Stanford Ups Ante On Experiential Learning For MBAs

A SIDE BENEFIT? NEW COURSES COULD BOOST JOB ACCEPTANCE RATES AT STANFORD

That is why job offer acceptance rates at Stanford often trail rival MBA programs. Giving students the opportunity for more learning experiences inside the MBA program could improve those stats in the school’s annual MBA employment report. This would be a side benefit to the new set of courses meant to bridge the knowing-doing gap. While 95% of Stanford MBAs had job offers three months after graduation last year, only 88% accepted those offers. That compares with Chicago Booth where 96% of the MBAs had offers in the same timeframe and 95% accepted them.

“Over time we’ve found that students learn best by doing,” says Brian Lowery, the senior associate dean responsible for the Teaching and Learning unit. “With the Action Learning Program, students will gain on-the-ground experience at organizations with the guidance of faculty. The evolution of this program will be an iterative process, with both students and faculty working together to make this a valuable, impactful experience.”

As part of the process to add the courses Stanford studied how several other schools are tackling experiential learning. “We looked around at what exists and learned from that,” says Feinberg. “What Ross has done is very interesting. MIT has an interesting data science one. We took those components and asked how can we build a platform out of it. That is how innovation happens. Connecting the dots of what other people do.”

‘IT’S CLEARLY A LEARNING METHODOLOGY THAT IS EFFECTIVE’

The bigger takeaway for Feinberg, however, was how compelling action learning can be. “It’s clearly a learning methodology that is effective,” he says. “It resonates well with the students. I don’t know if it’s a generational thing or not but having something that is hands-on and dynamic is more engaging for students and they get more out of it.  But the projects need to be meaningful. The stakes are higher. It is going to demand more time from the students and it will be immersive. That is what we took away from other schools.” 

Feinberg expects the courses to be highly popular. MBA students will essentially bid for the courses in the school’s lottery system that requires students to rank the elective courses they want to take. “I’m pretty confident that we will do at least one more,” he says. “We’ll get up to four or five next and then keep growing. Our initial inclination is that the demand for these courses is substantial so we want to grow in two ways by growing our capacity with the existing courses and then adding new courses.” 

WALKING THE GSB CORRIDORS

Why start with a trio of courses? “I walked around the corridors and talked to three people I thought would be great faculty to lead this effort and all three of them got excited,” explains Feinberg. “Susan Athey is an amazing researcher and economist but her real passion in recent years is to work with big data to solve really big problems. She has a research lab that looks at big social questions. The idea behind this vertical is that she is getting amazing data from all kinds of organizations. MBA students will work with data scientists on these projects which will have real social impact. Her goal is to create a class with half business school students and half engineering students.

“Baba Shiv is a behavioral marketing guru who does work on decisionmaking and how to support innovation in s large organization,” adds Feinberg. “We will solicit innovation projects across Intel for this course. You will have the internal teams that generated those innovations and students will work with them to build business models behind the innovations and pitch them internally. So we will become part of their innovation process.

“The third one is with Stefanos Zenios who did Startup Garage at GSB. Instead of looking at startups that are generated by students, we wanted to curate early-stage startups that are generated outside for projects. They could come from outside the university or the medical school. But the idea is to curate things with high potential. What you have is the chance to take these startups and figure out the biggest milestones they need to achieve and then help to execute those milestones. This would really prepare a student to join a startup.” 

DON’T MISS: THE P&Q INTERVIEW: STANFORD GSB DEAN JON LEVIN or HOW STANFORD GSB IS TACKLING DIVERSITY & INCLUSION