A
new era for business education Virginia’s
business schools adapt to help students compete in a
global market
by
Heather B. Hayes
Virginia Business January
2005
Several
years ago, Chris Royse decided that he needed to enroll
in an MBA program to update his management skills. But
Royse, the deputy task leader of the Bioweapons Proliferation
Prevention Support Team for Science Applications International
Corp. (SAIC) in McLean, wasn’t particularly interested
in learning how to create an income statement for the
airlines or manage the product launch of a new kind
of cereal. He wanted to find an executive MBA program
that offered coursework devoted to issues associated
with biosciences. “I looked and looked, and I
just couldn’t find one,” he explains. “Then
they started this program.”
The
program that attracted Royse’s attention wasn’t
an MBA program at all but something just as good as
far as he was concerned: a two-year master’s degree
in bioscience management at George Mason University
(GMU). Officials at the school’s Graduate School
of Management decided to offer it after local business
leaders requested a program that could bolster the region’s
fast-growing biotech industry.
The first class of seven students, which includes Royse,
is now learning about such traditional MBA subjects
as finance, marketing and management, but with a biosciences
bent. The curriculum also includes industry-specific
courses such as “Best Practices in R&D Management.”
It also features an international residency at bio-accelerator
parks in France and England. Royse, who will graduate
in May, hopes to use his specialized education to build
a new business area within SAIC that will support government
and private customers in their efforts to prevent the
proliferation of bio-information. “This is truly
an acumen booster for me,” he says.
GMU’s bioscience management program is an example
of a new era of graduate business education. Virginia’s
business schools are altering curricula to meet the
evolving needs of sophisticated students and an increasingly
global marketplace. Today’s degree programs are
more specialized, and there’s a stronger emphasis
on the development of human relations skills. Plus,
schools are providing more opportunities for the gainfully
employed to stay on the job while improving their management
techniques. “The signs are clearly there that
businesses have different expectations for the people
they hire from graduate business schools,” says
Dr. Robert Reid, dean of the College of Business at
James Madison University (JMU).
A few years ago, MBA programs across the country experienced
a sizeable drop in the number of companies recruiting
their graduates. Businesses now have returned to campus
in full force, but many no longer are satisfied with
the traditional, buttoned-down MBA graduate with a penchant
for number crunching. They want highly adaptive, polished
employees who are more team- and process-oriented. Companies
also are looking for managers with strong people and
communications skills and an understanding of how businesses
grow and compete. And recruiters want graduates to be
able to hit the ground running. As a result, Reid says,
“We are definitely trying to provide a different
style of education than we were providing even three
years ago.”
This creative approach to graduate education is reshaping
business programs across Virginia. By offering MBA and
management degrees that provide concentrated coursework
in niche industries, business schools have found a way
to differentiate their programs and attract better students
and faculty. “It sort of reflects the complexity
of the business world in that you really can’t
have one set program that meets everyone’s needs,”
explains Dr. Tarun Sen, MBA director for the Pamplin
College of Business at Virginia Tech.
While Virginia Tech has been offering concentrations
for some time, the subject matter has changed dramatically
in recent years. Instead of just finance and marketing,
the choices today include global business, systems engineering
management, organizational leadership and tourism and
hospitality management.
JMU found a niche three years ago when it began offering
an MBA in information security. The program, which weaves
information security issues throughout all MBA courses,
has been extremely popular. “Students come away
with a solid core of business knowledge, but they also
get enough depth in information security and information
technology that they know what the different issues
are, and they can help span the conversations between
management and the technical folks,” Reid says.
Some business schools are following the lead of George
Mason University by developing specialization in direct
response to the employment needs of local businesses.
After conducting a lengthy market analysis in its area,
for example, Lynchburg College decided to offer MBA
concentrations in health services management and financial
services. While the core MBA coursework will remain
the same, electives will cover topics specific to those
fields, says MBA program director Dr. Sally Selden.
Meanwhile, Longwood College recently decided that its
forte should be in retailing because 50 percent of Richmond-area
businesses deal in the sale of consumer goods and services.
The school has begun offering certificates and undergraduate
degrees in the field and hopes to offer its first-ever
MBA degree — with a concentration in retailing
— during the 2005-06 school year.
