The Master of Science in Industrial Administration (MSIA) historically has been a professional Master's degree that provides training in management and business administration.
Carnegie Mellon University's Graduate School of Industrial Administration awarded the first Master of Science in Industrial Administration (MSIA) degrees in 1951. At Purdue University, the MSIA program started in 1956. Originally, the program was designed to provide general management education to people from technical backgrounds. Now the MSIA program is offered at Purdue in addition to an MBA program, as the MSIA is an eleven month master's degree program. Instead of referring to it as an "accelerated MBA," Purdue's Krannert School of Management continues to keep the MSIA in order to honor the school's tradition of offering the unique degree. The MSIA program offers the same curriculum as the MBA, without the option of specializing, or selecting a "focus," as an additional semester would be required to fit in the elective credits required to gain the focus.[1]
Over time, there has been a convergence between the Master of Science in Industrial Administration and the Master of Business Administration (MBA) degrees. Carnegie Mellon, for example, changed its master’s degree designation from MSIA to MBA in 2000.