History
In 1972, with financial assistance from Ralph Evinrude, the chairman of Outboard Marine Corporation and a resident of Jensen Beach, FIT was able to buy the Saint Joseph College campus for its Hydrospace Technical Institute (HTI), which had been founded in 1968. HTI was renamed the School of Marine and Environmental Technology (SOMET)and moved to Jensen Beach with 16 students. Its full time enrollment soon grew to around 800. To adapt the campus to its new use, FIT built the Marine Science and Marine Maintenance buildings, a 720-foot dock out into the Indian River and an athletic field for recreation..
Within a few years the SOMET name was replaced by SAT (School of Applied Technology). By the early 1980s the campus was simply FIT Jensen Beach. Unlike Saint Joseph College, its predecessor, FIT was able to attract local full-time students as well as part-time ones who took advantage of the many courses offered at night.
FIT also took advantage of the local academic and technical talent and hired them as adjunct faculty. The campus was headed by a Dean and had a great deal of autonomy. Grade reports and transcripts, though, came from the main campus. In the mid 1980s, however, the board of trustees on the main campus determined that FIT Jensen Beach was not paying its own way and the campus was closed in 1986 and transferred back to the main campus in Melbourne where it became the Department of Marine and Environmental Systems (DMES).
In addition to bachelor's degrees, FIT Jensen Beach also offered an MBA program for local business people taught almost entirely by adjunct faculty. After the campus closed, the MBA program stayed on in rented space in Sewall's Point for a few years until it was merged into the MBA program on the main campus
Read more about this topic: Jensen Beach Campus Of The Florida Institute Of Technology
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