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

‘THE OPPORTUNITY TO DO MORE ONLINE IS GOING TO BE VERY POWERFUL’

Kohlmann: What are you thinking about in terms of how to expand the Stanford presence and educational value in a post-COVID world?

Levin: I think there are going to be changes in in-person education. We are going to use technology in more sophisticated ways. I hope we will take the best things that are happening now and the best things that happened before and find a way to marry them. The opportunity to do more online is going to be very powerful. Right now we are in the phase of doing a lot of experimentation. Normally, in the summer we would have thousands of professionals who come to Stanford to take one-, two- and six-week courses. They are wonderful programs and the participants are terrific. We can’t do any of them now but we are trying to run many virtual programs and learning an incredible amount. It is the opportunity to do education where it fits professionals’ schedules and adapts to their work life. As more people get used to that and we improve at it, it’s going to be a great thing for lifelong education. We’ve been thinking the moment was coming for lifelong education for 20 years. It’s always a couple of years in the future and that may be true. But at least at this moment, the moment has arrived and it is really exciting.

I will give you one data point. We run a one-year, online program where you take the core curriculum instead of elective classes and we had our largest cohort in the spring. And in the fall, it’s very possible that it will be 50% larger than the spring cohort just because there are more people who are interested and more people who have the time available and more people who are comfortable getting online.

Kohlmann: What’s the sense of MBA applicants for 2021?

Levin: For this coming year, people have to make the decision to apply in the middle of a pandemic. This could cut different ways. When the economy turns down and there are fewer opportunities, it’s a natural time to go back to school. Everything is constrained right now. The work world is constrained. Education is constrained. You could make the case it’s a good time to go back to school. It’s a good time to invest in yourself when the set of opportunities are less and will maybe be better when school finishes. At a time when there is incredible change in the world, being at a place like Stanford is a great place to be at a time of profound change. You have all these people who are interested to think through what is going on. How will the world change? What will be different? What will the new opportunities be? It gives you a chance to reflect and figure all that out before you launch off in a new direction or continue the direction you want to take.

Kohlmann: How are you thinking about the difficulties international students are having right now?

Levin: It’s been a very difficult time for international students in the United States, both for students who want to come to the U.S. and for students who are here and thinking about jobs. Travel restrictions, visa restrictions move very quickly. I think it’s a very challenging situation. We will have students who will defer and some who start this fall and weren’t able to get visas before the quarter starts. So they will start remotely and then they will come when they can. We will do everything we can to support those students. That is an unfortunate thing. One of the great things about being at a place like Stanford GSB is that you are surrounded by people from all over the world. You put that mix together and that is just tremendously powerful. Having that disrupted is really disappointed. I hope we will get back to a situation to welcome people from around the world.

WHEN THE JOB MARKET TIGHTENED, ALUMNI CREATED 300 JOB OPPORTUNITIES FOR STUDENTS

Kohlmann: Another challenge you faced this summer was jobs. I got an email back in April asking for help to build slots for students. How did that work?

Levin: The job market was tough and the internship market was tough. I wrote to alumni in April because we felt we needed to create 150 internship and full-time job opportunities. The response of our alumni was just unbelievable. Our alumni ended up creating something like 300 job opportunities. So that was incredible. Look, you get a crisis and one thing you want to see is the community you are part of come together and people help each other. That was just a great example of that.

Kohlmann: In 2016, when I was an MBA2 here, you were thrown right into the fire. There was a challenging situation as we transitioned deans. The stuff in Ferguson was happening and so there was a lot of conversation on campus about racial strife. And obviously, in the midst of COVID, we had the killing of George Floyd in June which caused a whole slew of challenges on top of COVID. What is Stanford doing on the diversity front?

Levin: When you were a student at the GSB that social issues and social inequity was top of mind. We had the Ferguson situation which was incredibly traumatic and then issues around immigration. And this year, if the pandemic has been anything, it has just laid bare the inequities in our society around education, health and race. We saw that so clearly this spring. The police violence and the Black Lives Matter protest and we are seeing it right now in Kenosha. When I started in this role what I have come to appreciate much more is the importance for institutions like Stanford to play an active role in helping the country move forward when you have a crisis.

WHAT COULD THE SCHOOL DO TO HELP THE WHOLE COUNTRY MOVE FORWARD ON RACIAL INEQUALITY

When we had the George Flood killing and the other episodes of police violence in the spring, it just triggered so many discussions on our campus among the students, the faculty, the staff, and the alumni about what was going on. But also what could the school do to help not just our community but help the whole country move forward to understand what happened. To think about solutions, to think about what would be constructive and how can we move to a situation where we have less racism against Blacks in this country and more equity, more opportunity, and more racial justice. That arrived right in the middle of COVID, and we spent a lot of time talking to people about it. In the middle of the summer, we came out with a racial equity action plan with a set of goals and aspirations to increase the representation of Blacks on the campus and have a more inclusive environment on campus and contribute to broader society beyond the campus We put that out and now we are trying to execute on it. We’ve got some exciting things on that front that I’m proud of.

Kohlmann: What are some of the tangible actions you want to take?

Levin: I’ll mention a couple. Some of them have to do with the experience at the school. For example, we do teaching often with case studies and guest speakers, and often the folks who are represented in those case studies or who come to speak come through people’s networks and those networks often tend to look like them. So we are making more of an effort to broaden the set of people who come in front of our students.

Stanford University announced this summer a very ambitious faculty search to try to bring in faculty who have an interest on the impact of race in America. I hope that will help the whole university build strength in that area.

And we are going to do something on the financial aid front that I hope will be important for us. Many of our students receive financial aid to help them come to the GSB. It is one of the things that help us build a class that is as rich and broad in backgrounds and experiences. We do financial aid based on an individual’s income, assets and circumstances. We are going to introduce another set of financial aid that is based on family backgrounds to reflect the circumstances from where people came from. We think that ought to have some impact in terms of racial equity because one of the well-known facts about wealth distribution in our society is that there is a very big racial disparity in intergenerational wealth. We will go at that problem and the general problem of wealth inequality in this country that disadvantages a lot of people from the start of their lives.

DON’T MISS: MEET STANFORD’S MBA CLASS OF 2021 or STANFORD GSB WILL NOW START THE FALL QUARTER MOSTLY ONLINE