When prefrosh descended on the College’s campus in late April, the admissions office plugged the many advantages that puts Harvard atop the higher education world: its first-rate faculty, its unmatched resources, a campus steeped in history.

One thing they didn’t pitch was Harvard’s top-flight engineering school.

That’s because it doesn’t have one.

As a result, many top students and faculty in engineering, applied sciences and technology don’t give Harvard a second thought, opting for more engineering-friendly rivals like Stanford, Princeton or crosstown powerhouse MIT.

And while top University administrators had long been content to forgo the best researchers in these fields, a sea change has taken place in Harvard’s approach to engineering sciences.

The arrival of Dean of the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences (DEAS) Venkatesh “Venky” Narayanamurti in 1998 from the engineering school of the University of California at Santa Barbara marked the beginning of a resurgence in the long-ignored department.

The size of the engineering faculty has grown from about 50 to 65 full-time equivalent (FTE) faculty under Venky. While DEAS is still dwarfed by competitors, an even more ambitious plan for expansion to the 90 faculty sported by Caltech or the 120 sported by Princeton has begun to gather momentum and institutional support.

“In engineering, in fields like computer science, thanks to Venky’s leadership, we’re in a much stronger position than we were five years ago,” University President Lawrence H. Summers said in an interview Friday. “But I hope and expect to be in a much stronger position five years from now.”

The Allston science and technology task force, which was charged with considering the future of science at Harvard’s planned campus across the River, concluded that the University must commit to an ambitious expansion of engineering and several other scientific fields to stay competitive.

The May report says Harvard “is significantly underinvested in technology; most notably its engineering efforts, though qualitatively strong, are much smaller than those of our competitor institutions by almost any measure.”

“Harvard must grow engineering and applied sciences,” it concludes starkly.

The University “must also continue to invest ambitiously in the life sciences and physical sciences, which, in certain areas, have not always kept pace with other institutions,” wrote the task force led by Harvard’s most prominent scientists, including Venky and University Provost Steven E. Hyman.

Faculty say it has become harder for Harvard to maintain its preeminence in the life sciences over the last 20 years, given the proliferation of elite life science research universities—including medical schools—and relatively little investment in new University life science facilities over the last decade.

Although a spate of Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) and University-wide science initiatives—including the $300 million Broad Institute for genomics—have been launched over the last year, top administrators have concluded that the University’s two existing science campuses in Cambridge and Longwood will be insufficient to keep Harvard at the vanguard of scientific research.

Allston represents an opportunity to aggressively address scientific weaknesses by constructing from scratch a third science campus at the University—a one-million-square-foot science hub geared to shore up the areas where Harvard has fallen behind, Hyman and other colleagues have said.