New Gies Dean: ‘The Second Revolution Is Coming!’

In a blue blazer with white stars, a bright orange Gies t-shirt over white jeans, and a pair of metallic silver Air Jordans, W. Brooke Elliott was officially installed as the new dean of the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois. Though on the job since Aug. 16, Elliott took centerstage at her investiture ceremony (Sept. 12) as the Josef and Margot Lakonishok Professor in Business and the 11th dean and the first woman to head the business school. 

Her selection as dean, after 21 years at Gies, represents the culmination of an extraordinary academic career. She joined the school as an assistant professor of accounting in 2003 and climbed the academic ladder to gain tenure and a full professorship by 2015. Two years later, Elliott became the first woman to head the school’s highly acclaimed department of accountancy. The ultimate test of her leadership ability came one month before the pandemic hit when she was drafted by her predecessor, Jeff Brown, as an associate dean to lead the school’s online initiative. Under her leadership, the school’s flagship iMBA program, one of the most disruptive higher education products of this era, became the fastest-growing MBA program in the world.

When she took on the role, 2,792 students were enrolled in the iMBA. After her first year in the job, enrollment jumped by 62% to 4,524. It reached a peak of 5,435 in 2022. Gies iMBA was named the MBA Program of the Year in 2022 by Poets&Quants. Last year, 4,898 students were studying for an iMBA, with a remarkable 96% satisfaction rate, a 92% retention rate, and nine out of ten students saying they would recommend the program to others. More than the growth of a single program, however, she led, with Brown, a revolution in disruptively-priced online learning, with multiple pathways to degrees, stackable credentials, and new online programs.

THE SEARCH FOR A NEW GIES DEAN CONSIDERED ‘AN IQ TEST FOR THE UNIVERSITY’

While Elliott was the most obvious candidate to succeed Brown, the university conducted a national search for a new dean, and two other finalists were invited to campus to compete for the job with her. Former University of Illinois President Joe White, who has been a mentor to Elliott, says he considered the search for a new Gies dean to be “an IQ test for the university.”

The university clearly passed the test. When University Provost John Coleman told her by phone this summer that she had won the shootout, Elliott was on the sidelines of a soccer match, rooting for her daughter, Kallyn. At her investiture, Kallyn along with her brother Aidan, and her husband of 25 years was in the front row to witness University Chancellor Robert Jones and Provost Coleman drape the heavy bronze medallion of the university’s seal around her neck.

In her remarks before a cheering crowd that stood to celebrate her in the spacious atrium of Gies’ Business Instructional Facility, she recalled her upbringing in Bedford, Indiana, a small southern Indiana town known for the mining of its limestone. “For the most part, you either worked for Ford or GM,” she said. “You see my roots every day because I drive a big gray Ford Raptor. There’s actually an option where you can turn the muffler off so it sounds like you don’t have a muffler. I flip that on every day.”

INNATELY COMPETITIVE FROM AN EARLY AGE

From an early age, Elliott recalled, she was innately competitive. “One of my most vivid memories as a child is I would challenge anyone who would listen to me to a competition in the pool to see who could swim the longest underwater. I won most of those which maybe isn’t surprising for two reasons: one, because I was willing to pass out rather than lose. I had a strong mental fortitude at a young age and I was willing to do things that others just weren’t willing to do. That has proven true throughout my entire life and my leadership journey. The second reason I would win is because others actually cared about me more than they did winning. So they would come up for a breath because they felt sure I was going to die. But I didn’t mind because in my mind it was still a win and if you want to choose empathy over winning that’s on you.”

Her vision for the next five years as dean is as ambitious as her predecessor. “We’re going to create an unmatched learner experience,” Elliott said. “I believe in continuous improvement, in ensuring that we understand where our learners come from, what their experiences look like, and how their experiences are different. We want to ensure that we put every learner on their path to purpose and that they can tell that story whenever they leave Gies.”

In an interview with Poets&Quants, Elliott advanced the idea that “a second revolution is coming” at the school. The interview has been edited for clarity.

‘THERE CAN BE A SECOND REVOLUTION’

Under Dean Brown and your leadership of the online initiative, there’s been a dramatic change at Gies. Using the word ‘revolution’ is not an overstatement. So the obvious question is, how much more can you do? 

“There can be a second revolution, and that’s what I intend to create. So when I think about what we’ve done in terms of expanding access to education, it has been revolutionary. We now serve more students in our graduate online programs than we do in residential, undergraduate, and graduate combined, and that’s over eight years. I say that a lot when I’m out speaking, and I watch for the reaction, and there’s a pause. So I say it again because I have to remind individuals that doesn’t happen in academic institutions. We have an opportunity in the graduate space to continue to expand access.

