The ‘Wicked’ Advantage of Regional Business Schools

• Organizations today face problems that resist straightforward solutions, a reality that exposes the limits of traditional, research-centric business education.
• The defining characteristics of regional schools—nontraditional students, practitioner faculty, constrained resources, and deep community ties—create powerful conditions for developing leaders who can manage ambiguity and tradeoffs.
• With their ability to turn community crises into living laboratories for learning, regional institutions demonstrate how business schools can prioritize capability and impact over prestige-based metrics.

 
Today’s most pressing business challenges share a defining characteristic: They resist simple solutions. A manufacturing company, for instance, might attempt to reduce its carbon footprint only to discover that the use of sustainable materials increases costs by 30 percent, new processes require retraining 40 percent of the workforce, and suppliers lack incentives to change. In other words, it’s fix one element, break three others.

These challenges are defined by incomplete information, conflicting stakeholder demands, and constantly shifting parameters. As another example, consider how organizations implementing AI face interconnected ethical, technical, and operational challenges. They’re finding that algorithms trained on historical data can perpetuate biases and that privacy protections conflict with functionality. Each solution that organizations adopt only generates new complications.

Traditional business education developed tools for a simpler world—one where problems had boundaries, stakeholders were aligned, and problems stayed solved. But complex problems demand different capabilities: navigating ambiguity while maintaining momentum, integrating conflicting perspectives into workable compromises, and implementing solutions that must evolve as fast as the problems they are designed to address.

For decades, business education has defined impact through peer-reviewed publications, citation counts, and theoretical advances. This paradigm inadvertently positioned regional institutions—with their diverse nontraditional students, practitioner faculty, resource constraints, and community focus—as somehow deficient. Yet the very characteristics that define regional business schools create exceptional environments for developing leaders who are adept at solving wicked problems.

Although these characteristics may exist elsewhere in higher education, they concentrate and intensify at regional institutions because of the distinctive mission, student demographics, and resource realities of these schools. These institutions most often educate working professionals, operate within constraints, maintain close industry ties, and serve their local communities. Taken together, these four defining features are advantages and strategic assets, not compromises to overcome.

1. Nontraditional Student Diversity

Nontraditional students comprise 74 percent of all U.S. undergraduates and are concentrated more heavily at regional schools than elsewhere. The life experiences of these students confer a decisive advantage for wicked problem-solving. At regional schools, 34 percent of students are over 25 years old, 80 percent work while enrolled, 44 percent are financially independent, and 18 percent have dependent children.

These are not students learning about business; they are business practitioners earning degrees. The manufacturing supervisor has watched sustainability initiatives fail due to cost pressures. The retail manager understands why customers say one thing in surveys and do another at checkout. The veteran supply chain manager has moved supplies through environments where infrastructure did not exist.

This experiential diversity creates natural cross-stakeholder dialogue that mirrors the defining characteristic of wicked problems: the necessity of navigating competing interests simultaneously.

The life experiences of nontraditional students confer a decisive advantage for wicked problem-solving.

Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) in Fort Myers exemplified the power of experiential diversity when Hurricane Ian struck in September 2022. In its aftermath, with 25 percent of faculty left homeless and the community devastated, the business school’s response was not theoretical but personal. Students from all backgrounds (from military veterans to hospitality workers to healthcare professionals) brought their diverse expertise to the crisis. Veterans organized logistics, hospitality students managed emergency shelter operations in Alico Arena, and business students with construction experience led rebuilding efforts.

FGCU’s Hurricane Ian Recovery Program did not just help students earn service-learning credits. It created a model for disaster response that could emerge only when practical experience meets academic frameworks. The diversity of its students’ perspectives transformed crisis into curriculum in ways homogeneous student bodies may not achieve.

2. Resource Adaptability

Regional business schools receive less funding per student than research universities in the U.S. while serving 70 percent of public four-year undergraduates and awarding 66 percent of bachelor’s and 67 percent of master’s degrees in the public sector. The resource constraints these schools often face create distinctive capabilities for problem-solving.

The University of Houston’s Hobby School of Public Affairs demonstrated such capabilities during Winter Storm Uri in 2021. Unable to afford traditional disaster research infrastructure, faculty and students crowdsourced data collection through social networks and community partnerships, surveying more than 1,500 residents. The data they gathered showed that 69 percent of residents lost power for 42 hours, and 49 percent lost water. These findings influenced state policy reforms with 75 percent public support for utility winterization.

This research cost a fraction of what traditional studies would have, while providing students with invaluable crisis research experience. Within the existing constraints, students learned lessons that they never could from abundance: how to identify creative alternatives when ideal resources are not available and how to develop solutions that work within current limitations.

This constraint-driven innovation directly transfers to organizational challenges. Graduates who learn to maximize limited resources bring a mindset that organizations desperately need: one that knows how to solve problems with what exists, not what is ideal. Their solutions embody frugal innovation, a skill that is increasingly valued as organizations seek sustainable solutions in resource-limited environments.

3. Practitioner Integration

Regional schools often maintain faculties that comprise 30 percent to 45 percent practitioners, not as a compromise but as a strategic choice. Faculty who maintain connections to practice bring wisdom regarding implementation that complements theoretical approaches.

