Are industrial engineering’s identity, educational orientation, and undergraduate programs keeping it in an ambiguous position?

Industrial engineering encompasses a wide range of disciplines, but it can lack a specialization. To address this, we need to establish an identity for industrial engineering in undergraduate education, develop a deeper curriculum, and provide hands-on experience through external connections.

 

Expressions such as “conducting the orchestra of engineering” and “the management department of engineering” are often mentioned when introducing industrial engineering. As these expressions indicate, industrial engineering is not limited to a specific discipline, but rather encompasses a wide range of disciplines across industries. Specifically, industrial engineering is a discipline that aims to solve problems in almost all areas related to industry, including production, manufacturing, quality, service, IT, and management, and to learn how to improve the components of industry and the “systems” they comprise, and to apply these methods to real-world industry. While this has the positive aspect of providing a broad perspective, it also has the negative aspect of not specializing in a particular field, which can lead to being stuck in a vague position. Therefore, undergraduate education for industrial engineering majors needs to provide students with a broad perspective while also providing them with the depth to enter any field of their choice in the future. However, the current undergraduate curriculum for industrial engineering does not fully meet this need and does not instill a sense of identity in students. This can be seen as a serious problem on the undergraduate side, as it leads to skepticism about the major among undergraduates and low graduate school retention rates. To address these issues, it is necessary to clarify the direction of undergraduate education.
First, we need to educate students about what industrial engineering is and what they can do by majoring in it, i.e., identity education. The question “What is industrial engineering?” is difficult to answer clearly, and even people who have been in the field for a long time have different definitions. While it’s important to have a variety of perspectives on a subject, for first-time students, this can be confusing. This issue is important not only for undergraduates, but also for high school students exploring careers, as the lack of clarity in the description of industrial engineering often leads students to consider only certain areas of study. For example, when technology management was popular, many students entered industrial engineering because they wanted to pursue management, and more recently, with the rise of big data, many students think industrial engineering is only about data science. Therefore, it is necessary to clearly explain and educate students about what industrial engineering is and what its subfields are, and to promote it accordingly. For example, the American Society of Industrial Engineers has been promoting industrial engineering in various ways, such as using the slogan “Industrial Engineer makes a difference” and creating a promotional video on YouTube to explain the role of industrial engineering majors. Efforts like these are needed.
The next step is to improve the curriculum. Industrial engineering is a multidisciplinary field, and the undergraduate curriculum includes a number of required courses to expose students to different fields. While this approach has the advantage of explaining the philosophy and methodology of industrial engineering as a whole, it also has the disadvantage of lacking depth in the subjects taught due to the focus on diversity, and the overlapping but uncoordinated content between the subjects. This negatively impacts both students who want to study a variety of disciplines and students who want to study a specific discipline in depth. To address this, instead of reducing the number of required courses, we need to develop a curriculum that allows students to pursue diversity and academic depth at the same time by teaching core content efficiently and broadening the range of elective courses. In addition, existing courses need to be improved to provide a balanced coverage of the core areas of traditional industrial engineering such as production, manufacturing, and quality control, as well as subjects that reflect the latest trends in industry such as mathematics, information systems, services, finance, and management. This requires more investment in curriculum research. As key sectors of industry are changing rapidly, schools must continue to invest in research and curriculum development to ensure that they can keep up with these changes and provide the necessary education.
Finally, there needs to be more opportunities to gain experience and explore future career paths through connections with companies and graduate schools. Students often lack the opportunity to experience how the methodologies they learn in the classroom are applied in the real world, realizing their importance only after they graduate and enter the workforce or go to graduate school. Because industrial engineering is so focused on real-world industries, it is important and valuable to provide students with the opportunity to understand how companies are using what they learn in school. Research experiences through graduate school can also be very beneficial to undergraduate industrial engineering students. Undergraduate industrial engineering programs do not have a specific track and are often not very interdisciplinary, with a single professor working in a single area. This makes it difficult to get consolidated information when preparing for graduate school, and students often rely on anecdotal information or information available on the internet, which is often inaccurate and hard to get more detailed information. Providing research experience and the opportunity to understand trends in the field can help solve these problems.
Industrial engineering is a discipline that has come a long way in a short period of time and has a lot of potential for further development. However, without proper training at the undergraduate level, there is a risk that you will end up in an ambiguous position with neither a broad nor a deep understanding. To prevent this from happening, we have proposed an identity that can clearly answer the question “What is industrial engineering?”, a curriculum that pursues both diversity and depth, and expanded experiences through graduate school and corporate connections. With these improvements, we will be able to produce industrial engineers with a broad perspective and expertise.