“You’ll see new programs coming out from us that will revolutionize undergraduate education. The undergraduate space is quite different than the graduate space. We are a top business school, a top undergraduate business school, and we’ve served the same number of undergraduate learners for as long as I’ve been here. We have learned in the graduate space about how to deliver high-quality education using technological tools at scale. I’m not suggesting that we’re going to move away from residential education, but we can serve more learners residentially if we think differently about how we educate them.

‘WE’VE JUST STARTED TO SCRATCH THE SURFACE’

“We do have an online undergraduate business minor right now. We serve about 2,000 students across campus in that minor. However, the university has 39,000 undergraduate students. Why can’t we serve 10,000 learners through an online business minor? That’s less than a third of the undergraduate students here. Stackable credentials really have not been considered in the undergraduate space. And so this year, we intend to launch the first undergraduate certificate out of business that would be stackable into a minor. Using that same approach from a strategic perspective, we can expand the reach of undergraduate education and that’s just starting on our campus. You really can start to revolutionize undergraduate education by breaking outside the bounds of your institution. There are just 10s of millions of people all over the world who don’t have access.

“We have served over 4 million learners across the world through our MOOCs. When you start to think about that, and then you start to think about the population that hasn’t been served. As long as you’re willing to think about educational products differently, then you can start to think about access in a wholly different way. We’ve just started to scratch the surface in terms of thinking about access and ensuring that learners around the world can be exposed to higher education.” 

When you imagine a second revolution, do you think in terms of actual numbers? How many students would you live to serve by the end of your first five-year term as dean? 

“I don’t have a number in mind today, but I do think about it in terms of numbers. I think about it as the number of learners that we serve through a Gies education, whether that be credit-bearing or non-credit-bearing. I also think about it, though, in terms of affordability. So, whenever I talk about access, I mean the diversity of learners that we serve. And I think about diversity in the broadest sense, in terms of lived experiences, and I think about the affordability of the education that we are providing. And that’s another place in the undergraduate space where we really can be transformational. We still have significant unmet needs with our undergraduate residential learners, and one of my primary focuses will be around reducing that unmet need. I would love to get to a place where undergraduate education at Gies is accessible for anyone who desires it and has the aptitude to pursue it. As the public flagship in our state and a land grant institution, we’re charged to serve learners in our state who are accepted into the university, accepted at Gies but don’t pursue education here because it’s not affordable. And so that’s the next place where I would really like to be transformative.

GETTING TEXTS TO FIX THINGS AT 1 A.M.

Let’s go back to your early challenge in scaling online learning. In January of 2020, just one month before the pandemic hit, you were given the role of associate dean of online learning. In one way, you could say you were in the right place at the right time. In another way, things were getting closed down. People feared that they were going to get Covic. It was hard to get people together in a single room. What was that like? 

“It was a transformational leadership experience, I took the role before we even had heard the word pandemic, and so I was excited to step it because when I was head of accountancy, we launched the online Master of Science in Accountancy program. And so, I had exposure to online education. I also knew what we were doing in the iMBA program. So, I was excited, to take on that new challenge. And then we entered into the pandemic, and there was an unprecedented demand for online education. It was the only way that you could learn. We had been in the market for several years with the iMBA, and so we had established a reputation for delivering high-quality online education.

“There was a moment when we had a choice: we could stay at the same scale or we could meet the demand that was coming in on the fly. I made the second choice. And it was honestly the most fun 12 months that I’ve had professionally. I had a really special team, and that team was willing to double down. We rallied around what our mission is at this institution. We went from serving 600 learners in a course to serving 1,400 and that’s difficult to do. It requires a change in staffing, and you can’t change staff that fast in an academic environment. We had people working 24/7 to ensure we were delivering quality education. We had to get faculty on board. Faculty went from serving 600 students to 1,400 students, and we had to ensure that faculty were supported. It really was an exciting time. It forced us to break down barriers to education. But it forced us to push through that next phase of innovation at an unprecedented pace, and we haven’t looked back.”

It is the equivalent of changing your tire when you’re speeding down the highway at 70 miles an hour. You had to wonder at times, will this really work?

“And we broke things along the way. I remember I would get texts at 1 a.m. and something had to be fixed by 7 the next morning. But we would get it fixed, and we would continue to deliver. In that fall of 2020, we enrolled the largest cohort ever in iMBA, and that cohort has the highest retention rate that we’ve ever had. I was concerned that individuals would be attracted to education, but as we weathered the pandemic, they wouldn’t stay committed to the program. That cohort in particular was committed, which suggested to me that, we met what we set out to do, which was to continue to deliver quality education at scale.