The Singapore Management University School of Economics & Social Sciences was established in 2002 to launch SMU's Bachelor of Social Science undergraduate programme with principal disciplines in Sociology, Political Science and Psychology and a Bachelor of Science programme in Economics. In 2007, a restructuring exercise led to the Economics Department being separated from the rest of the Social Science faculty to form two new schools; a School of Economics and the SMU School of Social Sciences.
The restructuring was made to allow both schools, which have seen rapidly growing student enrolment and faculty numbers, to have greater focus on their individual strengths and develop distinctive curricula at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels.