Students who lived through the turbulent period are bringing new perspectives to the classroom, educators say.
Paul Page (with inputs from The Wall Street Journal)
Published26 Jul 2024, 09:52 PM IST
Alexis Havlicsek, who graduated this year from Penn State, was attracted to supply-chain management studies following turmoil in supply chains during the Covid-19 pandemic. (Pennsylvania State University)
Alexis Havlicsek recalls watching with astonishment as workers struggled to free a huge containership that had run aground in the Suez Canal, leaving a backup of vessels in its wake.
Sydney Deardorff was aghast at the hurdles new and expectant mothers faced in getting baby formula.
Houston McClure remembers being stunned at the sudden scarcity of common household goods like toilet paper when he went into lockdown while studying at Indiana University.
Havlicsek, Deardorff and McClure are among the thousands of students who were drawn to supply-chain management studies by the turmoil that hit communities and businesses when the Covid-19 pandemic starting in 2020 upended global supply chains.
Many of these students now are completing their degrees, moving into the working world and bringing with them views and experiences formed by a tumultuous period marked by crushing lockdowns, unprecedented shortages of common household goods and transportation gridlock.
Play
Unmute
Loaded: 2.62%
Fullscreen
“We are finding that both at the graduate and undergraduate level, the pandemic was like a learning laboratory,” said Norman Aggon, assistant department chair at the Penn State Department of Supply Chain and Information Systems in the Smeal College of Business.
Established supply-chain programs such as those at Penn State, Michigan State, the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Tennessee say they have seen students coming out of high school with their interest already piqued by the pandemic-era shortages of everything from food to paper products.
“I’d never heard about supply chains, it was never talked about in high school,” said Havlicsek, of Allentown, Pa., who graduated this spring from Penn State with degrees in project and supply-chain management and in management and marketing.
PROMOTED
立即打開您的瀏覽器進入遊戲Hero Wars|
Sponsored
完成個人理財問卷送$100超市禮券香港忠意保險|
Sponsored
Paris Olympics 2024: Lakshya Sen scripts history as he storms into semi-finals; eyes gold for India | MintLive Mint
建行（亞洲）「好現金」私人分期貸款建行（亞洲）私人貸款|
Sponsored
MS Dhoni opens up on heartbreaking 2019 World Cup semi-final loss: ‘Knew it will be my last…’ | MintLive Mint
樂高®無制限宇宙 參加送$50 LEGO 現金券LEGO® x StayFun|
Sponsored
擁抱全Sun 假期！低至7折！Club Med|
Sponsored
42歲女性只吃1個月就好像別人！用萬寧賣的「這個」超有效熱門話題|
Sponsored
She and other students make up a new generation whose views and aspirations were formed by the television coverage, social-media posts and dinner-table conversations about empty shelves, lengthy supermarket lines and historic shipping backups. Some just started college while others went back to school in the midst of careers in other fields, some of them sent by companies to bolster their own supply chains.
Educators say that pandemic generation is bringing a new perspective to classrooms that will work its way into businesses as the graduates begin to enter the workforce.
“Now, students are more aware of what the supply chain is, the questions are more precise,” Aggon said. “They have this plethora of examples to draw from. They lived through it, they experienced the hoarding, the shortages.”
Related Stories
Zika virus detected in larvae samples from parts of Pune as cases rise
2 min read1 Aug 2024
Gujarat sees Acute Encephalitis Syndrome outbreak in children aged under 15; 148 cases reported with 59 deaths
3 min read1 Aug 2024
Bangladesh’s shaky political future
4 min read1 Aug 2024
The growing interest comes not necessarily in the numbers of supply-chain degrees, experts say, since many programs have caps on the numbers of majors. Instead, it shows up in the rising numbers of students from other areas—finance and marketing, for instance—who are loading up on supply-chain courses to bridge an information gap many companies found in their operations during the pandemic.
Some schools are also starting supply-chain programs after seeing interest in the field from their business students grow.
Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., last fall said it gained state approval to establish a School of Supply Chain, Logistics and Maritime Operations. Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond and Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., both cited pandemic-era disruptions in launching bachelor’s degree programs in supply-chain management this fall.
At the University of Tennessee, supply-chain management last year counted the largest number of graduates from the Haslam College of Business. The Knoxville, Tenn., school has nearly 2,000 supply-chain management students across its undergraduate and graduate programs.
“The turmoil around Covid created a greater awareness of the field. That stuff doesn’t just show up without a lot of blocking and tackling that takes place behind the scenes,” said Ted Stank, a professor at the school and co-executive director of its school’s Global Supply Chain Institute.
Part of the draw, Stank said, has been the hiring of supply chain and logistics workers in greater numbers during the pandemic as companies scrambled to unravel supply-chain snarls.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics counted more than 200,000 jobs as “logistics” in 2022 and projected hiring would grow by 18% over the next decade, far beyond the average 3% growth in all job categories.
“Students are great at finding out pretty quickly where companies are hiring and what they’re paying,” Stank said. “We have undergraduates coming to us that come in from other fields, they may be high school music teachers or IT folks. That group has been influenced by the heightened attention to supply chains.”
Eva Ponce, director of online education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Transportation and Logistics, sees the growing interest in supply chain education as a global phenomenon. Enrollment in the school’s “micromasters” online program, which is open to applicants worldwide and offers a path to the full master’s program at MIT, expanded 34% during the pandemic, she said.
“After the pandemic, companies realized the importance of having an end-to-end overview of the supply chain, not just in having people working in their silos,” Ponce said.
Houston McClure, of Hendersonville, Tenn., just started work at a drinks manufacturer after switching from a doctoral program in linguistics in Indiana to Tennessee’s supply-chain studies. “The shortages became the buzzword of 2021-22, so I was thinking about it as I looked at going back into another area,” he said.
For Sydney Deardorff, a Buford, Ga., native who began an internship this summer at a jet-engine manufacturer, supermarket shelves barren of baby formula were “the tipping point” in her decision to study supply chains at Tennessee.
That shortage, sparked by pandemic-driven distribution snags that deepened after a plant shutdown, left caregivers and parents across the U.S. scrambling for formula for infants. “Learning about the baby-formula shortage, I was thinking about new mothers, about expectant mothers, and I thought if I had been in those shoes that would have been really scary,” she said.
The new generation of students, whether in undergraduate or graduate studies, bring with them a different view of supply chains than those of previous generations, who were largely focused on achieving efficiency, educators said.
“Having been exposed to these big disruptions, the new generation has an appetite for risk management,” said MIT’s Ponce. “This has become a key topic and that is one of the consequences of the pandemic—this focus on ways to reduce risk and vulnerability.”
Corporations also are taking more interest in supply-chain programs, said Manpreet Hora, a professor and senior associate dean for programs with the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business. Many companies are sending more of their existing workers to school to get more grounding in the field after seeing the impact areas such as procurement, sourcing and transportation had on their businesses during the pandemic.
Namrata Saha, an electrical engineer by training, is one of those workers moving up the corporate ladder who jumped into the field. She signed up for a master’s in supply chain management at Tennessee in November 2021 after working for more than 10 years in the automotive industry.
“I was in a very good position, but literally dropped my job to get into supply chain,” she said. Since graduating last December, she has been working as a senior sourcing manager for AT&T in Dallas.
Now, Saha said, she believes “maybe young professionals like us can change the world.”