The new direction came about with the encouragement
of the Retail Merchants Association of Greater Richmond.
“Employers tell us that they want students to
be able to come out of school and immediately make significant,
valuable contributions,” says Dr. Evelyn Hume,
dean of the College of Business and Economics at Longwood.
The school’s MBA courses will cover such subjects
as buyer behavior, supply chain management and e-commerce/direct
marketing. “For that reason, a general education
just doesn’t prepare them well enough,”
Hume says.
Not everyone is convinced these designer MBAs are a
good idea. The Darden Graduate School of Business Administration
at the University of Virginia doesn’t offer any
concentrated tracks and has no plans to do so, says
Dr. Robert M. Conroy, the school’s associate dean.
Darden does offer joint degree programs with other graduate
schools, such as engineering and nursing, but Conroy
says, “those have never really had a lot of popularity
and attraction.”
Steve Parscale, director of accreditation for the Association
of Collegiate Business Schools and Programs, believes
that, in the quest for specialization, schools that
offer concentrated MBAs are not adequately covering
core areas such as finance, marketing, accounting, economics
and quantitative techniques. “They’re really
watering it down,” he says. Parscale suggests
that, instead of messing with the MBA formula, schools
should offer a separate graduate degree in the specialized
subject, as George Mason does with biosciences management
and technology management. “Businesses still need
the traditional MBA because they still need somebody
who can crunch the numbers.”
And not all students are attracted to the concentrated
MBA. Carla Wilhoit, an MBA student in her second year
at Virginia Tech, decided early on that a traditional
MBA program would suit her needs better. “I didn’t
want to pigeonhole myself,” she says.
But even without the concentrations, MBA and other graduate
business programs are significantly different than they
were even 10 years ago. For instance, business schools
are putting more emphasis on developing emotional intelligence
skills, such as communications, team-building and conflict
resolution. Lynchburg College accomplishes this through
integrated learning techniques; each class has a semester-long
project that requires students to assume different roles,
such as finance, marketing, engineering and human resources,
so they can learn to cope with different team dynamics.
VCU has plans to elaborate on that approach by bringing
business students together with engineering and strategic
design students in cross-listed classes. One such course
would require students to develop a product and do all
the requisite business and technical analyses. “MBAs
have got to work with and understand and talk with these
types of functional people in the real world, so this
approach will hopefully give them plenty of practice,”
says Dr. Michael Sesnowitz, dean of VCU’s School
of Business.
In addition, schools are offering more ethics courses,
and there has been a renewed push for students to develop
leadership skills by engaging in activities on campus
and in the local community. Entrepreneurial thinking
has also started to pervade the graduate learning environment.
Virginia Tech, for example, now offers MBA courses in
venture capital finance and entrepreneurial leadership.
Meanwhile, the William & Mary School of Business
is taking the idea of realistic education one step further.
It is “bringing business into the business school”
with one-on-one student mentoring sessions provided
by an army of retired Fortune 500 CEOs and vice presidents
from such companies as IBM, ChevronTexaco and Procter
and Gamble.
Business school education is also evolving as a result
of the changing demographics of students. While most
graduate business schools require students to have some
work experience, an increasing number of employees are
refusing to give up their place on the corporate ladder
in favor of the traditional MBA experience. Which is
not to say they want their education to drag on. Some
students want to attend school part-time, but more want
an executive program that combines flexible weekend
and evening classroom time with supplemental online
work that allows them to get their degrees in a reasonable
amount of time. The numbers bear out this trend. According
to a recent survey by the Graduate Management Admission
Council, 78 percent of business schools responding reported
a decrease in full-time, two-year MBA programs, but
53 percent experienced an increase in executive MBA
programs this year and 27 percent saw an increase in
part-time MBAs.
Darden is considering starting an executive MBA program
on its Charlottesville campus in 2006. The school expects
to have more details on the program early next year.
Whatever the reasons behind the trends, observers think
they have benefits for recruiters and students. Andrew
LaVanaway, an executive at O’Keeffe and Co., a
high-tech marketing company in Alexandria, says that
the combination of more specialized subject material
and working experience rounds out the final MBA product.
“We’ve found the most recent MBAs that we’ve
hired to be highly motivated, mentally agile and much
more polished,” he says.
