Dow Chemical Co. will spend $250-million over the next 10 years to expand chemical-engineering programs at 11 universities, says The Wall Street Journal.

The donation will support faculty positions and research projects with an eye toward attracting top engineering students and boosting doctoral awards in the chemical field, which has lost ground in recent years to biomedical and other engineering disciplines.

“We think the shift has gone too far,” said Theresa Kotanchek, a Dow vice president. She said the firm has hired about 50 chemical-engineering PhD’s in the past three years and expects its needs to grow.

The recipient schools are the California Institute of Technology; Carnegie Mellon; the Georgia Institute of Technology; Northwestern; Pennsylvania State; the University of California’s Berkeley and Santa Barbara campuses, and the Universities of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.