In San Francisco, A Small B-School Undergoes A Big — And Impactful — Transformation

Otgontsetseg Erhemjamts is the first person from Mongolia to earn a finance doctorate from a U.S. business school. She is also the first, and only, U.S. B-school dean of Mongolian descent.

But more important than her country of origin or her academic climb is her approach to the job — and what it has meant to the school she now leads.

Dean Otgo, as she is known to everyone at the University of San Francisco School of Management from students to faculty to kitchen staff at the university dining hall, came to the small Jesuit school in summer 2022 with a charge to reverse a worrying years-long slide in enrollment. That charge has become a mission to change … well, everything.

THE DECLINING ENROLLMENT CHALLENGE

“I came here two years ago and was given a charge of basically helping the school turn around,” Otgo tells Poets&Quants. “Like many other universities around the country, we’d been experiencing declining undergraduate enrollment. Because of our location, we tend to be more heavily reliant on international students. Tension between the Chinese government and U.S. government, Trump government policies, Covid — all those things had a huge impact on international enrollment, and our enrollment dropped more than universities that didn’t have such a heavy international presence.”

Undergraduate enrollment at the McLaren School of Management has dropped by about one-third since 2019. Though it’s a smaller population, enrollment is also down by a third across graduate programs at the Masagung Graduate School of Management.

“Enrollment decline is a common challenge all of higher ed is grappling with, combined with the demographic cliff and everything else,” Otgo says. “So coming here, and looking at the size of our school, I felt that we need to rebalance and re-optimize the program portfolio, sunsetting some programs, and launching new programs.”

“But basically, the dean’s job is resource allocation. How do we allocate the limited resources we have? If you have declining enrollment, that means your finances or budgets are also declining, so we have to do more with less, basically.”

CLASS SIZES, ALL USF BUSINESS GRAD PROGRAMS, 2019-2023

USF	FALL 2023	FALL 2022	FALL 2021	FALL 2020	FALL 2019
Students	418	541	538	581	618

USF MBA CLASS SIZES, 2019-2023

Program	FALL 2023	FALL 2022	FALL 2021	FALL 2020	FALL 2019
FT MBA	82	86	81	69	68
PT MBA	59	72	79	92	89

USF UNDERGRAD CLASS SIZES, WOMEN & MINORITIES, 2019-2023

Data	FALL 2023	FALL 2022	FALL 2021	FALL 2020	FALL 2019
Class Size	1143	1249	1361	1420	1722
Women	542 (47.4%)	595 (47.6%)	652 (47.9%)	689 (48.5%)	826 (48.0%)
Minorities	690 (60.4%)	731 (58.5%)	778 (56.4%)	818 (56.2%)	882 (51.2%)

‘LET’S ELIMINATE DEPARTMENTS’

With an enrollment collapse hanging over everything, 2023 became a year of “reimagining” at USF’s Schools of Management. That meant taking the pulse of students through surveys. And it meant sunsetting some grad programs and launching others — as Otgo says, resource reallocation. Among the changes, three programs, the Master’s in Financial Analysis, Master’s in Organizational Development, and Master’s in Nonprofit Administration, were phased out; two more, the Master’s in Management in Sustainable Social Impact and Online Part-Time MBA, have been announced, launching this fall.

Still bigger changes loomed. Beginning last summer and fall, the B-school initiated its most daring approach yet, phasing out its seven departments in favor of three “impact areas.” The effort catalyzed in late January 2023, when Dean Otgo and school leadership convened a day-long workshop facilitated by faculty from Stanford University’s Design School. In attendance were USF faculty, staff, students, members of local NGOs and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, and a representative from the education unit of Mayor London Breed’s office.

In the morning of the day-long workshop, they grappled with the question: “If USF School of Management were to fail in five years, what would be the reason?”

