I thought it was pretty poor reporting for the article not to mention that what Toyota donated was industrial engineering expertise.
In college we called the guys in the IE program "imaginary engineers" but in real life the discipline is responsible for making assembly lines and other manufacturing processes work as efficiently as possible. All modern manufacturers of any scale live and die by their IE departments.
People said this at my undergrad, too. "Instead Of Engineering", but same deal.
Mainly, they had a reputation for a light workload, which people naturally extrapolated into a judgment of the discipline.
When this came up I always proposed the alternate explanation that Electrical Engineers' higher workload might, just might, be due to a sadomasochistically-macho department culture, and Industrial and Operations Engineers' lighter workload might be due to a curriculum designed by efficiency experts.
I did "systems engineering", which was OR and control theory. While it was somewhat soft engineering for the first years, the final year was intense optimization once a proper mathematical and computational background was established.
on one hand its true, cuz i spent almost my entire last 2 years in 'hardcore' optimization, network flows, computer simulation etc, with only a couple 'filler' courses in facilities design, efficiency etc...
on the other hand i got into the major cuz my GPA was horrid, and my advisor who was one of the leaders of the engineering physics department was like yeah dont bother to apply to the engineering physics you should apply to orie instead...
In college we called the guys in the IE program "imaginary engineers" but in real life the discipline is responsible for making assembly lines and other manufacturing processes work as efficiently as possible. All modern manufacturers of any scale live and die by their IE departments.