How Business Schools Are Reimaging Business Education

Business schools are coming up with new ways to offer more flexibility and lower cost options for a business education.

Both Harvard Business School and Columbia Business School have started adding certificates  and ‘lifelong learning’ to their programs, The Wall Street Journal reports.

“It makes no sense that people should get all of their education in their 20s, because if we live until our 80s there should be many points in time when one could come back and get re-educated,” Debora Spar, a senior associate dean in charge of Harvard Business School Online, tells WSJ.

RETHINKING VALUE

Earlier this year, a survey found that nearly half of b-schools expected a drop in enrollment in 2020.

In 2019, even the highest ranked b-schools in the US saw significant declines in MBA applications.

To draw more applicants, b-schools have reimagined what value a graduate business degree can bring to students.

Part of that rethinking is adding more relevant skillsets, such as technology and data-science, and flexible options to their program offerings.

“The future is likely to find not just growing demand for one-year M.B.A.s, but also for part-time, executive, blended, online and stackable degrees, potentially with the stackable M.B.A. being delivered by different  schools at different times in a student’s career,” a study from Carrington Crisp, a business-school consulting firm, reads.

In the study, Carrington Crisp outlined strong demand from prospective students on content that addresses topics such as responsible management, ethical leadership, diversity and equality, and global challenges.

“Future students tend to see responsible leadership as a fundamental aspect that runs through business education teaching and research, not as a specialist add-on or elective,” according to Carrington Crisp.

LIFELONG LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES 

At both Columbia Business School and Harvard Business School, students will begin to see new certificates and options that support lifelong learning in MBA programs.

Juliane Iannarelli, vice president and chief knowledge officer at the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), says roughly 39% of b-schools accredited by the AACSB reported offering graduate-level certificates.

“With the ongoing global pandemic, we expect to see these offerings continue to emerge,” Iannarelli tells WSJ.

Additionally, b-schools are adding more opportunities for online learning.

Columbia recently launched Alumni Edge, a set of immersive and evolving online courses available for b-school alumni. Columbia Business School dean Costis Maglaras emphasizes the Alumni Edge platform as a differentiating feature of a Columbia degree.

“In today’s environment, things are changing quickly in the professional world,” he tells WSJ. “I think this will be more of the norm than the exception over time.”

Harvard Business School Online includes more than 30,000 students with 13 courses available. HBS Online focuses on certificates rather than degrees and is aimed at students who want to continue working while pursuing their studies online.

HBS Online’s Debora Spar says that while online programs traditionally offer more accessibility to a wider range of students, they tend to lack the valuable in-person opportunities that traditional, on-campus MBA programs provide. That’s starting to change.

“Higher education and business education has been sold primarily as a bundle. You get the education along with the campus experience, along with the coffee in the lounge, along with the Frisbee games,” Spar tells WSJ. “What we were already starting to see pre-Covid was this unbundling.”

Sources: The Wall Street Journal, P&Q, Forbes, Carrington Crisp