Free Exec Ed Could Cost Wharton $1 Million A Year

REDUCING THE NUMBER OF COHORT-BASED CLASSES.

“Responding to these concerns, our new design thus 1) slightly reduces the number of required credit units from ten to nine; 2) frees faculty to teach both required and elective courses in intensive 1-week periods in late August, early January, and (perhaps) late April; 3) reduces somewhat the number of cohort-based required classes; and 4) introduces the concept of six required “Content Areas” (as opposed to six required courses) within which students will be able to choose from a short menu of options the courses that will satisfy the demands of the required curriculum. These moves free up a great deal of flexibility for students and opportunities for the faculty to innovate at an individual as well as departmental level. It also allowed us to combine, for the first time, the six classes on ethics and the six classes on law that are currently required in different parts of the curriculum into a single, integrated subject area – “Ethical and Legal Responsibility.” Students can now take a number required classes in the second as well as the first year, subject, of course, to their desire to major in a given subject area. Students may also continue to waive certain classes based on qualifying exams or credentials, further enhancing the flexibility of the program.

MORE FREEDOM BY PROFS TO DUMP AND ADD COURSES.

“The fifth and final design factor related to innovation is the new freedom for departments to move existing courses into and out of the required curriculum without having to seek a vote of the entire faculty. Under our proposal, a department may recommend a change to a Content Area (by, for example, moving an existing, well-received elective into the required Content Area) by simply seeking permission to do so from a new school-wide Curriculum Innovation and Review Committee charged with reviewing these requests.

“The change can go forward with the agreement of this committee. This committee will also be conducting periodic reviews of all courses in the required curriculum and overseeing departmental policies on waivers, majors, and prerequisites to assure the program as a whole meets the needs of students and the School as a whole. Meanwhile, the faculty as a whole will continue to be consulted regarding brand new courses that may be suggested for both the elective and the required curricula. This latter governance structure is critical to both avoiding duplicative courses and assuring that Wharton’s highest standards are met whenever a new course enters our curriculum.

“In addition to flexibility and innovation, our recruiters, alumni and faculty were very clear that we needed to maintain the emphasis on the hard, analytic skills for which Wharton is renowned. In this regard, our review suggested to us that there was room for us to expand from requiring 6-week classes in statistics and microeconomics in the first semester to requiring full-semester, 12-week courses in these two foundational areas. Qualified students will still be able to waive these classes, of course, but we think this expanded treatment will give incoming, non-specialist students a better grasp of sound risk analysis as well as the basic operation of markets and the relationship between markets and appropriate regulation.

EXPANDING LEADERSHIP AND TEAMWORK TRAINING.

“Finally, our recruiters, alumni and existing students told us we needed to expand the emphasis on the “soft skills” of leadership, teamwork, and communications in a more emphatic way. Our new design thus increases from 6 to 12 classes the amount of oral communication training in the required curriculum and adds a writing requirement for the first time. These classes are taught in very small sub-cohort sections of 10-12 students to allow for individualized coaching and focused practice. In addition, we are expanding our leadership and teamwork training to encompass co-curricular as well as classroom work – with a two-year, web-based feedback system that will be backed by a number of coaching interventions stretching over the entire two-year MBA experience. Students co-curricular activities–running events, leading various clubs, engaging in their summer internships–will therefore be brought, in a more self-reflective way, into the overall MBA program.

STUDIED CHANGES AT STANFORD, COLUMBIA, CHICAGO.

The committee also took a close look at reforms of MBA program content and design at major rivals. “We examined in detail the curriculum (and degree) change processes and outcomes over the past 5-10 years at Stanford, Chicago, Columbia, Berkeley, MIT Sloan, and Yale (among others),” said Shell. “We also re-examined in great detail the Wharton experience from the early 1990s. We surveyed the content and flow of existing programs at some thirty peer institutions both in the USA and abroad. Finally, we conducted an in-depth study of MBA programs in the USA and abroad lasting less than the two full years such as Columbia’s accelerated MBA program, Kellogg’s one-year program, and INSEAD’s one-year program. All options were on the table, but our focus was not on imitating any other approach but rather on finding the approaches that would best work for Wharton with its unique scope and scale.”

WHARTON CONSIDERED NEARLY A DOZEN PROGRAM DESIGNS.

“The committee considered as many as 10-12 different program designs before settling on the basic design we recommended. We then re-connected with our students and faculty in the spring of 2010 and came up with our final design ideas in the summer of 2010. Finally, we re-surveyed our faculty in early September 2010, presented our final design ideas at the end of September, and consulted in detail with the faculty, departments, and staff in the fall of 2010 to validate the feasibility of our program ideas and flesh out how it might be implemented. After this crucial final step, we brought our proposal to a vote on Dec. 3. We were gratified that our work met with overwhelming approval from the faculty.”