The Future Of B-School: An Interview With Dean François Ortalo-Magné

A Wisconsin Business School professor in class

Do you see the full-time MBA degree becoming more or less popular in the coming years (and why)?

I observe the same trends as everyone else in our industry with regards to overall demand for one and two-year MBA degrees, and full-time versus part-time. In the coming years, I’ll be curious to learn more about market trends vis-à-vis another dimension of differentiation: the general versus specialized full-time MBA. As an industry, I do not think we have explored and realized the full-potential of the MBA degree yet.

At the Wisconsin School of Business, we offer a specialized full-time MBA. I’m excited about all the work we’re doing to learn from our own experiments and to improve how we communicate the value of our offering with potential students and employers. For now, our data shows clear signs of increasing interests. I know other schools are like us exploring ways to add value to their full-time MBAs. The future will tell how the market responds to our innovations. For sure, students and employers will all gain.

Do you see continued expansion of the one-year specialty master’s in business (and if so how that will materialize)? 

It’s important to first acknowledge one year programs are of different types. I’ll go back to our KDBIN framework. Some one year programs are pure K (Knowing) plays – helping students add specialized knowledge to complement a more general education. Today’s technology has driven the marginal cost of delivering K to zero. I don’t see how many such masters’ programs will survive. I expect we will see significant consolidation on this market in the coming years.

We are keen to play in the DBIN spaces (Doing, Being, Inspiring and Networking). That is why for now we are focusing on extensions to our Bachelor’s degree with fifth year masters that are integrated within the undergraduate experiences – students apply in their junior year so that we can tailor their learning experiences starting in their senior year. Such programs push our best students to a higher level and help us address employers’ demands. We have amazing undergraduates. Fifth year programs have the potential to improve how we launch their careers.

How might either the funding model or the MBA curriculum change over the next five years?

For those of us in public research universities, the funding model is rapidly changing from “who pays now” (state, student, donors) to “who pays when” (students while in school paying tuition, students once alumni providing philanthropic support). We welcome this change as it strengthens our incentives toward greater accountability to our primary stakeholders: our students.

Within our school, this greater emphasis on the students was determinant in our choices of success measures within our MBA program. In particular, we focus on how successful and how grateful are students are – think of successful and grateful as our alternative to revenues and profits. Right out of the gates, we measure successful by the proportion of students placed within 3 months of graduation; we measure grateful by the proportion who pledge a gift to the school at graduation. The grateful measure tells us about student satisfaction with our MBA program and about their appreciation for the many alumni who funded their education.

Our alumni do play a critical role in our MBA program, not just with funding but also with curriculum design and delivery. Their engagement and that of many corporate partners is actually critical to the value of our specialized full-time MBA model. They also contribute in many ways to our more general part-time offerings. Over the next five years, we will continue to build on our strong alumni and corporate community to refine and enhance our students’ experiences. And we’ll do it with greater collaboration with our campus. We are fortunate to be part of one of the premier public research universities in this country. I am convinced there is much to be gained for our students and their employers from redefining the partnership between the business community and the public research university. Stay tuned.

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