MAY 2007
Dean's Column
New MBA First-Year Program Sticks to Basics
Photo by Robert Holmgren
All students will be pulled into active classroom participation from the start.
The overwhelming majority of alumni who have heard about our new design for the MBA Program have expressed enthusiasm and support, but a few have expressed nagging worries. Will we be able to fulfill our promise to advise and guide individual students through a curriculum with so much choice? Will the increased level of “tracking” decrease cohesiveness of the student community?
We think that, overall, the changes we are making are good ones, and moreover they are changes that will be difficult for our peers to copy. So if we succeed, we’ll be way ahead. But no substantial change in the program is without some implementation risk. The key is to understand the risks, watch how things unfold, and be ready to adapt as we learn what works and what needs improvement. You can be certain that we will be watching closely.
But one concern I’ve heard—which doesn’t worry me in the least—is what are we doing to The Core? Many alumni remember our Core coursework, maybe not quite fondly, as a hugely important part of their education. I’m not worried because we are not abandoning The Core. If anything, the new program strengthens it.
Now to make this claim, I have to be clear on how I define The Core. This means the part of our educational program in which every student is brought up to speed―a very high speed―on two types of fundamentals: foundational skills of reasoning (modeling, data analysis, and the basic social sciences); and a broad understanding of the key functions of management (accounting, finance, marketing, and so forth). Every student is still going to be brought up to speed in each of these subjects. And because of the menu of alternatives we are going to offer through distribution requirements, some students are going to reach speeds we haven’t reached before. No student is going to escape with something less than the old Core-level course. Indeed, for three reasons, I think we are going to do The Core even better than before:
First, as many of you will remember, we have long had streams―so-called “poet” and “turbo” sections. Our experience, uniformly, has been that this improves the learning outcomes for everyone. Teaching basics to a more homogeneous audience allows the instructor to pitch level and pace to what the students in the room can learn effectively. This needs instructors who push students as hard as the students can go. I’m not worried that our faculty members, who are passionate about the value of what they teach, are suddenly going to let students kick back.
Second, in the fall quarter, the new course Critical Analytical Thinking is going to work on our students’ abilities to think deductively (logically) and inductively (from data) and then to argue persuasively. Taught in seminar-sized groups of about 15, all students will be pulled into active classroom participation from the start. In particular, written and oral communication skills will be improved.
Third, in the fall quarter, eight General Management Perspectives courses, including new ones like Strategic Leadership and The Global Context of Management, will frame the big issues of management for students, so that they have greater appreciation for what they can learn from the functions and tools of management in 11 General Management Foundations requirements (each with a menu of three course alternatives) in subsequent quarters. Microeconomics, for instance, can be a great thinking tool, but too often students don’t appreciate that until they see where and how it can be used.
Abandoning The Core? Not hardly―it is too much a part of our institutional DNA. We think the new curriculum, with the managerial Perspectives courses up front, will make clear the relevance and importance of the distribution requirements when students take them. What we’re after is to deliver The Core more effectively than ever.
