Indiana University will begin offering engineering degrees in “intelligent systems” beginning in the 2016-17 school year, the university said Thursday.
The new bachelor’s and doctoral programs will offer degrees in bioengineering, computer engineering and cyber-physical systems, and molecular and nanoscale engineering, the university said. The doctoral program will have additional degrees in environmental and neuroengineering.
The Indiana Commission for Higher Education approved the program Thursday, according to a statement from IU. University trustees approved it in April.
But, as Lafayette Journal & Courier columnist Dave Bangert wrote this week, IU’s in-state neighbor isn’t pleased. “If Purdue University has a signature brand, an academic pride and joy, it would have to be engineering,” he wrote in a column Thursday. “So when Indiana University decided it was time to offer a degree in engineering — even a fairly limited taste of the discipline in Bloomington — Purdue went into rivalry mode to protect a franchise that the West Lafayette campus has all but owned since opening in 1869.”
IU created the program in part to fill employment needs of “major employers such as Crane Naval Surface Warfare Center, Cook Group and Cummins Inc. and to help attract new industry to the region,” according to the university’s statement.
The university expects to propose master’s degrees once the program is underway.
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