Wednesday, March 13, 2013

MBA Programs Evolve to Meet Student Needs


Changes to MBA curricula atomic number 18 intended to help students contend in the job market.

After workings for five years in California as a musical supervisor for film trailers, Nick Martin decided to wiretap into his analytical side at Texas Christian University's Neeley School of Business.

 

As lot of his business school studies, he works as a digital marketing and advertising intern for a checkup technology company, where he is being recruited for a position after(prenominal) he graduates. With his background, getting hired there was a abundant shot, he says. hardly his employers were impressed by how intimately he managed a market opportunity analysis students did for the company.

Administrators at Neeley and elsewhere are scrambling to find radical ways to sharpen graduates' skirt in a leaner, meaner business world. In some cases, veer has been sweeping.

[Learn more about the job market for MBAs.]

The University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School turn out a whole new plan start fall that allows students greater leeway to customize their studies within six "pathways," including Managing the Global Enterprise and Understanding and Serving Customers.

Northwestern University's Kellogg School of precaution will infuse its entire curriculum with four themes that bang across the traditional disciplines alike accounting and marketing: diversity and entrepreneurship; private enterprise/public policy interface; markets and customers; and "architectures of collaboration."

Most institutions, like Neeley, are working within their existing curricula to allow students opportunities to set earlier, expanding offerings on entrepreneurship and innovation, and integrating experiential learning as well as more (and more sophisticated) ways to get a global perspective.

[See photos of the Best Business Schools.]

Schools are responding to new pressures to compete among themselves, too. Applications were down at nearly two thirds of the country's full-time MBA programs last year, according to a study last fall by the Graduate Management Admission Council.

"The increasingly competitive constitution of the MBA landscape mandates that you are always on the leading edge," says Stacey Whitecotton, cuss dean for MBA programs at Arizona State University's W.P. Carey School of Business.

The new curriculum at W.P. Carey, which debuted last fall, still relies on shopping mall courses such as accounting, finance, and marketing as a foundation. But it now integrates more electives into the third and fourth quarters, so students screwing go after greater depth in their elect areas before showing up for a summer internship. 

Courses in entrepreneurship are becoming de rigueur in the elective mix. Entrepreneurship and innovation were appetite list items that Raj Echambadi heard again and again when he polled employers and alumni of the University of Illinois—Urbana-Champaign, where he is a professor of business administration and academic film director of executive programs.



Materials taken from US News

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