Emory’s Goizueta School: Anatomy Of A Turnaround Few Knew Was Needed

PREPARING STUDENTS TO HIT THE GROUND RUNNING FOR SUMMER INTERNSHIPS

The idea was to insure that Goizueta students, going out on their summer internships, would be ready to impress. One of the five electives, moreover, has to be one of several experiential courses that provide students with quasi-consulting projects—the kind of capstone course that most schools only provide in the second year. “It is designed to mirror practice, adds Kazanjian. “They gain access to executives in the beginning, the middle and then during a final presentation. So you have team dynamics, the pressure of a deadline, a real deliverable. It is practice for their summer internship.”

Surprisingly, the faculty agreed to the changes—including coming in to teach the core in early August–with little major debate. “I anticipated it would be an issue,” concedes Maryam Alavi, vice dean for faculty at Goizueta. “I thought people would say, ‘My God, you are getting me started on Aug. 1? What about my vacation?’ But I did not hear any complaints. It went very smooth and that really speaks to the engagement of our faculty. They really stepped up.”

The faculty helped in other ways, receiving recruiter feedback on students that prompted changes in the classroom. “A marketing professor here attended a recruiter feedback session before starting his fall course and he actually adjusted his curriculum plan because of it,” says Wendy Tsung, associate dean  of Goizueta’s MBA Career Management Center. “He wanted to make sure he was teaching what the market needed.”

FACULTY HAS GONE OUT OF THEIR WAY TO PUT MORE FOCUS ON STUDENT OUTCOMES

A similar example occurred in accounting for students headed toward investment banking internships. “On the finance side, students who want to go into investment banking really need a solid accounting foundation,” adds Tsung. “But accounting as taught in a classroom is really different than it is applied in investment banking. So we now have someone in the practice of accounting who comes in and talks to students about how to use accounting in a practical way.”

Bowman’s task force also went back to track the success of Goizueta admits from previous years, re-examining everything from their applicant files and interview assessments against grades assigned to each graduate by the career management center. An ‘A’ grade went to MBAs who were highly successful in the program and had no trouble finding the job they really wanted. Many of them, in fact, had several opportunities.

The ‘B’ grades were largely assigned to the majority of graduates and ‘C’ grades were given to MBAs who didn’t have a job offer, or landed a job they didn’t want. “We would love to have a whole class of ‘A’s,” says Julie Barefoot, associate dean of MBA admissions. “A ‘B’ was fine and a ‘C’ meant we could do better. There were more ‘C’s than we wanted.”

 ADMISSION INTERVIEWS HAVE GROWN IN IMPORTANCE AND BECOME MORE RIGOROUS AS WELL

What the analysis showed was that the admissions staff did an exceptional job of assessing the applicants. More often than not, the ‘Cs’ performed were given harsher grades for their interviews, while the staff was very good at picking the As and the Bs. “The analysis showed we were pretty good on interviewing,” recalls Barefoot. “So we put more emphasis on the interview. But we also needed to make the interview even more robust in terms of looking more at the characteristics of the people who career services rated an ‘A’ or a ‘B.’”

Barefoot worked closely with the career management staff to overhaul the interview process, adding questions that allowed admissions to screen for such attributes as resiliency, flexibility, focus, and resourcefulness—traits that career management believes are critical to successfully placing an MBA into a desired job.

In all, candidates are graded on 12 dimensions, ranging from their reasons for wanting an MBA to their interpersonal skills. International applicants are graded on five additional categories, including English comprehension and fluency. While the weight of an admission interview will obviously vary by candidate, Barefoot says that at Goizueta it may have as much as a 30% to 40% weight.

THE CAREER MANAGEMENT CENTER DIRECTOR NOW SITS ON THE ADMISSION COMMITTEE

And now career development Associate Dean Tsung, whose staff for full-time MBAs has more than doubled to 10 from just four, is a full member of the admissions committee so she can speak to an applicant’s eventual employability. “We knew we had to do a better job of selecting candidates who would be successful in our environment with what we could offer them,” says Barefoot.

To insure that the best raw talent was coming into the two-year MBA program, the school shrunk the size of its entering class to 135 in 2009 from 181 in 2007 and lowered the percentage of international students. Class size has since increased to 152 entering students but the dean believes the optimal size is 165.

The school found it difficult to place international students into jobs they wanted, especially as it became harder to obtain visas for them. Now Goizueta more closely manages the number of non-sponsored international students, and non-U.S. students account for 33% of the latest class, down 11 full percentage points from a peak of 44%.

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