The Dean’s Impossible Job: Why B-Schools Are Trying To Lead Through A Storm With One Hand On The Exit Door

Business schools are being asked to prepare leaders for the most unpredictable business environment in decades. AI is changing work faster than course committees can revise syllabi. Geopolitical fractures are reshaping supply chains and student mobility. Employers are asking harder questions about the value of an MBA. Families are questioning tuition. Governments are changing visa, funding, and diversity rules. Rankings continue to reward some things, ignore others, and occasionally change the game while everyone is still playing it.

At precisely this moment, business schools themselves are finding it harder to lead.

The modern business school dean is expected to be a strategist, fundraiser, faculty diplomat, enrollment manager, crisis communicator, accreditation expert, technology translator, employer ambassador, and occasional political shock absorber. The old image of a senior professor taking on the deanship as a final act of academic service has become badly outdated. Today, the role resembles an executive pressure cooker with a faculty senate attached.

That would be manageable if the environment were stable. It is not.

In a 2025 survey of roughly 75 business school deans conducted by Poets&Quants with the University of Miami Herbert Business School, 88% identified AI and technology integration as the most important emerging trend for the next five to ten years. At the same time, 86% said uncertainty over visa and immigration policy was already affecting their schools, while 65% flagged potential changes to U.S. Optional Practical Training rules as a significant concern.

The job of leading a business school has never been simple. The difference now is that nearly every important variable is moving at the same time.

THE DEAN IS NOW RUNNING 5 BUSINESSES AT ONCE

A dean must still protect academic quality, recruit faculty, support research, maintain accreditation, build industry relationships, and ensure students graduate with meaningful career outcomes. But those core responsibilities now sit alongside several new demands.

The first is the AI challenge. Schools must decide what students should learn when AI can draft a memo, analyse a market, write code, build a presentation, and produce a passable strategy recommendation in seconds. The answer is not simply to add another elective called “AI for Managers.” Business schools must rethink assessment, curriculum, ethics, data fluency, and the role of human judgment.

The second is enrollment. The coming demographic decline in traditional college-age populations was identified by 34% of surveyed deans as the major threat facing business education. Competition from alternative credentials such as certificates and bootcamps was next at 26%, followed by high tuition and concerns about value at 24%.

The third is international mobility. For decades, many leading business schools built their financial and intellectual models around the flow of international students. That model now faces pressure from visa uncertainty, shifting immigration policies, slowing demand in some markets, and the very reasonable question students increasingly ask: “Will this degree help me build a career where I want to live?”

The fourth is financial sustainability. Many business schools are expected to generate revenue not only for themselves but also for their wider universities. This can lead to a difficult temptation: increase class sizes, launch programs quickly, and chase short-term revenue before asking whether the offerings genuinely strengthen the school’s long-term reputation.

The fifth is institutional politics. Deans must align faculty priorities with university strategy, navigate government intervention, address public debates over higher education, and protect their institutions’ credibility. A dean can be asked to innovate boldly on Monday, reduce spending on Tuesday, reassure faculty on Wednesday, satisfy accreditation reviewers on Thursday, and explain rankings on Friday.

That is not one job. It is five jobs wearing the same name tag.

THE IRONY: SCHOOLS TEACH LEADERSHIP WHILE STRUGGLING TO RETAIN LEADERS

The problem is not that deans are unwilling to lead. It is that the role has become increasingly difficult to sustain.

AACSB’s 2024 global report, drawing on responses from 434 deans and 36 interim deans across 64 countries, found that only 8% of deans felt they had sufficient time for professional development. More than half said they had little or no time for it. That is a troubling statistic. We ask deans to lead transformation, but many have little time to step back, learn, reflect, or prepare for the transformation themselves.

The leadership pipeline is also thin. AACSB found that only 29% of senior business school administrators expressed interest in becoming a dean. The reasons are unsurprising: fundraising demands, faculty and staff management, political pressure, the sacrifice of research time, and what some respondents described as an increasingly turbulent or “brutal job.”

Meanwhile, 61% of current deans are in their first deanship. New leaders bring energy, fresh ideas, and willingness to act. But they also enter a role that now requires competence across finance, fundraising, faculty governance, crisis management, accreditation, recruitment, politics, technology, and brand strategy—often with little transition time.

This creates a quiet but serious institutional risk. When leadership roles turn over faster than strategy cycles, schools lose continuity. When every new dean begins by reassessing priorities, reorganising teams, and revisiting plans, faculty can become exhausted by constant “new directions.” The institution begins to confuse activity with progress.

ACCREDITATION DOES NOT MOVE AT THE SPEED OF TURNOVER

Business schools are judged over long horizons. Accreditation cycles typically require years of evidence: learning assurance, faculty qualifications, curriculum improvement, societal impact, employer engagement, and strategic progress. These are not projects that can be completed between one leadership announcement and the next.

Yet many deans inherit plans they did not create, reporting systems they did not design, and accreditation commitments they must defend almost immediately. If leadership changes in the middle of an accreditation or strategic cycle, the incoming dean must either continue a predecessor’s agenda or risk restarting the institution’s direction yet again.

Neither option is easy.

