Texas A&M’s Nate Sharp Says Mays Won’t Be Content Until It’s America’s No. 1 Public B-School

ENGINEERS WHO WANT TO LEAD

Sharp is just as bullish on the Anthony Bahr ‘91 Engineering MBA. Texas A&M’s College of Engineering enrolls roughly 25,000 students, Sharp says, and its own research found that 55% to 60% of them planned to start in technical roles but hoped eventually to lead companies.

The program lets those students go straight from their engineering bachelor’s degree into a Mays MBA, with no GMAT required but a mandatory internship at a major company. Mays screens heavily for interpersonal skills, emotional intelligence and executive presence. The engineering college now pitches the program to high school students it recruits.

The first class graduated in August with a 95% placement rate on graduation day, Sharp says. One current student he met at a recruiting event the night before the interview had a $110,000 offer with a $15,000 signing bonus. A former student landed what he called his dream job, at AMD in Silicon Valley.

“It’s a brand-new program,” Sharp says. “I think it’s going to grow tremendously. The sky’s the limit there.”

The portfolio keeps expanding. Earlier this month, Mays launched an MS in Sport Business Analytics, its first program designed specifically for the sport industry, which is enrolling for Summer 2027.

REAL FOUNDERS, NOT POLISHED PITCHES

Entrepreneurship may be where Mays is changing fastest. In February, the school formally launched its Center for Applied Entrepreneurship and Innovation, led by Levi Belnap, an HBS MBA and serial founder whom Sharp describes as perhaps the unlikeliest person ever to take a job in higher education.

“What has happened in just one year of his leadership is just blowing everybody away,” Sharp says.

The center’s signature event, the AI Venture Velocity Challenge, threw out the traditional business plan competition. Instead of rewarding the slickest pitch deck, it asked student founders to document their real progress using AI to test assumptions and learn faster. Sharp, Belnap and Senior Associate Dean Shrihari Sridhar laid out the thinking in a May op-ed for Poets&Quants, arguing that business schools must learn faster in the AI era.

The challenge drew 531 teams from 160 colleges and universities. Of those, 248 submitted experimentation logs, 27 reached the semifinals and 12 advanced to the finals in College Station. The winners, a team of UC Berkeley chemical engineering undergraduates, took home $100,000 – and have since been accepted into Y Combinator, according to Sharp.

“This was real entrepreneurship,” he says. “This was not an idea that we dreamed up with my roommates last night. These were real companies with real progress.”

Mays also brought Creative Destruction Lab, the venture program born at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School, to Texas in fall 2025, making it one of three current U.S. CDL sites, alongside UW Foster in Seattle and the Wisconsin School of Business. CDL Texas runs energy and space streams, the latter tied to Texas A&M’s new Space Institute in Houston. Former students mentor the startups, and Mays students work alongside founders in six-week sprints, Sharp says.

“I can’t tell you the number of people who have said to me, ‘I don’t even recognize Mays,’” Sharp says. “‘When did you guys become so innovative, so forward-thinking?’”

THE UNGLAMOROUS PATH TO GENERATIONAL WEALTH

Then there’s entrepreneurship through acquisition, an area Sharp wants to own. Mays held its first ETA forum in September – invitation-only and, by his account, possibly the biggest event the school has ever staged.

“There is no better place in America to do entrepreneurship through acquisition than the state of Texas,” he says.

The opportunity, Sharp argues, lies in blue-collar, decidedly unglamorous small businesses founded 50 or 75 years ago whose owners are now ready to retire – companies that can be highly profitable but that private equity often overlooks. He points to forum speakers like a Dell retiree who bought a residential fence company and turned it into generational wealth for his family. Another speaker started a heavy equipment rental business with a single tractor, a $995 monthly payment and $2,000 in monthly rental revenue, and built it into a company that sold for $300 million last year.

ALL IN ON AI

On artificial intelligence, Sharp recalls one visit on his 12-dean tour in sharp relief. He asked a dean at a school in a tech-heavy region what the school was doing about AI. The answer was wait-and-see.

“We just said, wow, we’re totally opposite,” Sharp says. “We think we’ve got to get ahead of this as fast as we can.”

