Stanford Lets Students Customize
EXCHANGING IDEAS: HBS Dean Jay Light talks with Stanford Dean Robert Joss.
Photo by Neal Hamberg
Stanford describes its new MBA curriculum, launched last fall, as a “revolutionary change in management education.” It aims to remedy what the school viewed as a pervasive problem with student engagement.
The new program leads off with a quarter of required “Management Perspectives” courses designed to provide students with an integrative overview of management challenges and to develop soft leadership and communication skills, including courses in Strategic Leadership, the Global Context of Management, and Critical Analytical Thinking. Students also get one-on-one advice from senior faculty who help them customize a plan of study.
Customization is a cornerstone of the new program, which permits students to tailor their course work to an unprecedented degree. In fact, after the required “perspectives” introduction, students have no required courses. Rather, they pick from eleven “foundations” subject areas, including finance, human resources, marketing, microeconomics, and operations. In a major break with the one-size-fits-all approach of the past, most foundations courses offer three levels of difficulty — basic, accelerated, and advanced — allowing students to choose the one that best fits their knowledge and experience. “We wanted to move the program in ways that would pull, not push, students back toward academics,” Dean Robert Joss told the student newspaper.
During their second year, students choose from a menu of more than 100 electives to pursue specialized knowledge. Before graduating, all must attend a new Synthesis Seminar to tie together what they have learned and to reflect on how they hope to achieve their goals.
The Synthesis Seminar highlights another goal of the new curriculum, getting students to think across disciplines and functions. “The front-end perspectives courses and the capstone Synthesis Seminar definitely focus on the integrated nature of management issues,” Joss explains in an e-mail. “But most of our electives in entrepreneurship, management, and leadership also take an integrated approach. And even in the discipline-based foundations courses, we often look at issues from a general management perspective, which requires some integration.”
The new curriculum comes with a hefty price tag. To accommodate the increased number of small-group courses, the school will grow its faculty by 10 to 15 percent and erect new classroom buildings with spaces designed for seminars and study groups.
Summing up Stanford’s first year of experience with the new curriculum, Joss observes: “Our faculty and staff felt there was a noticeable and valuable increase in student engagement. Thus, it was very successful from my point of view.”
