Eight years after Washington State Everett campus opened, the university branch is still trying to define itself

EVERETT — In a room on the Washington State Everett campus, students practice defusing cybersecurity threats using a miniature model city with skyscrapers, a power plant, office buildings, a train, homes and a Ferris wheel.

During a demonstration, alarms ring and the city lights go out as electricity is cut off by hackers.

Cybersecurity professor Shih-Lien (Linus) Lu shows several racks of servers students will need to go through to reprogram computers and find controllers to restore electricity.

Lu is proud of the state-of-the art miniature city security platform. He said the platform purchased by Washington State for the cost of $100,000 is one of two in the world.

“The other is in some government agency somewhere,” he said in an interview, not knowing if it’s the CIA, FBI or some other secretive agency.

But the security platform in Everett is somewhat of a secret too.

Lu said the cybersecurity program started with just two students in 2003. Seven students were enrolled in the school year that ended in May.

Lu, the only faculty member in the program and a cybersecurity expert from Taiwan, expects 10 students this coming September and is hoping for 20 within two years.

He said it’s hard promoting a new program and gathering interest.

The same could be said for the entire Washington State Everett campus.

Eight years after it opened in August 2017 as a satellite of the main Washington State campus in Pullman, the Everett campus is still trying to find its way.

It was envisioned that the science- and technology-oriented campus would be serving 5,000 students by 2025. That was the assessment in 2004 when the Legislature authorized $4 million dollars to begin the planning process for a Snohomish County campus of Washington State.

The large number of students never materialized.

The sole $64.6 million four-story campus building on Broadway, holding upperclassmen and one graduate program, had 224 students in its first year of operation in 2017, college statistics show.

Attendance slowly rose to a peak of 291 students in the fall of 2020 but started dropping after COVID-19. By the fall of 2022, attendance was down to 186 students.

In September, it was back up to 237, only 13 more than when the campus opened eight years ago.

“I think our vision was to grow a little bit more rapidly,” Washington State Everett Chancellor Paul Pitre said in an interview. “We had some pretty aggressive timelines for adding new degree programs.”

He said the campus has 10 degree programs compared to the 26 that were envisioned by today.

Pitre said COVID-19 threw things off, but the planning and incremental funding for new degree programs were more complicated than anticipated.

The chancellor said he was encouraged by applications for the incoming class in September and expects a 4% rise in students when the classes start in September.

He said more degree programs will be added gradually, but he dosen’t see the school getting up to 26 degree programs any time in the near future.

In March 2023, college officials abandoned plans to buy land for a branch campus much larger than the current building that sits on the Everett Community College campus.

The legislature appropriated $10 million to Washington State Everett in 2019 for a campus expansion. Campus officials had looked at buying 13 acres of land from the Everett Housing Authority in the Delta Section of Everett.

Washington State officials eventually concluded they only had the budget to buy 3½ acres of the land of what had been the Baker Heights housing complex.

With 13 acres, you could build an urban campus, Chris Mulick, the interim vice president for WSU External Affairs & Government Relations said in May 2023. “At 3½ acres, not so much.”

Pitre said it would have cost between $13 million and $16 million to acquire the entire property from the housing authority, and that is without construction costs to build new buildings.

“It was a little out of reach for us,” he said.

The Washington State Everett building was built to house as many as 1,000 students, though Western Washington University in Bellingham and Eastern Washington University in Cheney also offer some degree programs out of the building.

In addition to starting the cybersecurity program, Washington State Everett also began its first graduate degree program, a doctorate in educational leadership, tw0 years ago.

Pitre said the program is aimed at offering school administrators leadership skills and can be taken in conjunction with a certification program to become a school district superintendent.

He said the program had been offered at other Washington State campus locations, but offering it in Snohomish County filled an unmet need.

He said the mechanical engineering program is the most popular offering at the Everett campus, training engineers for work at Boeing and other companies in the Snohomish County manufacturing corridor.

Most of Washington State Everett’s students come from community colleges, like Edmonds College and Everett Community, Pitre said. He said the original decision to build the campus focused on not offering a four-year program because it would be a duplication of what local community colleges already offered.

He said that turns out to be cost-effective for students because they pay lower community college tuition for their first two years.

Pitre said one shift for the Washington State Everett campus has been an increase in the number of part-time students.

He said 51% of the 237 students attending school in the 2024-25 academic year were attending school part-time compared to only 27 % of the students attending school back in 2017.

Pitre said he is looking at holding more university classes in the evening and on weekends to accommodate the changing trends.

“Most of our current classes are held between 8 a.m and 2 p.m. weekdays,” he said.

He said the increase means more students are working while attending school and that the college needs to be flexible in meeting the students’ needs.

Randy Diamond: 425-339-3097; randy.diamond@heraldnet.com.