The P&Q Interview: Leila Alinaghian On UCL’s Record Growth & New Flagship Master’s

It has been another year of record expansion for the UCL School of Management, which launches its new flagship master’s program next year – its latest in a burgeoning menu of courses.

“At a time when many business schools are rationalizing their portfolios, UCL School of Management is moving in the other direction,” says its director of postgraduate programs, Leila Alinaghian.

Across the UK, business schools have been squeezed by budgetary pressures even as tightened visa policies have made it harder for international students to move to the island nation. But from the UCL b-school’s campus in the highest floors of a Canary Wharf skyscraper, those forces feel far away.

Having started its business school on level 38 back in 2015, the UCL now occupies four floors – and is adding another two in the next couple years. If its recent addition of courses is any evidence, the school is having no trouble attracting more students. By 2027, it expects to have added 650 students since its 2024-25 intake, when its growth spurt began.

A ‘NEW FLAGSHIP’ MASTER’S PROGRAM

Many of its recent additions relate to its launch of more specialized analytics and technology-related programs. Since 2025, UCL’s b-school has launched seven new degrees – an MSc Finance with Data Science; MSc Marketing Science; MSc People Analytics and Human-Centred Management; MSc Strategic Accounting and Finance; MSc Digital Innovation; MSc Creativity, Innovation and Leadership; and a joint program, the MSc Law and Finance.

“We are expanding, but this is not growth for growth’s sake,” Alinaghian insists. “Our portfolio is developing around a very clear view of what management education needs to look like as technology, AI and data reshape organizations, industries and careers.”

Next year, the school will launch its “new flagship,” the MSc Management: Strategy, Finance and Technology, with 60 to 80 students. The course is based on the idea that “strategy cannot realistically be separated from questions about capital, data, AI, platforms or technological transformation,” says Alinaghian.

She says the course was built by “designing from the destination backwards” – that is, starting with input from industry partners.

“We asked what kind of professional we want a student to be able to become, what kinds of complex situations they should be able to handle and what combination of academic knowledge, applied experience and human capabilities will get them there,” says Alinaghian. “We then work backwards from those questions to the curriculum, the learning experiences and ultimately, the structure of the program.”

While this sounds intuitive, it differs from a more “traditional approach to program design,” where faculty start from “established disciplinary boundaries” in areas such as strategy and finance, she explains. The teaching is also meant to match the challenges graduates encounter in the real world, where problems “rarely arrive neatly packaged.”

Poets&Quants spoke with Alinaghian before the start of UCL’s autumn semester.

UCL is a relatively young business school. How much has that shaped its ability to launch these new degrees?

Being a relatively young school gives us some advantages: agility, fewer legacy structures and the ability to build programs around where business is going rather than where it has been. But that is only part of the explanation. The more fundamental point is that analytics and technology are not recent additions to a traditional business-school model at UCL; they run deep in the school’s intellectual identity and in the way our portfolio has developed. You can see that in the specialized MSc portfolio. Business Analytics sits alongside programs such as People Analytics, Marketing Science and Finance with Data Science. These are not conventional degrees with an AI or data module added to them. They reflect a much deeper integration of management questions with analytical and technological capability.

How does that deeper integration look?

The important shift is from teaching technology as a subject to teaching management in a world shaped by technology. As AI takes on more analytical and execution-oriented work, the premium increasingly shifts towards judgement, systems thinking, creativity, ethical reasoning, communication, interdisciplinary collaboration and leadership under uncertainty. Our view is that tomorrow’s graduates need both technological fluency and the ability to exercise human judgement around it.

How does the new flagship fit into the picture?

Our new flagship MSc Management: Strategy, Finance and Technology is perhaps the clearest expression of that philosophy. We deliberately bring strategy, finance and technology together because that is how major business decisions are increasingly made. Strategy cannot realistically be separated from questions about capital, data, AI, platforms or technological transformation. The program therefore develops integrated strategic, financial and technological expertise rather than treating these as separate disciplinary silos.

What does interdisciplinarity mean in practice for this program?

Interdisciplinarity for us is not simply about students taking electives from different subject areas; it is about learning to solve problems through several lenses at once. That is why the new MSc starts with foundations in strategy, finance and analytics and then asks students to apply them to complex business challenges. Its compulsory core includes Accounting and Finance, Strategy and Value Creation, and Business Analytics and Data Storytelling.

You’ve also been working on experiences for students outside the classroom. Tell us about that?

A second part of the story is that we are trying to reduce the distance between the classroom and professional practice. The new MSc is deliberately designed around immersive experiences: sector Expeditions, live business challenges, a project-based Placement and a month-long Global Economy and Business Ecosystem Immersion. The objective is not merely to teach students what organizations do, but to recreate some of the ambiguity, pace and interconnectedness of real professional work.

In what ways do businesses engage with your curriculum?

We think about engagement with organizations as a spectrum rather than simply inviting executives to give guest lectures. At one level there is access and engagement; at the next, companies co-design, co-deliver and co-evaluate elements of education; and at the deepest level, universities and organizations work together on questions such as how talent and professional capability themselves need to change. This can include credit-bearing corporate challenges and placements, practice advisory boards and, ultimately, co-created programs and thought leadership. That matters because the relationship between business schools and employers needs to move beyond the old ‘educate, then recruit’ model. AI is changing jobs quickly enough that education, professional development and lifelong learning are becoming much more connected. Business schools have an opportunity to work with organizations not only to supply talent, but also to help define the capabilities that future professionals will need. Our work on professional capability is explicitly exploring that agenda.

What’s the international dimension to these courses?

The new MSc includes a four-week, credit-bearing immersion in an international business hub, and we are developing similar immersive experiences across the portfolio. The ambition is to connect London with major business ecosystems in both Europe and Asia, helping students become comfortable moving between different markets, institutions and ways of doing business. This sits well with our broader ambition to bridge East and West.

How do the new flagship and the wider portfolio expansion fit together?

The expansion of the portfolio and the launch of the new MSc are really two sides of the same story. We are not predicting that management education will become narrower or purely technical. We think the opposite: as technology becomes more powerful, management education has to become more integrated. Graduates need to understand data and technology, but also finance, strategy, organizations, people and the consequences of the decisions they make. The opportunity for UCL is to build a portfolio around those intersections rather than around traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Perhaps the overarching message is that we are expanding not because we believe the future requires more business-school programs, but because we believe it requires a different kind of business education: one in which technology and analytics run through the curriculum, disciplines connect rather than sit in silos, and students learn with business rather than simply about business.

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