, the students who select those majors are top notch so got top graduate school bids, Goldwaters, and tons of other oppurtunities, as they do today. It is producing more Goldwaters and pulling more extremely gifted math students, but that is because of the recruitment of a mentor oriented faculty member far after the new building opened. Ken Ono hosts summer REU’s for high schools, and is sort of like an “Abstract Algebra rock star” and has been able to attract a lot of interest on his own to that field. In addition, the math department at Emory has been actively recruiting high level talent (so those who went significantly beyond calculus BC in HS) through the Scholars programs or otherwise. They also have implemented an honors course for those types of students and make access to math graduate courses easy (the two most recent GWs from math were taking grad. level courses in sophomore year, and the younger one was the first to go through the honors sequence).
Humanities majors at Emory are becoming highly employable simply because of the existence of this fairly new program called QTM. Guess what, QTM is hosted in the very old (but nice) building that hosts political science. QTM has rigorous statistics/programming oriented courses, as well as a robust fellowship and internship program. That is the secret to success of those who enhance their majors with QTM. I’m sure a separate facility would be nice, but it would make no difference in overall quality even if the programs remained as they are.