The deeper issue is not whether a dean stays forever. Institutions need renewal. The issue is whether the school has enough governance discipline to make strategy survive individuals. A business school should not lose its institutional memory every time a dean changes. It should have a clear academic identity, transparent strategic priorities, capable associate deans, stable faculty leadership, and succession plans that prevent every transition from becoming a reinvention.

In other words, schools need to practice the continuity planning they advise family businesses and corporations to adopt.

WHEN PRICE, OUTCOMES & TRUST DRIFT APART

The recent turmoil at USC Marshall offers a public reminder of how quickly leadership pressure can become institutional crisis.

In August 2026, Poets&Quants reported that Marshall’s full-time MBA applications fell from 3,198 to 1,914 in one year, a decline of 40.2%. Its acceptance rate increased from 23.1% to 31.3%, while the incoming class declined from 211 students to 176.

At the same time, annual tuition rose from $62,760 in 2021 to $83,853 in 2025, an increase of 33.6%, the steepest among the peer group cited in the analysis. Employment outcomes also weakened: the share of graduates employed within three months fell from 97% for the Class of 2023 to 71% for the Class of 2025, while average salary declined from $150,314 to $142,184.

This is not an argument that one dean alone causes every institutional outcome. Employment markets are cyclical. MBA demand is volatile. Universities have complex governance structures, and no dean controls tuition, employer demand, rankings, admissions, or faculty sentiment alone.

But the larger lesson is clear: when pricing, student outcomes, market confidence, and faculty trust move in opposite directions, leadership becomes extremely fragile. A business school cannot build its reputation on price increases and brand promises alone. It must show credible value in learning, careers, networks, and long-term opportunity.

That is now the basic contract with students.

RANKINGS ARE A COMPASS, NOT A CONSTITUTION

Rankings remain powerful because they simplify difficult decisions. Students use them. Employers notice them. Boards watch them. Donors mention them. Deans cannot pretend otherwise.

In the Poets&Quants dean survey, roughly four in ten respondents said rankings and reputation were the strongest influences on public perceptions of business-school quality. Employer relationships and placement outcomes came next, followed by alumni success and engagement.

But rankings make a poor substitute for institutional strategy.

A school that chases every ranking metric can end up making decisions that improve a table but weaken the educational experience. It may over-prioritise selective admissions at the expense of access, short-term salary metrics at the expense of mission, or publication lists at the expense of relevant scholarship. It may also become vulnerable when ranking methodologies change or conflict with local regulation.

The healthiest schools use rankings as information, not instruction. They track the data. They understand the market. But they do not allow an external scorecard to determine every academic choice.

A dean needs the courage to say: “This may not improve next year’s ranking, but it improves the school.”

That is difficult when the board is watching the ranking.

WHAT BOARDS & UNIVERSITIES MUST CHANGE 

The answer is not to ask deans to work harder. Most already are.

The answer is to redesign the leadership system around them.

First, universities should build longer strategic horizons. A dean should be assessed against a realistic multi-year mandate, not against the expectation of instant transformation. Major changes in curriculum, faculty culture, research quality, employer confidence, and student outcomes take time.

Second, boards and university leaders should invest in succession planning. Every school needs capable associate deans, program leaders, faculty committees, and professional staff who can preserve continuity during transitions. The dean cannot be the only person who understands the strategy.

Third, institutions should reduce the number of contradictory demands placed on deans. A school cannot simultaneously be told to grow enrollment, reduce costs, lower tuition, increase faculty hiring, expand research, improve rankings, protect access, and transform every curriculum without trade-offs. Strategic leadership begins with choosing which trade-offs the institution is willing to make.

Fourth, business schools should diversify their models thoughtfully. More than eight in ten deans in the Poets&Quantssurvey said they were expanding online or hybrid offerings; 68% were launching certificate programs; 64% were developing new corporate partnerships; and 61% were introducing interdisciplinary programs. These are sensible responses, but only if they emerge from a clear academic strategy rather than panic-driven program proliferation.

Finally, schools must protect the human side of leadership. Faculty are not simply resources to be allocated. Students are not just enrollment targets. Professional staff cannot carry endless change without support. Deans need mentoring, peer networks, executive-development opportunities, and enough space to think beyond the next crisis.

THE LEADERSHIP TEST BUSINESS SCHOOLS CANNOT AVOID

Business schools exist to prepare leaders for uncertainty. They teach resilience, adaptation, strategy, ethics, systems thinking, and long-term decision-making.

Now they must apply those lessons to themselves.

The real crisis is not that business-school leadership has become difficult. Leadership was always difficult. The crisis is that institutions are expecting deans to navigate unprecedented disruption with short tenures, fragmented authority, unstable revenue models, and little time to build the capacity required for change.

The dean of the future cannot be only a fundraiser, academic, marketer, or administrator. The role now requires a systems leader—someone who can connect technology, talent, global mobility, financial sustainability, curriculum, reputation, and institutional purpose.

But even the best systems leader cannot succeed alone.

If universities want business schools capable of producing future-ready managers, they must first create leadership structures capable of sustaining the leaders already inside them.

Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Woxsen University or its partners.

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Dr. Hemachandran Kis Director of the AI Research Centre at Woxsen University in Hyderabad, India. Dr. Raul Villamarín Rodríguez is Vice President of Woxsen.

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