“And a few things bubbled up, such as, maybe we didn’t have good partnerships with industry, whether it’s the government or local businesses,” says Otgo, who before joining USF was a professor of finance at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts for 17 years, holding various leadership positions including associate dean and associate provost for strategic initiatives. “Maybe our curriculum is not innovative, not agile, or not flexible enough. Maybe we are not agile in the way we are doing things, we need to be adapting to industry needs more rapidly. And one final thing was that we need to be more student-centric. If we’re not student-centric, then students won’t come.

“And then the second part of the day was, if these are the core reasons why we might fail, how do we fix it? What kind of things can we do? So that started this reimagining the school process, and we had numerous meetings, surveys, and discussions. And then we said one way to achieve more agility, along with all the curricular work that we are doing, is to experiment with a new structure.

“Most universities have this structure that we’ve inherited from the 17th, 18th centuries — that every school has a department-based structure and it’s based on disciplines. And that kind of leads to silos and turf battles. And when we try to innovate curriculum, faculty will be like, ‘This is my department’s program or course.’ And so these silos, we felt, were getting in the way of being more agile. So we floated different ideas: ‘What if we get rid of departments and completely organized around themes?’ People were freaked out about that. People felt, ‘Well, we need still some sort of community and way to gather or identify around something.’ And then we talked about consolidating departments. We had seven, so what if we consolidated into three departments, two departments? Then the issues that were identified about silos and everything still kind of remained, in a different scale maybe.

“So we ended up deciding, ‘Okay, let’s eliminate departments.”’

WOMEN IN THE USF MBA, 2019-2023

Program	FALL 2023	FALL 2022	FALL 2021	FALL 2020	FALL 2019
FT MBA	47	48	39	29	34
PT MBA	27	31	32	41	35

MINORITIES IN THE USF MBA, 2019-2023

Program	FALL 2023	FALL 2022	FALL 2021	FALL 2020	FALL 2019
FT MBA	6	12	23	21	16
PT MBA	11	38	43	48	45

INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS IN THE USF MBA 2019-2023

Program	FALL 2023	FALL 2022	FALL 2021	FALL 2020	FALL 2019
FT MBA	64	65	46	32	38
PT MBA	1	2	2	1	3

YEAR ONE OF THE EXPERIMENT

Since last August, the School of Management has implemented a plan that “ambitious” doesn’t begin to describe: Along with the ongoing programmatic makeover, including a major revision of the undergraduate core, the B-school’s leadership is attempting a total rethinking of the school’s administrative structure. Instead of departments, programs are now categorized under three themes or “impact areas”: Sustainable Management Education, Racial and Social Justice in the Business Community, and Digital Transformation.

Dean Otgo makes a compelling case for how such a radical administrative recalibration will help the school financially — but above all, how it will help the students.

“If you think of department chair roles, it’s a very faculty-centric role, it’s supporting other faculty, working on scheduling, mentoring younger faculty, hiring adjuncts,” she tells P&Q. “So it’s very faculty-centric, all the responsibilities. So we removed departments, that right away was a lot of cost-saving, like department chair compensation. Instead of having full-time people taking on these administrative roles and then having to hire temporary adjunct faculty to teach courses, now these department chairs go back to classrooms, so we have more full-time faculty teaching courses, less adjunct teaching, so we save money from the adjunct teaching as well.

“But ultimately, more than money, it’s supposed to help us with this interdisciplinary collaboration, not just with your group, but with other faculty, whether it’s research or curriculum or service, all that stuff. And then we created these new roles called undergrad major faculty leads. So their job description, we made sure that there’s nothing administrative in there, nothing faculty-centric, it’s all student-facing responsibilities. You should be looking at your student experience or student success in your major, come up with metrics, track them, monitor them, find out ways to improve them. And also have kind of community-building events and activities with the students so that they feel that they know the faculty more, they feel supported, they feel connected with each other and with faculty.

“So those are new roles that we created, and this is basically year one of that experiment.”

