The 30 MBA students on a winter-break study trip met with heads of state and with heads of nonprofit organizations in India and Pakistan. “You learn about the political, demographic, economic, social and cultural issues in the country,” says Professor Garth Saloner, MA ’81, MS ’82, PhD ’82, who accompanied students on the trip. “There’s no substitute for seeing it yourself.”
Study trips, which have been voluntary at the Graduate School of Business, are about to become part of the core curriculum. “We’re going to require that every single first-year student has some kind of personal global experience—like a study trip or international internship,” says Saloner, who heads an 11-member task force that worked last spring to revise the professional school’s long-standing curriculum.
Saloner says the changes, which will take effect in fall 2007, are designed to launch students into a new world. “They increasingly need to be prepared to deal with management in a global environment—it’s the reality of their business lives,” he says. “And we, like most places, have not been doing as good a job at that as we think we need to do.”
With 750 students, Stanford’s MBA program is relatively small. But it is enrolling more students from diverse backgrounds. And an investment banker with six years of experience on Wall Street doesn’t need the same economics course as a history major who’s worked for Teach for America.
“We’ve admitted them and then put them through what has largely been a one-size-fits-all curriculum,” Saloner says. “The consequence of that is that you have some students who are not challenged and a little bit bored or disenchanted to some extent, along with students who really need to master basic material. Instructors have had to deal with that diversity, and they end up not pitching the class to either.”
That’s about to change. Under the new curriculum, students will choose which required courses they would like to take first, and whether they would like to take them at an introductory or more advanced level. The menu of foundational courses includes economics, statistics, finance, marketing, operations and general management. “The idea is to give them an understanding of why they need those [courses], as opposed to having them take them on faith,” Saloner says.
Perhaps more significantly, students will be assigned to one of 25 seminars that will be limited to about 15 students each. Instead of lecturing to 66 students in a large hall, faculty will stress critical-thinking skills by having students write weekly essays and discuss them in class. Each faculty member also will serve as an academic adviser.
“It’s very similar to things we’ve done in the undergraduate program, with freshman seminars and Sophomore College,” Saloner says. “Faculty members will have an intimate setting where they’ll really get to know the students, and when we know who they are and what their aspirations are, we’re going to design a personalized curriculum.”
Many of the traditional fall-quarter classes will be replaced with smaller workshops that will run for one week at a time, similar to a course Saloner currently teaches with GSB professor Kathryn Shaw that last year brought 26 entrepreneurial women to campus. “You do a deep dive into a particular subject, and then move on the next week” to study another topic.
At the end of the second year, Saloner envisions a so-called synthesis seminar that would bring students back together, perhaps in the same 15-person groups that launched their first year, to reflect on what they have absorbed. “They wrote admissions essays coming in, and they might write an exit essay as part of the seminar,” he suggests. “Or go back, read the admission essay and ask, ‘Well, who am I now, two years later? Having spent two years on the Farm, what do I want to do with that?’”
Saloner says it’s likely that 10 faculty will have to be hired to teach the courses that are being discussed for the new curriculum. The changes already are stirring reaction elsewhere. “A number of larger schools are saying, ‘This sounds very interesting, but we really don’t think we could do something like this because it’s hard to be intimate with 1,000 students.’”
Small is just fine with Saloner. “This is a curriculum that will play to our size and make it a source of competitive advantage for us.” Sounds like a perfect object lesson for business students.
