The First College of Computing in the U.S. is Now 35 Years Old

Georgia Tech launched a College of Computing years before the commercial Internet.

With all of the news of new colleges of computing these days, I find it all the more incredible to think that Georgia Institute of Technology has had a College of Computing for 35 years now. In 1990. Years before the commercial Internet, even.

Think about that timing for a moment. In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee was still working on the first web browser at CERN. Most people had never heard of email. The idea that computer science would become as fundamental to modern life as it has—that it would reshape everything from how we communicate to how we work to how we think—was far from obvious. And yet Georgia Tech made a bet that computer science deserved to stand on its own, separate from electrical engineering, as a full college.

While I don’t know the full history of the establishment of the College, I remember hearing stories about how the restructuring was quite controversial at the time. I can only imagine what those faculty meetings must have been like. Academic reorganizations are never easy, and this one was particularly bold. It meant pulling computer science out from under the traditional engineering umbrella and giving it independence, resources, and autonomy. That kind of move doesn’t happen without fierce debate and, I imagine, some bruised egos along the way.

Even when I started there as an assistant professor in 2006—sixteen years after the College was established—I remember thinking that the structure was pretty unusual. As a fresh Ph.D. graduate, I really couldn’t wrap my head around it. The thought of CS in a completely separate department from EE seemed utterly foreign to me at the time. I had come from a world where computer science and electrical engineering were tightly coupled, where the organizational chart reflected the historical reality that computing had emerged from electrical engineering. Separating them felt almost unnatural.

But so many faculty there, including and especially Ellen Zegura, sold me on the College, saying how advantageous this structure was. I took a leap of faith at the time, but over the years it has become increasingly clear to me how right she was about this—and many other things. Organizational structure is critical for innovation, in scholarship as it is in anything. When you give a field room to define itself on its own terms, rather than as a subset of something else, it can move faster and think bigger.

I think it’s one of the reasons Georgia Tech has been able to remain so agile in thinking about CS over the years. The Online MS in CS program, which launched in 2014 and ultimately reached over a million students worldwide, was a radical experiment in making high-quality graduate education accessible at scale. The Threads curriculum reimagined how to teach computer science by letting students weave together their own path through the discipline rather than following a rigid sequence. And more recently, the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy represents yet another structural innovation, recognizing that security and privacy have become foundational concerns that deserve their own institutional home.

None of these innovations were guaranteed to work. All of them required institutional flexibility, a willingness to experiment, and the kind of autonomy that comes from having your own college rather than being a department within someone else’s college. When you have to negotiate with other departments over every curriculum change or new program, innovation slows to a crawl. When you have the independence to move quickly, you can try things that other institutions can’t.

The more experience and perspective I accrue, the more impressed I am that Georgia Tech did this so early, and even more so that they pulled it off in the face of what must have been incredible resistance at the time. It amazes me every time I think about it. Someone—or more likely, a group of people—had the vision to see that computer science was going to be massive and the courage to fight for the institutional structure to support that vision. They were willing to endure the controversy and discomfort of reorganization for something that wouldn’t fully pay off for years or even decades.

Now, 35 years later, other universities are catching on. We’re seeing new colleges of computing announced with great fanfare, as if the idea is novel. And maybe for those institutions, it is. To me, this just makes it all the more incredible that Georgia Tech figured this out in 1990, when it was far from obvious that this was the right move.

That kind of foresight and institutional courage is worth celebrating, and learning from.