When a supply chain professor who actively manages warehouse operations incorporates disruption experiences into courses, students gain insights absent from textbooks. Practitioner-educators can create cognitive apprenticeships in wicked problem-solving.

As students hear the lived experience of these instructors, they access not just what happened to organizations but the evolving thinking that occurred throughout implementation. Practitioners share the initial assumptions that proved incorrect, emphasize the need for adaptation strategies when elegant solutions confronted constraints, and impart concrete lessons that arose from failure.

During California wildfire responses, for instance, faculty in the California State University system who work in emergency management bring students directly into active emergency operations centers. During these crises, students observe decisions being made in real time, understand how incomplete information drives choices, and learn why communication failures can be more dangerous than the fires themselves. This is experience that textbooks alone cannot provide.

Faculty who maintain connections to practice bring wisdom regarding implementation that complements theoretical approaches.

Similarly, the iCenter at Marshall University’s Lewis College of Business in Huntington, West Virginia, brings practitioners directly into the curriculum as a necessary condition, not just a sufficient one. A recipient of one of AACSB’s 2023 Innovations That Inspire awards, the center has trained nearly 3,000 students and community members since 2018.

The program has contributed to West Virginia’s elevation from last place in national business rankings to an emerging innovation hub. The iCenter’s success demonstrates how practitioner integration creates capabilities that pure academic approaches cannot.

4. Strong Regional Connections

Regional schools are deeply embedded in their communities, which creates a continuous feedback loop that abstract learning environments cannot match. These institutions work directly with organizations facing interconnected challenges, allowing business students to become participants in finding context-based, impact-focused solutions for the community.

For instance, when the University of Alabama’s Culverhouse College of Business in Tuscaloosa chose to combat the opioid crisis across 17 Southern states, students did not just analyze data; they worked with communities where overdose deaths were personal tragedies, not statistics. Over a decade, Alabama’s opioid prescription rates dropped from 143.8 per 100 residents to 71.4 per 100 residents. Culverhouse students contributed to interventions that saved actual lives in their communities.

Students at regional educational institutions learn that wicked problems cannot be understood independent of context—solutions must be adapted to specific environments. This provides them with contextual intelligence, a crucial dimension to business education that abstract or fragmented approaches miss.

The Synergy: How Advantages Compound

These four advantages do not operate independently. They reinforce each other, creating capabilities greater than their sum. Nontraditional students bring problems from their workplaces into resource-constrained classrooms. Practitioner faculty help develop solutions that are tested immediately in community partnerships. Together, students and faculty develop solutions to community-based challenges in real-time, often with significant limitations. Each advantage amplifies the others.

When Marshall University launched its innovation programs, nontraditional students (including coal miners seeking new careers) brought deep understanding of economic disruption. Resource constraints forced the school to adopt creative program design that leveraged free tools and community partnerships.

Simultaneously, practitioner faculty from successful startups provided real-world guidance to students and school partners. They helped form deep community connections, which ensured solutions addressed actual regional needs.

The result was 3,000 trained entrepreneurs, programs in eight high schools, and a transformed economic narrative for West Virginia.

From Recognition to Action

The following framework shows how characteristics traditionally viewed as weaknesses of regional institutions become strategic advantages and create unique opportunities for intellectual contributions that advance both understanding and capability:

For regional business school leaders, this framework can be a template for schools to adopt a range of strategic actions:

Value experiential diversity by designing curricula that extract wisdom from life experience. Here, schools can formalize pedagogies that will emphasize discussion formats where contradictions become teaching moments, and they can make stakeholder conflict a discussion tool, not a classroom management challenge.

Make resource adaptability explicit in the school’s educational approach. This means that students and faculty will document how constraints spark innovation, publicly share models for doing more with less, and position frugality as a competency that graduates carry into organizations.

Regional business schools are not fallback options; they are talent pipelines for navigating complexity.

Integrate practitioners strategically, not apologetically. This requires schools to build curricula that oscillate between theory and application within single sessions. They can hold “hot wash” (debriefing) sessions where this week’s business crisis becomes next week’s case study.

Position regional challenges as living laboratories for contextual intelligence. Schools can make every local challenge a learning opportunity, and they can measure impact in community outcomes, not just student placements. Then, they can tell the community and legislators about those outcomes.

For employers and policymakers, the message should be clear: Regional business schools are not fallback options; they are talent pipelines for navigating complexity. Their graduates have solved problems with real constraints, real stakeholders, and real consequences.

The Future of Business Education

In a world where artificial intelligence handles routine analysis, global challenges manifest locally, and traditional credentials matter less than demonstrated capability, the regional business school model is not just viable; it is vital. Regional institutions are preparing graduates for problems that do not have clean solutions and require navigation rather than resolution.

The evidence is compelling. When FGCU transforms hurricane devastation into sustainable disaster response education, when Marshall University converts economic disadvantage into entrepreneurial advantage, and when California State schools turn wildfire threats into workforce development opportunities, this is not compromise. It is excellence, differently defined and powerfully delivered.

The crisis of relevance that confronts business education today creates both urgency and opportunity. Regional business schools can lead not by mimicking traditional models but by pioneering approaches that leverage their unique characteristics. These characteristics, once viewed as limitations to overcome, may prove to be exactly what business education needs to maintain relevance in a world defined by wicked problems.