On The Rise: How Marquette’s B-School Is Making A Name For Itself, In The Midwest & Beyond

In February 2020, the unthinkable happened at Marquette University: Joe Daniels, the James H. Keyes dean of the College of Business Administration, was killed crossing the street near campus. He had been elevated to the top job just a few weeks earlier.

The sudden and tragic loss of a dean would have been enough to put any business school on its heels, disrupting the kind of big plans that a new leader always brings with them. That was even more the case at Marquette, a Jesuit B-school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where Daniels was, in the words of the school’s president, “a campus fixture for more than 30 years”: professor, department chair, adviser, friend.

“It was devastating — sudden and unexpected,” says Karen Rinehart, currently assistant dean of graduate programs at Marquette’s COBA. “He had previously served as interim dean, and we had gone through the dean search process and he had been selected and was just in his first few weeks in that role. It really felt like it was a moment of takeoff and an on-ramp, and to so quickly have that change, it was really hard.”

HOW MARQUETTE’S B-SCHOOL FOUND ITS NEW DEAN

Marquette named Tim Hanley, a longtime member of the College of Business Administration Dean’s Advisory Council, as acting dean, with a plan to begin a search in summer 2020. But just a few weeks after Daniels’ death, the coronavirus pandemic hit, and the whole world stopped completely.

Hanley stayed on through 2021, intending to guide the school through a search process in summer 2022 that would end with a new, permanent dean taking office in summer 2023. But the search became a “failed search,” Rinehart says, and the school pushed back finding its next leader for a year.

Finally, in December 2023, Marquette found its next B-school dean — and in the end it didn’t have to look very far. Andrew DeGuire is a Milwaukee favorite son, having earned his BA in economics from Marquette in 1993. He met his future wife on the Marquette campus. His father Frank was a dean of the law school. His adviser was none other than Joe Daniels, the future dean of the B-school.

After earning a master’s in international economics and finance from Brandeis University in 1995 (with stops along the way at Copenhagen Business School and London School of Economics), DeGuire returned to Milwaukee in 2002 to work for Johnson Controls, an industrial machinery manufacturing firm, where he filled various roles for a dozen years including vice president of strategy and acquisitions and vice president of business development and global growth. In 2018, DeGuire joined Fortune 500 insurance and brokerage firm Northwestern Mutual, where he soon became vice president of corporate strategy. It was in this position that he started hiring Marquette interns and employees and learned what kind of graduate the school was producing — in a word, outstanding. In 2022, DeGuire joined the COBA Leadership Council tasked with finding a permanent dean for the B-school; after the failed search, for the next go-round he threw his hat in the ring and won the James H. Keyes deanship in mid-2023. He officially started in the role in July 2024.

DeGuire is unusual in that he has never taught in a B-school classroom. But his extensive experience in industry, and his oversight of actual Marquette grads in the workplace, is a unique strength, Rinehart tells Poets&Quants.

“As a business school, we seek to prioritize applied learning: What are the actual current and future needs of business?” she says. “That’s what we’re seeking to help students be prepared for — and that’s what Dean DeGuire is a leader in.”

A NEW PATHWAY TO A STEM MBA

Marquette’s College of Business Administration has 1,743 undergrads this fall, and the Graduate School of Management has 410 students. Of the latter, the MBA program — which can be full- or part-time, campus-based, online, or blended — has 173 students. The online MBA has another 84.

Ranked 73rd in U.S. News‘ most recent ranking of part-time programs and 31st in finance in the magazine’s specialization rankings, Marquette’s MBA this fall added a new and important wrinkle: a pathway to make the degree STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math). Students admitted to either the MBA or OMBA can opt for the Business and Managerial Analytics specialization; international students who graduate with the STEM degree qualify for up to three years of visa-free employment in the U.S.

That last point is key: Once a strong Midwest draw for international students, Marquette’s COBA saw its foreign student population severely drained by Covid-19, and it has yet to recover. Through the STEM MBA and other efforts, Rinehart says, the school is hoping to bring them back.

‘THERE’S SOMETHING SPECIAL ABOUT A MARQUETTE GRAD’

STEM is just one of many exciting things happening at Marquette, which is still enjoying a honeymoon in its new $70 million building, the state-of-the-art Dr. E. J. And Margaret O’Brien Hall that opened in 2023. In May 2024, donors made a major gift to launch the Vieth Institute for Real Estate Leadership; in early summer, Marquette was rewarded for the hard work of its faculty and Center for Supply Chain Management with record success in the biennial Gartner Supply Chain Ranking, placing 10th in the undergrad ranking and seventh on the graduate list. And in July, Fortune named the school’s Executive MBA 31st best in the U.S.

Dean DeGuire, noting “the intentionality over the last five and 10 years of putting us at these intersections of important trends and important connections to our constituents,” tells P&Q that he may be most excited about fulfilling Marquette’s simple Jesuit mission: the continued matriculation of graduates from both the undergrad and grad side who rival anyone for their critical thinking skills, preparedness to excel, and ethical fortitude — all of which he saw firsthand at Northwestern Mutual.

“That’s one of the things that I experienced, and what my company experienced: There’s something special about a Marquette grad, both undergraduate and graduate, because they’ve got excellent technical skills but they also learn the good traits of leadership that make them both leaders who do the right thing and who do it in a very human way,” DeGuire says.

“Marquette used to describe itself as a ‘hidden gem.’ And I would always challenge that. It’s like, ‘Why are we hidden?’ I think really we are at an inflection point, as we’re really now starting to take advantage of the team that is here, the place that we’ve got, the connections that we’ve got, and as we now start to scale. We have nationally ranked top 25 or top 10 programs, middle of the city, state-of-the-art capabilities, incredibly capable faculty. We have all the ingredients to be playing consistently within the top 50, but not because we care about that, but because the people here have the mission and focus and capabilities that the rankings will just fall out because we see what’s needed in the business world, and what’s needed and more for leadership in business.

“We’ve been around since 1881 for a reason, and we’re seeing a bright path ahead of us that combines the new with what’s made Marquette great all along.”

See the next page for Poets&Quants’ interview with Marquette College of Business Dean Andrew DeGuire.