Rochester Simon Dean Sevin Yeltekin On The MBA’s Value & More

You’ve also invested in online education, recently launching an online master’s in business analytics which is a very hot field. Talk a little bit about those investments and why they’re important.

Yes, absolutely. There had been some talk at Simon before I arrived around launching an online program. It was something that the previous administration wanted to do and I had some experience with it at Carnegie Mellon. Of course, having come from Tepper, I had taught in the online MBA program. For a long time, I was the senior associate dean when the online master’s in business analytics at Tepper was launched. Having looked at the market, I really thought about where exactly did we want to place this? What did we want to to? What is the audience that we’re trying to hit? I’ve always said, and I almost sometimes sound like a broken record, but say we need people who are what I call bilingual, people who understand business and data, people who understand how data can add value. These are people who can direct a data science team to go and do the analysis and be able to understand the analysis that comes out of it and at the same time have that strategic business training so that you can combine the two to add value. They’re not going to be the programmers in the background, perfecting some piece of code. That’s not the skill set we’re trying to get at.

We want to train people to be technology fluent. So they can be effective and combine that with their business knowledge to make strategic decisions and add value to organizations. So when I came in, the online program folks had in mind what I thought was a little bit too technical. If we’re trying to hit an audience that’s been out, let’s say, 10 years since school, and have now reached a managerial position, they are not looking to do deep programming in AI and reinvent themselves as data scientists.

They want to understand how they can direct their teams, and how they can utilize data to make better decisions. Everybody’s always trying to sell somebody the new shiny tool. These managers have outside firms approaching them to say, ‘Give us your data, and we can number crunch it for you.’ But if you don’t understand what you’re doing, you can waste a lot of time, waste a lot of money, and actually make really bad decisions as well. So we centered this around the experiences of a manager, someone who is able to combine a marketing, operations, or finance function with data. And so the entire curriculum is done from scratch with the practical aspects in mind to provide that bilingual education without getting extremely technical.

The one thing silver lining of the pandemic is that everybody got used to teaching online, whether they want to or not. But of course, designing an online program that is meant to be online is not the same thing as just doing Zoom. It’s not take your class and put a projector on it. We have a great education school that has experts in online pedagogy. So we actually had them design a class for us. All the faculty teaching in the online MSBA program took that six-week class that helped them also design their syllabi, get familiar with a lot of effective tools, and then customize what they are teaching to the online domain.

We have a small cohort of about 15 folks who started in the fall and everything is going well. When you launch something new, there are always going to be tweaks and version two. We take that feedback very seriously. But I’m very excited about it.

Our executive MBA program has a lot of online elements. It looks and probably works like an online MBA program. But we don’t call it that. It’s two days a week, and then a lot of both synchronous and asynchronous online components to be able to accommodate the schedules of the executives in the program.

Designing an online program that’s meant to deliver a quality teaching experience in that hybrid environment is not the same thing as putting a camera in front of the classroom. You flip the classroom, but you really have to think about engagement. How do I slice and dice the content in a way that people can do things on their own, and then come back and have meaningful discussions or meaningful experiences? It’s a lot of work if you want to do it right. I want to make a distinction between going online, which is what we all have to do during the pandemic versus designing an online program.

And that is an important distinction because delivering a class on Zoom with what you’re already teaching is remote instruction. Online education is literally taking out a white piece of paper and redesigning your course from scratch and making sure that everything you do is directly related to your learning outcomes. It’s quite a skill to figure out how do you keep students constantly engaged and increase the efficiency of the learning.

Yes, and at Simon, the online programs are cohort-based because students prefer to have a cohort experience, even though they might be remote. Going through an experience with other like-minded people, even if their goals are different from yours, is a very important part of that experience. That’s not an easy thing to do, either. I, for one, would hate to be just an IP address. We hear this from our own students who really like to have that peer-to-peer, peer-to-teacher interaction.

Launching the online master in business analytics plays to your real strengths because the school has long been known for its quantitative approach to teaching business and management. For professionals who don’t want to quit their jobs but want to improve their skills and advance further, it’s an ideal way to learn.

I think a lot of the innovation is going to come at that level. which is thinking about how do we reach the professional? We already have a successful in-person master of business analytics as well as a master in marketing analytics program. With online, you change the audience and reach people where they are in their careers.

And of course, this is the latest in a portfolio of business master’s programs that you have. What are the most popular of these programs in terms of student enrollment?

