Autodesk gives $21 million software grant to Penn State Erie

Students and faculty at The Behrend College will have full access to Moldflow, Creation Suite, and other software. This is the first grant of its kind from Autodesk.

Students and faculty at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College (PSE-B) are the beneficiaries of a new corporate gift today from Autodesk. For the first time Autodesk has provided full access to a range of products through an in-kind grant to a college or university. The gift—the largest ever at PSE-B—will give students access to three software suites:

Education Master Suite, which includes a variety of Autodesk CAD and engineering analysis tools
Simulation Moldflow, Autodesk’s design tool for plastic injection molding
Entertainment Creation Suite, including software used to animate the last 17 films that won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.

moldflow10_scaled_w450px — Autodesk Moldflow plastics software will get plenty of use at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, which has the largest plastics engineering program in the US. (Source: Akro Engineering)

Faculty members in the college’s School of Engineering and professors in chemistry, psychology, game design and management information systems already are using the software. Every student and faculty member at Penn State Behrend now has access to the software.

Students also can become certified in Autodesk Simulation Moldflow by taking an exam that will be administered annually on campus.

Our take

A quick online search reveals a significant connection between PSE-B alumni and classes on Moldflow, including next month’s Autodesk University, for good reason. PSE-B is the only campus in the Penn State system to offer a plastic-specific engineering degree, and is one of only four accredited programs in the US. PSE-B claims its plastics lab is the largest in the country dedicated to undergraduate education.

Autodesk has working with higher education in its DNA. An aggressive sales campaign to schools in the 1980s helped AutoCAD separate from the pack and become the global standard for computer-aided drafting. When the most notable undergraduate program for plastics engineering starts cranking out Moldflow-trained graduates, it is not hard to imagine what software they will ask for when they land their first job.