The Birth of Cornell’s College of Business

Newly arrived Johnson MBA students during Cornell's redesigned orientation

Newly arrived Johnson MBA students during Cornell’s redesigned orientation

‘I SEE IT AS A WIN-WIN, NOT ONLY FOR THE MBA PROGRAM BUT FOR CORNELL’

Making that case has occupied a good deal of Dutta’s time in the past year. “The School of Hotel Administration is too small to build bench strength with faculty in technology,” he explains. “Yet, technology is transforming the hospitality industry internationally. Working with Cornell Tech and the Johnson School, it can really bring that technology orientation. Even in more traditional areas like food and beverage, the Dyson School has some of the world’s leading experts in food sciences. If you bring together some of these experts, the combination can be very strong and very powerful. Once alumni understood these new opportunities, they started seeing the benefits of the College of Business.”

The dean has had an easier time convincing business school students and alumni of the merger’s benefits. “I think it’s a great opportunity for collaboration,” says Charles Cooper, an MBA who will graduate in the Class of 2017. “It provides an opportunity for students that may not necessarily be in one college to be able to take classes within the MBA program. What I find is, MBAs are open to all kinds of experiences, but oftentimes they are not exposed. I have an option to take classes in agriculture, culinary, and other areas, and I see it as a win-win, not only for the MBA program but for Cornell.”

Dutta agrees. “In the Johnson School, a small but significant minority of students are interested in real estate,” adds Dutta. “But the real estate faculty don’t really exist in the Johnson School. They are in the School of Hotel Administration. Now we can give MBA students greater access to courses in real estate. The same is true in entrepreneurship. Coming together, we have much deeper and richer bench strength in faculty and programming. Whether it is sustainability or entrepreneurship, real estate or hospitality, our students will be able to benefit from increased faculty and increased courses across the schools.”

A 13% INCREASE IN APPLICATIONS TO THE FULL-TIME, TWO-YEAR MBA PROGRAM

Dutta believes the 13% increase in MBA applications this year is a sign of increased interest in the school and what it’s doing. Applications for this fall’s entering class rose to 1,960 from 1,704 a year earlier for the Johnson School’s 284 two-year MBA seats. The increase allowed Johnson to lower its acceptance rate to 27.4% from 33.4% a year earlier. “We are seeing pretty strong demand and the general sense we have is that applicants are noticing that new things are happening at Johnson,” says Dutta. “That has proven to be interesting and attractive to many prospective applicants.”

The school recently greeted those new students with a redesigned orientation and created a new leadership retreat for second-year and accelerated one-year MBAs. They also will benefit from the recruitment of 13 new companies scheduled to visit campus this fall, including Microsoft, Barclays, and Comcast-NBCUniversal.

Meantime, there have been major leadership changes under Dutta. Accounting professor Mark Nelson has taken over as dean of the Johnson School. Dyson Senior Associate Dean Ed McLaughlin has become the interim dean of Dyson, while organizational management professor Kate Walsh has assumed the interim deansip of the School of Hotel Administration.

NEW YORK CITY LOOMS STRONGLY IN THE FUTURE

One of the more compelling parts of the school’s future, of course, will be its operations in New York. Johnson just enrolled the third class of MBAs in its one-year Cornell Tech MBA in New York. The program, which attracted 52 incoming students this year, kicks off in Ithaca with a ten-week dive into core business and leadership courses. Then, students move to the New York campus for nine months of what the school calls “interdisciplinary, innovative entrepreneurial courses.” MBAs work closely with other master’s students in computer science and engineering. “It is an MBA program which really does not exist anywhere else,” says Dutta. “We have a great group of students in that program, and they are getting great jobs with about about 25% of them starting companies.” Johnson’s other one-year accelerated MBA program in Ithaca enrolled 72 students in its newest class.

But when Johnson moves into the larger facilities on Roosevelt Island next July, Dutta expects to have what he calls “a dual-campus program where students will have the chance to spend six months or more in New York City. It is already happening on a small scale. We allow a few students now to go to New York, but once we have the space on the island we will be allow larger numbers of students to go. It will be modeled after the INSEAD example where students can move across two campuses in France and Singapore.”

Four years into his deanship, Dutta says he feels privileged despite the pressures of a heavy workload and the initial controversy over the merger. “I was very forutnate to have spent a lot of my formative years at INSEAD,” confides Dutta. “Cornell is providing me an incredibly rich platform in the U.S. that would have been harder in a standalone business school. This is not just setting up an MBA program in New York City, but a different kind of institution that hopes to play a critical role in the transformation of the economy of a region. I certainly feel very privileged to have the opportunity to bring these things together.”

Construction proceeds on Cornell's New York City campus on Roosevelt Island

Construction proceeds on Cornell’s New York City campus on Roosevelt Island

DON’T MISS: CORNELL REVAMPS ITS TWO-YEAR MBA PROGRAM or CORNELL’S BIG BET ON NEW YORK CITY