Our marketing analytics program is continuing to grow. Our biggest cohorts come in through our master of finance and our master of business analytics. But we’re seeing more growth in marketing analytics. Those three are all on-campus 18-month programs. Students can finish them in 14 months but a lot of the students take the internship option. So they do an internship, and then they come back and do another couple of courses in the fall, and then finish in December. The average work experience in those programs is probably about one to one and a half years as opposed to five and a half or so in our full-time MBA program.

Sevin, there’s a lot of hand-wringing and debate over full-time MBA programs and a lot of schools run small programs as lost leaders. What’s your sense of the value of the degree today and its future?

I have always been a very, very firm believer in the MBA in general management education. I think you really do get to see a lot of different functions of a business in an MBA. While some would like to accelerate the experience and get on with their life and go find a job, there’s a tremendous opportunity in being able to take those two years to gain the skills and establish who you are. If you use that time effectively, you can really reinvent yourself. We have a lot of career switches, and you really open up the set of opportunities for yourself, not just immediately after the MBA program but well beyond that.

Most importantly, what we really teach students to do is think about the right questions to ask. Your environment might be different. Your industry might be different, and your resources might be different. But how do you take any problem and think through it, pull it apart into its components, and use the tools that you have been taught in the best way possible to put together a solution?

I think one of the nicest things about the MBA program is that students see and practice that in a multitude of domains, in a multitude of different settings over a long period of time, and they hone in their leadership and presentation skills during that longer period as well. I’m a firm believer in an MBA degree. I’m an economist. So I’m going to give you the economist’s answer. If people are buying our product and have great outcomes, there is a need we are satisfying. . Our placement rates are 95% to 97%. Companies are lining up to hire our students and give them very nice offers, and they’re doing really well. That’s a big sign of approval Yes, the economy ebbs and flows. But you know that’s going to happen in any industry. We almost need a kind of milk advertisement for the MBA. Are people buying our product? The answer is a resounding Yes, and they will continue to do so.

Part of the Simon School is the Bradley Policy Center. What role does its work play in your vision of what business and management education should be?

Policy defines the environment that businesses have to operate in. If we’ve learned anything over the last couple of years with the pandemic and with all of the sort of geopolitical issues we’re facing, it’s that they can be extremely destructive. People talk about technological disruption. I used to always say, coming from an economist policy perspective that the biggest disruptions you see are often policy disruptions. You don’t even have to be in a necessarily highly regulated industry, like healthcare or finance, to feel the impact. And yet a lot of business schools are not very good at delivering that piece of the skill set. Policy schools are different from business schools, although a lot of us do teach the law of economics, markets, and things like that.

Simon has a very long history of hosting the Carnegie-Rochester-NYU Conference on Public Policy. We have a very long history of sort of contributing to, and being at the forefront of policy debates. The Bradley Center was first established to really think about tax and monetary policy. but now I look at the faculty at Simon, and we have experts on everything from antitrust to labor and health care. We need to put this great intellectual power and the work that’s being done under an umbrella. So we launched the policy and business initiative and the Bradley Center. It has been a long-standing center at Simon but had become a little sleepy. To be perfectly honest. we have revitalized it with new leadership.

We’ve already started a seminar series, and the idea is that if we can bring policymakers, practitioners, and academics together to discuss policy issues, we can provide solutions and have an impact on designing good policy. That’s only going to be better if business and business schools have a role in that. Our students need to be better versed in understanding that landscape, and really be able to understand how they need to respond to it but also contribute to the debate.

That certainly makes sense for Simon. After all, the school is named after a policymaker and treasury secretary.

As we push it to the next phase, I firmly believe that you’ve got to keep that DNA connection. It does back to what makes Simon Simon? It’s certainly connecting the strengths and assets and the history of the school with new innovations. It’s not all about tax policy anymore or Treasury policy. It’s now about big tech and antitrust labor, geopolitical issues, trade issues and supply chains, and health care policy. Those are the domains that we can contribute to.

I also think that the winds are blowing in the direction of a revival of antitrust policy, given our changing view of technology and the dominance it’s playing in our lives.

