Analyzing the academic and employment growth in the field of supply chain management

Over the last decade, supply chain management (SCM) programs have been rapidly expanding in universities of the United States. Building on the agglomeration-economies and human-capital theory, we investigate the relationship between SCM program expansion and the employment of workers in local industries. We estimate pooled and fixed-effects models using a balanced panel of 39 universities, and a random-effects model using the TSCSREG procedure in SAS. The employment of Construction, Transportation and Warehousing, and Information is strongly related to the growth of SCM programs, and Retail Trade is only significant in the fixed-effects model. The Information sector has a negative association, indicating that graduates are being recruited inter-regionally, not locally. The results are not causal, but rather are correlational, and provide an approach that may be replicated by administrators and workforce planners to establish relationships between academic programs and regional industry patterns.