An industrial viewpoint on the training of societal systems engineers

The company with which I am associated, Systems Control, Inc., currently employs 150 people. Most of the company's technical staff has received formal systems engineering, and approximately half hold the Ph.D. degree. The company does a significant fraction of its business in areas where social and economic factors are significant considerations; these include urban planning, water and air quality monitoring, control or sewage treatment plants, urban transportation, air traffic control, human operator modelling, corporate modelling, and industrial and public utility demand forecasting. While relatively few of our staff members obtained degrees in fields with titles that can be construed as equivalent to "societal systems engineering," nevertheless, many of the recent graduates have received some formal training in this direction as part of their systems engineering curriculum. I would like to comment on the present and projected value of this training to an organization such as ours.