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Enrollment and SAT scores are up. So are fund-raising and income from research grants.
New joint programs have been established with top schools, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Purdue University. Work is under way on a biotech research center, and officials expect soon to add $100 million to the endowment.
Oh, one other thing: Two attention-grabbing new buildings just opened in the middle of campus.
Read about the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) lately and the focus will be on those new buildings-an edgy, innovative, $48-million campus center designed by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and a stunning, $28-million dormitory by Chicago's own Helmut Jahn. But the better story is what else is happening to the once-struggling school that surrounds those buildings.
After a 50-year nap, the South Side university that another famed architect, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, put on the map finally has awakened, along with the
adjacent Bronzeville neighborhood. It still has a long way to go to fully compete with engineering and science schools it considers its peers: Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh- and Cleveland's Case Western Reserve University. But the bright new campus buildings are both a sign of what has occurred and a catalyst for further change.
"We're trying to reposition the university to be among the very best in the United States," says IIT President Lew Collens.
"It's turnaround time-for us, for the people in Stateway Gardens, for the...