How Katz Is Changing The MBA Experience

The Pittsburgh area boasts six Fortune 500 companies, such as U.S. Steel and Heinz, as well as a burgeoning entrepreneurial scene. How have these advantages translated into greater learning opportunities for Katz MBA students?

That also relates to what attracted me to this school. If you live in Buffalo, which I did for seven years, you don’t notice that there’s a lot of activity in Pittsburgh, especially a lot of entrepreneurial activity. And that’s alongside the traditional Fortune 500 enterprises that have been around for quite a while.

So Pittsburgh has the advantage of having both the entrepreneurial spirit to form new enterprises and grow them but also the established businesses that have been there and have really formed some of the foundational structure of the region’s economy.

We benefit from both. From the Fortune 500 companies, we benefit from grants that enable our students to enjoy new learning experiences. We have, for example, a grant that focuses on corporate social responsibility from the Bank of New York Mellon. We have grants focused on entrepreneurial activity. We have grants from PNC that focused on experiential-based learning – especially teamwork. So we benefit from the generosity of these companies and their collaboration

Another level is when entrepreneurs grow their ventures, they often come to the university as a whole, not just the business school. For example, we’re closely associated with an Innovation Institute that focuses on entrepreneurial activities. Local startups and small businesses often use our students to provide business experience, research or knowledge to help them reach the next level. Often, our students are often involved in those kinds of activities, so we benefit from the entrepreneurial spirit.

My job as dean is to actually create more opportunities where our students can find partners in any business that approaches the university with the notion of using our expertise to help with commercialization, product development, or translating innovation into usable products, ideas, or apps –  the whole range of commercialization activity.

On top of that, we also have continuing interest in not-for profit concerns. We do a lot of work in social entrepreneurship, especially at the undergraduate level where our students are deeply engaged. So it’s nice to see our students have interest on both sides – the not-for-profit and the for profit enterprises.

In 2015, Katz had a 22% acceptance rate, making it more selective than programs like Cornell and Emory. Considering the difficulty of getting into Katz, what are some things that you’re looking for in prospective MBA candidates?

This is one of the things that has pushed our MBA program up. Our philosophy is based on integration. What that means is when you admit students into an MBA program, you have to think of the full life cycle. It’s not just an admissions process. You have to think about input, which is admission; throughput, which is how are they going to contribute to the program through their efforts and teamwork; and finally output – what happens to them when they’re finished with the program. We view those three pieces as very, very intimately connected and we want to integrate those steps.

That means that we check for the skill set that we think the employers will value the most. If they don’t look like they either have those skills or have the promise of acquiring those skills, then we’d rather not take them in – which is why the selectiveness is what it looks like.

So what are the advantages of that? You can only do that if you have the advantage of being a small program because you’re not forced to admit just to build up volume. The great advantage of that is that the product that we produce – MBA graduates – is highly valued. Why? Because employers have understood that we essentially do the screening and selection for them. At the point of even admission, we will only admit students that we think will be good employees and ultimately great business leaders. When we do that kind of screening, it carries over and helps us when it comes to placement. So we have a tightly linked system between the inputs and the outputs.

When it comes to what employers are looking for, let me say this. As a dean who has been in a position of influence for a long time now, [I can tell you] that the terminology may change, but what employers are seeking has been pretty constant over time. It’s just that there is a little more attention placed on agility, versatility, and going beyond book knowledge to being able to apply knowledge.

Again and again, employers say the students who come out of Top 20 MBA program sphere will know the basic business fundamentals as reflected in the courses. But [employers] want something else. They want to make sure the students can come in and apply that knowledge, even when the setting is a bit more nebulous or the problem is not very well defined. They want people who can jump in and work in unstructured situations.Tthey place a large value on teamwork and how students build their own teams because, as managers, they will ultimately lead and motivate teams. And so [employers] have a long list of demands on the soft skill side and this is why they value the experiential-based curriculum and teamwork that Katz offers.

Another statistic that caught our eye was your high placement rate in recent years, culminating at 96% in 2014. How have you been able to produce such strong numbers in recent years?

Frankly, it’s focus. We made [placement] an area of focus. We said, ‘no matter what rankings say, we want to focus keenly on what we’re doing with our placement rate and the starting salary level. And we just honed in on how we would do that through all the mechanisms that are within our reach.

We started with the selection process. Don’t let in the students that you don’t think will be cut out to be the perfect hire for the kinds of firms that we target. Then, go to the firms that we target and build a better network. Interest the more demanding firms to look at our product because our product has improved. And we’ve been successful in building the network a lot more.

I think we’re still a little underrated for historical reasons. I expect that we will do even better as people see our products, meaning our graduates, going into the business world as adding value right away. That’s what I mean by “Katz Ready” – adding value right away. That’s what makes us attractive.

But that’s what’s been the single most important focus for us: Placement and starting salary in the right kinds of firms – the firms that want the most agile leaders of the future.

[Our graduates’ starting salaries are up], but the Pittsburgh area is lower [as a whole] in terms of starting salaries compared to some other major cities or financial centers. Despite that handicap, our starting salaries have gone up 30% over the last three to four years.

Katz is also known for its intimacy, with just 80 full-time MBA students accepted into the program in 2015. What are some of the advantages of a small program like Katz has?

I’ve been asking that question to our students. I want to know what they think as our customers. They repeatedly tell me they are very happy with all aspects of student services that they’re getting. Everybody is recognized by name. We know their background. We offer personalized service and career advice so that as they go through the program, we know what courses they’re taking and we tell them how we think that might help them advance with respect to their specific career goals which they need to define for us. Then, we give them the best advice to achieve those objectives.

That requires a lot of time that you need to spend with your students, poring over their records and capabilities so you can provide the right kind of advice and hook them up with the right kind of firms. I would say this would’ve been harder to do if we had an MBA program that’s three times our current size. We deliberately keep it small enough so we can offer them personalized service but also so we can do all the experiential-based learning. That starts to become very expensive when you start to talk about 500-600 students. With the size of faculty and resources that we have, we have rightsized the program.