Poets&Quants’ 2026 MBA Program of the Year: WashU Olin

As Mike Mazzeo talks, 400 people are filling the auditorium a few floors below his office for Olin’s annual wealth and asset management conference, a crowd of St. Louis business leaders, faculty, and students he can nearly hear from two floors up. It is, he says, a living illustration of the strategy that just won Washington University’s Olin Business School one of Poets&Quants’ top annual awards: MBA Program of the Year.

Olin earns the 2026 honor not for chasing scale, but for doing close to the opposite: rebuilding the MBA around a radically individualized model and leaning into being small – even as so many of its peers reach for size.

Mazzeo came to that conviction from inside the big-school world. He taught strategy at Northwestern’s Kellogg School for 25 years before becoming Olin’s dean, and he is blunt that he did not come to St. Louis to import the playbook. 

“The correct answer to any strategic question is, it depends,” he tells P&Q. “The idea of importing a strategy from Kellogg to Olin would just be a recipe for failure.”

LIKE ‘A LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE FOR YOUR MBA’

What it depends on, he says, is scale. The top-10 programs are built, deliberately, around large cohorts and the complementary strengths that scale unlocks. Everyone else is small, and Olin’s two-year-old strategic plan started from a simple question: how do you make being small an advantage rather than an apology? 

It is a question close to Mazzeo’s own scholarship on small and medium-sized firms, and to a lesson from a 2014 book he co-authored: If you’re small, own it.

Owning it meant rebuilding the curriculum. Olin trimmed its core so that roughly 60% of the program is now electives that students can begin choosing in their first year. Touching the core is what Mazzeo calls one of the genuine third rails between a dean and the faculty, hard to do without creating losers, and he credits a governance model in which faculty themselves drove the change.

The payoff is a degree that can bend to one student at a time. An experiential course that once needed 20 students to run can now be built for a handful – or even one.

“One of our faculty members said it’ll be kind of like going to a liberal arts college to get your MBA,” Mazzeo says. “That analogy stuck with me.”

In practice, that looks like independent studies and Oxford-style tutorials, a small group or a single student working a live, applied project with a company, and matched on purpose. Not just any project for general experience, he says, but a company in the specific industry a student is aiming for.

THE BUSINESS OF HEALTH: ‘THAT SPACE IS OPEN’

The clearest bet to come out of the freed-up curriculum is health. Olin is leaning on assets most B-schools can only envy, a top-tier medical school on the same campus and a new School of Public Health that opened in early 2025, to build an identity around not just healthcare management but the business of keeping people well.

“There really is no business school you can say is known for health the way Kellogg is known for marketing or Wharton is known for finance,” Mazzeo says. “That space is open, and we have the right to win in it.”

It is also a financial hedge. With market forces pulling international enrollment down across the industry, Mazzeo notes, health tends to draw more domestic students, making the school’s revenue base more resilient. The bet is strategic and existential at once.

SMALL BY DESIGN

The market has tested the thesis in both directions. Two cycles ago, applications to WashU Olin jumped nearly 100% and the class grew by about a quarter in a single year. The most recent cycle was softer, as it was soft for nearly everyone, and Olin’s class (for which details have not officially been published) came in smaller; but Mazzeo says it is the strongest it has ever been on scores and grades.

“If you’re small by design, you want to make sure it’s elite (students) coming in,” he says. “We’re not going to chase a little more tuition if it means our graduates aren’t these outstanding people who fit the system we’ve designed.”

International student enrollment is down, as it is down in most places in the U.S. Mazzeo is candid that that decline may be the new normal, and argues Olin is now built to withstand it in a way it wasn’t three years ago.

The resilience is by design, not luck. Because Olin had already committed to being small and selective, it doesn’t have to lean on large international cohorts to fill seats or hit a budget number – exposure that has left bigger programs scrambling as the pipeline tightens. The pivot toward health compounds the advantage, steering the school toward an industry that draws more domestic students and a more stable revenue base. And the premium on an individualized, relationship-driven education is a harder sell to pure volume, which means the model naturally skews toward the kind of applicant Olin most wants and least wants to lose.

Put together, a strategy Mazzeo built for other reasons – to own being small – turned out to be an insurance policy against exactly the disruption now reshaping the industry.

PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE

AI, Mazzeo argues, fits the individualized model almost too neatly. It starts with faculty on the leading edge, among them Dennis Zhang, an operations and marketing professor who came out of Google and studies how companies and AI actually work together. Mazzeo says Zhang spent a recent sabbatical as a fellow at OpenAI, and that research this current flows straight into the classroom.

He offers a telling anecdote. When Olin ran an AI elective in both fall and spring, fall enrollment lagged, and the reason surprised him: students wanted the spring section because they trusted the faculty to update it, and wanted the latest version right before graduating.

The deeper point is about judgment. As more of Olin’s applied company projects involve AI, students are forced to use it on real problems. Last year, according to the school’s Center for Experiential Learning, 60 students logged more than 2,250 hours on AI-focused experiential projects. Mazzeo splits that work into two parts, the tools and the application.

“The tools, knowing how to write a prompt, that’s some combination of table stakes and not that hard,” he says. “The challenging part is all the applications.” A model built on small, applied, repeated projects, he argues, is exactly how students get good at that, through practice, practice, practice.

WHAT CAN’T BE COPIED

Other B-school deans are studying what Olin has done, and Mazzeo is frank about what travels and what doesn’t. He would never try to run this model at a school the size of Kellogg, he says. Three things unique to Olin make it hard to copy: a faculty strong enough to teach this way and invested enough to care; St. Louis’s unusually dense network of companies run by Olin MBAs, from Emerson to Nestlé Purina to Enterprise Rent-A-Car to the construction firm Clayco; and a decades-long track record of outcomes that lets him point students at real careers and say, “This is how it gets built.”

That network produces names. Mazzeo, speaking in early October, would soon fly to Montana to see Dave Moellenhoff, a Salesforce co-founder and Olin MBA; he boasts about current students as well, such as second-year Justin Traenkle, whose startup has been collecting honors on the way to a national startup competition final.

On outcomes, Mazzeo doesn’t dress up a hard year. While Olin’s 2026 MBA employment report has yet to be released, the dean says hiring was roughly flat against last year, though salaries ticked up. But the softness landed hardest on international students, and Olin has had to put extra work into courting employers still open to recruiting them. 

That extra work is exactly the kind of thing a small program is built to do. At a school graduating hundreds, individually chasing down employers still open to international hires, or tracking every unplaced student week by week, would be impractical. At Olin’s scale, it’s just how the place runs. To illustrate the point Mazzeo turns his laptop, directing the camera to show a whiteboard behind his desk on which every member of the Class of 2026 is named with a photo; next to each is written by hand in blue ink a job offer – written as the email arrives. Olin’s careers team has a meeting every couple of weeks to go through those still searching.

“That’s not only what we can do at Olin, that’s what we do at Olin,” Mazzeo says. “We are invested in every single student in a deep way.”

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