Stanford GSB Dean Jon Levin On MBAs, COVID, Racial Injustice & The Future

‘WE ARE IN THIS PERIOD OF EXTRAORDINARY FORCED INNOVATION’

Kohlmann: What have you seen in the innovation sphere that faculty have done to make the classes interactive and to deliver the same content as they did previously?

Levin: One of the bright spots of this experience which was apparent early on was that even though this has been an incredible disruption to business schools and higher education and a huge disappointment for students who look forward to so many in-person interactions. There is no getting around that disappointment and this setback. But at the same time, it has been an incredible experiment. And all of us, everywhere in the world, has seen the power of the technology to bring people together online. Now we are in this period of extraordinary forced innovation where we just have to figure things out to make them work. When the pandemic ends, some of our faculty want to go back to doing what they did before in-person with students. And for some, it is a revelation. There are things you can do with technology that are different and in some cases better.

We use Zoom as our platform and here’s a shoutout to them for saving us and the Zoom founder is a Stanford GSB alum. What many of the faculty do is use breakout rooms. We know from 30 years of research in education that active learning, where people are talking and interacting, is better than sitting there and listening to someone talk. It’s actually hard to break people into small groups of four and another group of four in a physical classroom. But you can do that online and that is a great thing.

Another one is chat. When I was teaching, I never let students use computers in the classroom. It was too much competition. I couldn’t compete with Facebook and their email account and YouTube and what have you. So they couldn’t have their screens. I never wanted that. But now you see that in meetings and classrooms having people on chat is fantastic. People talk in class who otherwise would have been quiet. It brings out lots more voices and lots more people who answer each other’s questions. it is actually a great way to engage in a multi-modality.

Another one is speakers. We bring a lot of guest speakers to classes. It’s a hallmark of the classes. If you want to bring someone in from the East Coast they have to fly across the country. They have to spend the whole day and they have to fly back. It’s a big deal. You want to bring them in on Zoom, they can come in and it’s 30 minutes out of their day. It’s sensational. We’ll find ways to actually improve our normal way of teaching when the pandemic ends. There are going to be many opportunities that come out of this experience because everyone is innovating and experimenting at the same time.

I was just on a call with a group of our alumni earlier today for an hour and there were people from four continents on the call. How would we have gotten that group together before? We would have had to make plans a year in advance to fly everyone to Stanford to have a meeting like that and now you can send them an invite a couple of days in advance and people take the hour and get online. What a great way to get everyone connected.

We had a planning task force for the fall that was set up to think about near term problems. And the other group we set up in the spring was a group to think long-term about the effects of the pandemic. We called it the Beyond Covid Task Force. It is still running and it is a group of alumni and faculty. And they have been thinking about what opportunities have been created by the acceleration of online. If you think about the potential for online education or virtual learning, you get a geographic expansion. That we understood well. And you get a scale extension. You can do online education for larger numbers than in-person education.

The other observation they made is that you can have a temporal extension because it is easier to stay connected with people either before or after they leave the physical environment of the campus. For example, this year with our incoming students, we started engaging with them and having meetings eight weeks before orientation which normally we wait for orientation. This has implications for lifelong learning to help people stay connected to a school after they graduate. There is so much greater opportunity if everyone is used to using a virtual environment. They can be connected wherever they live and wherever they go. I think that is something we will make significant investments in having seen this potential. That has been an interesting learning about what is going to be possible in education.

TEAM POSITIVITY CONTAGION CREATED MORE THAN 200 VIRTUAL EVENTS FOR STUDENTS

Kohlmann: The thing about business school that is unique is the classmates and the benefit of having 407 other Stanford students who are from across the world and the benefits you get from the collision of minds and experiences outside the classroom. How are you innovating to create that similar environment?

Levin: In the spring, we had a group of students who knew each other already. When they were forced to go online, there were incredible constraints on what they are able to do in terms of being together. They were incredibly inventive. We had a group of students who called themselves Team Positivity Contagion. In true Stanford fashion, they printed t-shirts and they organized 200 to 300 virtual events during the quarter and invited alumni and speakers. It was amazing and really impressive in terms of community building and togetherness..Of course, that is a lesson of the pandemic as well. We are in this all together. What is going to be harder is how will people form new relationships online. One nice thing for us about having students on campus is that students will be able to engage on campus outside. I worry for students who are at schools that are starting 100% remote and the students have no physical togetherness. How will they meet people? How will they form friendships? It’s going to be a big, big challenge for everyone.

Kohlmann: I know you had a student town hall last week. Were there any key themes the students were talking about for the coming quarter?

Levin: They just want to know how is this going to work? We are all going into a new world of going to school during a pandemic. They want to understand how we will keep them safe and how they will get to know their classmates and the faculty. What they would love is certainty. How long will this last? It’s just like everyone. That is something that is impossible to deliver right now unfortunately so that makes for a tough situation for everyone.

Kohlmann: Even before COVID, we were seeing some of the lower end of the business school market slowly transitioning out? How do you see the economics of the inflow of tuition dollars impacting the business school marketplace and what will be the long-term effect of that?

Levin: If we go back before COVID, there were at least two very big trends in business education. One has been a decline in the popularity of two-year residential MBA programs, and you have even seen some schools stopping their two-year residential MBA programs. The second big trend is actually going in the opposite direction. It has been a massive expansion in the overall demand for business education: The demand for lifelong professional learning, demand for online education and more flexible and shorter programs, and undergraduate business education has grown significantly. So there has been a shift in how people want to learn professional skills and make them successful at work and then maintain and refresh those skills over time. At Stanford, we have seen a little bit of both these things. We have seen very strongly the demand for continuing programs and online programs. The online part has accelerated with COVID and the in-person part is shut down right now.

The classic two-year residential MBA still has incredible value. Where does the value come from? It comes from many things. It comes from getting a set of skills and building a set of relationships. It fundamentally comes being in an environment for two years that just opens up your aperture on the world. You just see more possibilities.

The metaphor I like for this is one that contrasts my own education, a Ph.D., with an MBA. Someone who does a Ph.D. is being handed this incredibly powerful microscope to just zoom in on some specific set of knowledge. In my case, it was economics. In an MBA program like Stanford’s, it’s like giving someone an incredibly powerful telescope. You are just opening their aperture to see all these possibilities and giving them the skills to go in so many directions. That value is not going away. It’s not going to go away if we do it online for a year or a quarter, either. It’s just a powerful value proposition. I feel confident in that value but certainly, the overall market is softening.