USF MBA COST 2019-2023

Program	FALL 2023	FALL 2022	FALL 2021	FALL 2020	FALL 2019
FT MBA	$81,600 (average scholarship = $8,200)	$79,200 (average scholarship = $8,000)	$76,800 (average scholarship = $7,700)	$75,600 (average scholarship = $7,500)	$73,200 (average scholarship = $7,300)
PT MBA	$68,000 (average scholarship = $6,800)	$66,000 (average scholarship = $6,600)	$64,000 (average scholarship = $6,400)	$63,000 (average scholarship = $6,300)	$61,000 (average scholarship = $6,100)

APPLICATIONS, ADMITS & ACCEPTANCE RATE FOR THE USF MBA, 2019-2023

Program	FALL 2023	FALL 2022	FALL 2021	FALL 2020	FALL 2019
FT MBA	378 Apps | 157 Admits | 47 Entrants	267 Apps | 159 Admits | 44 Entrants	234 Apps | 138 Admits | 51 Entrants	174 Apps | 105 Admits | 28 Entrants	184 Apps | 107 Admits | 39 Entrants
PT MBA	46 Apps | 30 Admits | 17 Entrants	36 Apps | 30 Admits | 16 Entrants	55 Apps | 45 Admits | 27 Entrants	61 Apps | 57 Admits | 39 Entrants	46 Apps | 41 Admits | 24 Entrants

GRE & GMAT SCORE AVERAGES IN THE USF MBA, 2019-2023

Program	FALL 2023	FALL 2022	FALL 2021	FALL 2020	FALL 2019
FT MBA	650 GMAT | 165 Q – 167 V	617 GMAT | 156 Q – 152 V	575 GMAT | 153 Q – 164 V	564 GMAT | 151 Q – 152 V	571 GMAT | 152 Q – 151 V
PT MBA	N/A GMAT /  167 Q – 164 V	N/A GMAT | 130 Q – 169 V	560 GMAT | 168 Q – 151 V	614 GMAT | 154 Q – 153 V	513 GMAT | 152 Q – 154 V

USF UNDERGRAD MILITARY & FIRST-GEN STUDENTS, 2019-2023

USF	FALL 2023	FALL 2022	FALL 2021	FALL 2020	FALL 2019
Students	Veterans – 41 (3.6%) | First Generation – 374 (32.7%)	Veterans – 41 (3.3%) | First Generation – 362 (29%)	Veterans – 35 (2.6%) | First Generation – 427 (31.4%)	Veterans – 40 (2.8%) | First Generation – 491 (34.6%)	Veterans – 34 (2%) | First Generation – 640 (37.2%)

‘IMPACT AREAS’: BENEFITS TO CURRICULA, RESEARCH & SERVICE

Paradigm shift? USF’s Schools of Management are in the midst of what amounts to a paradigm overhaul. At a school with a long and storied history — and the entrenched interests that come with it — Otgo is fulfilling her mission to an extent no one could have expected. Perhaps even herself.

“I think what’s encouraging is the impact areas: Faculty are getting together from different disciplines,” Otgo says. “They’re working even with faculty from the College of Arts and Sciences — very interdisciplinary. And we’re seeing closer connections between curricular development, research, and service areas. For example, in sustainable management education, the faculty lead is Marco Tavanti, he’s an expert in sustainability and sustainable business in general. And it used to be that he was doing that work for his research. His teaching was public administration, non-profit management. But now because he’s leading this impact area, he’s working with other faculty and students on this, so his impact has broadened within the school. And a new program, the Master’s in Management in Social Impact, was largely designed by Marco as well. So it’s bringing together and leveraging these talents or resources that we had, and expanding the impact of it.”

The experiment has only begun, but she’s encouraged by the progress she’s seen so far at both the graduate and undergraduate levels in the school’s three impact areas.

“So I would say the ‘impact area,’ since it’s kind of a new thing and then we are giving resources around it, there are more upsides than challenges,” she says. “The undergrad faculty leads part is, relatively speaking, more challenging because faculty are still comparing it with department chairs, and they’re still somewhat reminiscent of the former department walls. So I think it will take time to really embrace the opportunities and possibilities with the new structure. Faculty are starting. Some get it completely, some are kind of confused.”

See page 3 for a Q&A with Dean Otgo and Courtney Masterson, associate dean of faculty, research and impact.