We just hired a new faculty member who spent time at the Department of Justice and whose area of research is labor antitrust. That’s a whole new area because now you have companies that are hiring millions and millions of people. They become kind of monopoly hires and that’s a different type of antitrust than our concept of monopoly producers. She’s done some really extensive work on that and continues to do so. These are all going to be very important and impactful areas for us to continue to do research and to incorporate that research into our classroom discussions. When you talk about the gig economy, what are the labor rights? Who’s a worker who’s an employee? What does it all mean? It’s a very big issue.

Now, earlier in our conversation, you mentioned something that intrigues me. You referred to the impact that education is played in your own personal life. Can you reflect on that a little bit more and give me a little more insight?

My dad went to college. My mom has very limited formal education. She only went to elementary school actually. but she was a huge proponent of the importance of education. So my family is from the southeastern part of Turkey. We moved to Istanbul when I was about 2 or 3 years old, and from then on my mother made it her mission that my brother and I get the best education that we could find. The fact that I was able to go to Wellesley College on a scholarship made a big difference to my life. You know they took a chance on a curly—haired woman from Turkey who wanted to study mathematics and was interested in politics.
That’s an amazing thing for somebody to take a chance on you and say, here’s somebody interesting and ambitious who wants to do things and provide me with that opportunity. I’ve never taken that lightly, and I’ve always loved being in academic institutions. It’s how we can change, and it’s how we can provide upward mobility.

What was it like coming from Turkey to the United States for the first time for higher education?

I had gone to a bilingual school in Turkey so my English was fine, My formal English was really good. I could write well, but colloquially I had to get used to it. It was a different world. I mean it was a completely different world. On the one hand, you go through the same freeing phases as any college student who leaves home. But some things were almost baffling to me like the fact that people could debate the professor in the class. I’d come from an education system where the professors stepped on a stage and no one pushed back on them. At Wellesley, there was a sort of intellectual buzz and students who were really interested in a variety of different things. I missed the food. I missed my family. I missed all of the usual things that an immigrant does. But it was really an eye-opener in many, many ways. And for that, I’m extremely grateful. It was definitely a trying time, a lonely time, but I was delighted with the opportunities that were provided to me, especially being in a place where you know I started as a math major and then switched to economics. I was able to double major and take a whole variety of classes as opposed to some education systems. It completely changed my mindset about how to think about learning and how to think about developing myself. That’s why I’ve always stayed in school, I suppose.

Was it during the undergraduate experience that you discovered that you wanted to become an academic? Or did that come later?

I did an honors thesis in economics while I was at Wellesley, and got to really get my hands dirty on the research side. I found that exhilarating. You get to define your own question; it’s a question nobody has fully answered before, and you get to set about finding a solution. I like puzzles. I like the challenge. And I’m independent. So I like the idea of setting my own questions, and I really like the intellectual vibrancy. I graduated in three and a half years with a double major. I don’t know what my rush was. But I worked for about four or five months at an economic consulting firm as an entry-level person. It’s very repetitive work.
After a while, you really feel like your brain cells are starting to get a little moldy and I knew that that was just not for me. That’s what really cemented the idea of being an academic. Here’s a question nobody is solving. Go, solve it. And I love teaching. You can see the bulb go off when somebody finally understands a concept you are teaching and it’s extremely satisfying.

Did your mother get to see your success?

Yes, she’s very proud. She’s delighted, and I owe a lot to my mom because she was the one who recognized that these opportunities were not given to her and they were important to me in charging and charting my life. The thing about my mom is that she’s an infinitely curious person. She’s never stopped learning even though she did not have formal educational opportunities, That curiosity is infectious if you catch the bug and I owe that to her. Both my parents are still alive. They live in Istanbul, and they watch me from afar, but they’re delighted.

What do you see in store for the Simon Business School over the next few years?

Well, we’ve made some really good headway on our strategic plan. We’ll continue to invest in those four pillars and the university itself is going through a change. We have a new provost who came from Northwestern University, and our president had been a dean at Northwestern University as well. There are some exciting changes ahead. And what I really love about this place is that I have been asked to contribute at many levels in meaningful discussions about the university’s future. I sit on committees and work as an advisor so I’m getting a deeper understanding of an integrated university system, especially one with a very large medical center.

I’m delighted to be at Simon. I really am, and I want to see this strategic plan that we’ve put together through. And really, you know, I always think of my role as a person carrying an Olympic torch and handing it to the next administration. I hope that it shines brighter and bigger by the time I hand it over. That’s really my goal. I really want Simon to continue to be this intellectual powerhouse that provides very rigorous education to a very diverse community of learners.

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