CDEC Assay: How to Assess the Costs & Benefits?

In the fall of 1988, I wrote two very detailed four-year reports on CDEC: one, for the Sloan Foundation, detailing the strategy and projects of CDEC’s Sloan grant activity; the other, for the administration, detailing measures of CDEC’s overall productivity, service and impact on campus, with charts galore. It is timely again to assay CDEC’s value to the university, not only to answer the perennial CMU question What've ya done tor us lately? but also to assess what role, if any, CDEC should have in the university’s strategic future.

The university needs to assess CDEC’s role and performance with respect to its own larger missions: the creation and dissemination of knowledge; the continual improvement of undergraduate education; and, in its distinctive posture as a technologically advanced university, leadership in guiding technology for the benefit of society and education in the new millenium.