Academics at SSE

The late 1990s were times of tremendous uncertainty for most in engineering education.  The .com bubble, the emergence of the service sector especially with regards to management consulting, and the beginnings of globalization produced tremendous shifts in traditional engineering enrollments.  With enrollments dwindling in traditional engineering, globalization, the realization of productivity gains because of technology, and numerous challenges from industry for reinvention of the engineering degree, this was a time of tremendous uncertainty and opportunity for engineering education.

Some universities responded to the shift in the education trends by developing non-traditional engineering programs to compete with the emergence of business schools.  General engineering, Bachelor of Arts in Engineering, business and technology programs, joint business and engineering degrees, etc., were created at the undergraduate level in the face of declining enrollments (especially for traditional engineering) to attract those students who were interested in obtaining a business background but with strong technical underpinnings. At the graduate level numerous engineering management, systems engineering, integrated or innovated product development, etc., type programs were created to respond to calls from industry to train/retrain engineers to think and work in a market where globalization, technology, quality, complexity, and productivity are the key business divers. Stevens developed an aggressive and inventive academic response for the needs of the 21st century.   Our programs are all designed to operate at the interface between traditional engineering and business to respond to these needs of the 21st century.