Since 2001 the Portland Society for Information Management has awarded more than $250,000 to universities in Oregon and Washington, much of it coming to Oregon State.
This year Portland SIM awarded OSU $20,000 in scholarships, up $2,500 from last year.
“Portland SIM has been a model for other SIM programs across the country in raising funds to support BIS programs,” said Byron Marshall, a BIS and Accounting professor at the Oregon State College of Business. “It’s allowed us to award dozens of scholarships in the past few years.”
Portland SIM is a leading organization for information technology executives. In addition to OSU the group works with the Oregon Institute of Technology, Portland State University and Washington State — Vancouver.
Read how a Portland SIM scholarship helped Oregon State graduate Daniel Changkuon.
The increase for Oregon State reflects the growth in the BIS program, which has been steadily growing over the past decade.
“We’ve been doubling in the past few years,” said Rene Reitsma, director of the BIS program at OSU.
Reitsma said BIS programs struggled after the Dot Com crash of the early 2000s. OSU had around 30 BIS students after the crash, but has grown to around 90 this year, Reitsma said.
He attributes part of the growth to an increased interest in programming, especially after the introduction of the iPhone and other products that made computing cool again.
Some BIS programs also changed their curriculum to try to draw more students attracted to the business side, Reitsma said, something Oregon State never did. He said that strong base in technology — and having faculty able to teach it — gave Oregon State an advantage when students again wanted a more technical degree.
“I think the reason we survived is that many programs threw away all their tech pieces,” Reitsma said. “We never did that and took a risk and said we’re not going to do that. We stayed with technology and survived.”