Mays named its first assistant dean for AI, and Sharp says it became the first college at Texas A&M to launch an AI minor. The five-course AI in Business minor was oversubscribed as soon as it opened a year ago, he says. Mays also offers a Flex Online AI in Business program. Sharp says the school has bought enterprise AI licenses for faculty and staff while complying with federal student privacy rules, and runs an internal lab building tools for grading, academic advising and workflows.

Rather than threatening students who use AI, Sharp says, faculty are modeling how to use it well. Mays now builds its own interactive case studies in partnership with Texas companies, often led by its own graduates. Mays helps the companies with their AI transformations, and in return it gets data and insight for cases it doesn’t have to license from Harvard.

Sharp also rejects the idea that AI will put universities out of business.

“The experience that students have when they come to a campus like this cannot be replicated by any stretch of the imagination,” he says. “It will not – I don’t feel threatened by it. We’re going to have to adapt, but it’s not going to shut us down.”

As an accounting scholar, Sharp acknowledges entry-level accounting jobs are at risk. But he isn’t convinced they’re more vulnerable than entry-level roles in consulting, law or banking, and he notes that accounting has weathered waves of offshoring and automation before.

“Accounting, even as a profession, is very relationship-based,” he says.

AI will take over many day-to-day tasks, Sharp acknowledges, but that’s true across business, not just in accounting. Mays’ message to students is to master the tools and double down on what machines can’t do.

“There are certain things that AI is going to do extremely well, and you better be proficient in how to use AI to do all of that,” he says. “And then we’ve got to make you better and stronger at the uniquely human elements – what you can bring to a business that cannot be replaced by AI.”

MOMENTUM AMID TURBULENCE

Mays’ rise has come during one of the most turbulent stretches in Texas A&M’s recent history. President Mark Welsh resigned in September 2025 after a viral classroom video and the firing of a professor. Tommy Williams served as interim president from October until Susan Ballabina took office as the university’s 28th president in May 2026.

In November 2025, the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents unanimously required campus presidents to sign off on courses that could be seen as advocating race or gender ideology or addressing sexual orientation or gender identity. Regents also barred faculty from teaching material inconsistent with approved syllabi, with enforcement beginning in spring 2026. Hundreds of students, faculty and alumni rallied against the policy in January.

WHO MAYS IS CHASING

So which schools does Sharp measure Mays against? He names Michigan Ross first, praising Dean Sharon Matusik, who was recently renewed for a second term. He also cites UNC Kenan-Flagler and Dean Mary Margaret Frank, Indiana Kelley and Dean Patrick Hopkins, and Berkeley Haas and Dean Jenny Chatman.

He pointedly leaves one school off the list – the one 90 minutes down the road.

“There’s enough competition between the two of us,” Sharp says. “But there’s a lot about McCombs that we admire as well, and a lot that I would like to learn from them.”

STEPPING OUT OF THE SHADOW

The biggest misconception about Mays, Sharp says, comes from history. As Texas’ land-grant university, with deep roots in agriculture and engineering, Texas A&M has long lived somewhat in UT Austin’s shadow. That has fed a perception that Mays is a regional school without the heft of business schools elsewhere.

“It couldn’t be further from the truth,” he says.

His evidence: the No. 1 full-time MBA and No. 1 executive MBA in Texas, the No. 2 public MS in Finance in the country and four undergraduate departments in the public top 10. But what he really wants people to understand is the mood inside the building.

“I have never worked anywhere in my life where there’s this pervasive feeling of ambition in every office,” Sharp says.

“When we say No. 1 public, it’s not just a talking point. It’s not a wish. It’s something that we believe is going to happen.”

DON’T MISS THE 100 BEST & BRIGHTEST MBAs: CLASS OF 2026 and 2026 BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK MBA RANKING: STANFORD DOMINATES, VIRGINIA DARDEN RISES

© Copyright 2026 Poets&Quants. All rights reserved. This article may not be republished, rewritten or otherwise distributed without written permission. To reprint or license this article or any content from Poets&Quants, please submit your request HERE.