My hs junior is interested in a supply chain major or minor, or a business school with supply chain internships. She has seen and really liked Syracuse, Penn State, UMd and Pitt, BC (CSOM), BU and Northeastern thinking about, and somewhat liked Lehigh and Bentley. She has not liked any small liberal arts schools she has seen.
I have been hearing supply chain in the news as of late but came across the attached article painting the market as dwindling in the future? Anyone out there have any thoughts on supply chain as a major vs business admin major with the right internships? Any schools to suggest? She likes the Northeast/snow but would probably consider looking elsewhere.
My nephew is currently doing well with a supply chain degree from Lehigh and my D’s bf is also doing quite well w/a U of Wisconsin industrial engineering degree plus a supply chain master’s from Penn State. He said his colleagues have a variety of degrees, but an internship in SC matters.
https://hbr.org/2018/06/the-death-of-supply-chain-management
The third to the last paragraph is key - the author says that supply chain managers will switch from managing people doing repetitive tasks to managing information flows. That is happening already. Managing the information flow is presumably what is being taught in good SC programs.
Michigan State, Michigan Georgia Tech all have top notch supply chain programs. Don’t think its going anywhere to soon… Any good program will teach all the aspects of this plus the future of supply chain.
Related majors, but generally more math and statistics intensive than business-school-based majors, would include operations research and industrial engineering.
If the student’s strongest and favorite high school subject is math, that may be a way to combine strength and interest in math with an interest in optimizing processes including supply chains.
People are always going to need stuff, so there will always be supply chains to manage, And the robots can do repetitive tasks, but even industries with robots will need humans to manage the robots and make sure that they, and the systems and processes they execute, continue to work.
The other thing to remember is that college is not vocational school, and a college degree is not a technical diploma. Your HS junior can start out doing supply chain management and parlay their skills into something else later, should they need to move on.
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