AACSB Pulse: Financing the Future of Business Schools

Host Eileen McAuliffe, AACSB's executive vice president, chief thought leadership officer, and managing director of EMEA, discusses innovation in business school financing with Serguei Netessine, senior vice dean for innovation and global initiatives and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’sWharton School. She asks three big questions:

1. What are the limitations of the traditional business school model in adapting to major global shifts, such as changing demographics, a volatile economy, and geopolitical uncertainties?
2. How can deeper engagement with industry and external partners help business schools diversify revenue streams, without compromising their academic mission?
3. What is the potential for AI to reshape how business schools create and deliver value to students, employers, and society?

Transcript

[00:00] Intro: Welcome to AACSB Pulse, the podcast that tackles critical topics in global business education today, three questions at a time. We talk with deans, industry leaders, and other big thinkers about the trends reshaping education, leadership, and the future of work. AACSB Pulse: Three big questions. Bold Answers. Better business schools.

[00:37] Eileen McAuliffe: Welcome to AACSB Pulse. It’s my pleasure to welcome our guest, Professor Serguei Netissine. Serguei is the senior vice dean for innovation and global initiatives and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Thank you for speaking with me today, Serguei.

[00:55] Serguei Netessine: Thank you. Thank you, Eileen. My great pleasure to join you. And thank you for inviting me.

[01:00] Eileen McAuliffe: Oh, you’re welcome. You’re welcome. I know we’ve chatted a little bit before, so I’ve kind of had a sneak peek into the kind of things that you’re up to, and it’s really interesting. So I’m looking forward to sharing some of this with our colleagues. So let’s jump into our three big questions.

So, something that intrigues me, Serguei, is that you’ve written extensively about the need for business model innovation broadly, and you’ve experienced firsthand how different financial models play out across business schools. And we’ve seen over the last, I don’t know, say three to five years, maybe two years, even, a variety of different business models coming through.

So what do you think are the limitations of the very traditional business school model in adapting to major global shifts?

[01:47] Eileen McAuliffe: I mean, we’ve certainly seen some seismic shifts over the last, kind of, six to 12 months. And some of those could include things like, you know, globally, we see changing demographics at one time or another on a different country, we’ve got huge volatility in the economies around the world, and the broad range of geopolitical uncertainties is so challenging. What do you think these present in terms of limitations for business schools?

[02:18] Serguei Netessine: Yeah, so I think in general, even without all these seismic shifts, we’ve been facing a problem where the business model of business schools and universities really hasn’t changed much over the last 100, 200 years, honestly. And it’s been overreliant on degree education. So that’s what we do—we shepherd students in, we give them degrees, and then we graduate them.

And for a variety of reasons, demand for degree education is just going down. And we can see it in demand for test-takers. And that is partially because of demographic shifts but partially also because the technologies and knowledge change so fast that people see less value in degrees and more value in upskilling throughout their lifetime. Which is why every school kind of talks about lifelong learning, but very few schools really do something about this.

The business model of business schools and universities really hasn’t changed much over the last 100, 200 years, honestly. And it’s been overreliant on degree education.

[03:19] Eileen McAuliffe: I’ve heard people say things like the employment pipeline is broken for business students—you know, we’re not, as business school professors and deans, we’re not operating in the right environment that has an equal fit with the employers that want to employ our graduates. So I’m curious about that statement.

And then the second thing is you talked about lifelong learners. I think I read somewhere very recently that a young person today coming out of college or university, one of our accredited business schools, let’s say, has to be able to pivot between six to 10 lifetime jobs. Whereas some people went into a job, maybe progressed up quite naturally. But nowadays, I think because of the technological disruption as maybe one cause, young people have to learn to pivot. There’s two things there.

[04:09] Eileen McAuliffe: There’s the kind of employment pipeline and then this notion of pivoting in one’s career.

[04:16] Serguei Netessine: I think both of those are true. I do want to say, though, the business undergraduate degree and graduate degree is still, by far, the most in demand.

[04:28] Eileen McAuliffe: Exactly.

[04:28] Serguei Netessine: Yeah. So if you look at raw numbers, we are still doing very well compared to basically any other major, right? And, you know, maybe this number stabilized a little bit, and jobs are not as plentiful as they used to be because just the number of business schools skyrocketed. But I think there are still, probably, if you want to maintain kind of a good lifestyle and guarantee yourself good lifelong income, that’s probably one of the best degrees you can get nowadays, so.

[05:03] Eileen McAuliffe: Yeah, exactly. I mean, they often talk about—I know I see this quite a lot in MBA rankings and stuff—an indicator is return on investment, isn’t it? And you know, they give you the expected salary after three to five years of an MBA graduate or an executive MBA graduate. But I wonder if we see such metrics at the bachelor level as well, I’m not sure. Maybe from some schools we do, but I’m not sure that we do from others.

[05:13] Serguei Netessine: And of course, if you compare return on invested capital for business undergraduate degree, it’s much, much higher than almost any other. In computer science, at some point, was skyrocketing, but as we know now, it’s challenged much more than business degrees are challenged. So I think many majors are challenged, and business is no exception.

But I still don’t see kind of a big crisis anytime soon. Demand is strong, companies are hiring at every level. So it’s just a matter of us thinking through how to create a healthy budget for a business school which is not overreliant on just degree education and not overreliant on state funding that has been going down.

[06:08] Eileen McAuliffe: Yeah. So on that notion of budgets and stuff, what do you think a truly sustainable and globally relevant financial model for business schools could look like? This is a really tricky one for you, I think, because it’s digging deep into Serguei’s brain here.

[06:24] Serguei Netessine: I don’t think it’s that tricky. I think it has to be a diversified budget. You cannot be, you know, 90, 80 percent dependent on degree education, which most schools are. So to me, it has to be a healthy balance between degrees, non-degrees, fundraising, research funding, maybe some state funding or federal funding. And we have to think about growing business enterprises out of business school because we are a business school, we are supposed to know how to start businesses and grow businesses, and we just get out of this common mold that, you know, we deliver degrees. There are so many more things that we can do.

[A sustainable model] has to be a diversified budget. You cannot be 90, 80 percent dependent on degree education, which most schools are.

[07:06] Eileen McAuliffe: Yeah, that’s a really good point. And you at Wharton have got a really interesting backstory around, you’re not kind of, even though you’re very high in the rankings, you don’t have the same sort of legacy as maybe some of the other big players in the United States have. So do you want to just say a little bit about some of the examples from Wharton in terms of what you had to do to diversify your income streams?

[07:31] Serguei Netessine: Yes, certainly. So as you correctly pointed out, our endowment is not nearly as big on a per student or per faculty basis as some of our competitors. And we have not historically received nearly as big of a gift like, you know, University of Chicago, in hundreds of millions. Our biggest gift is 60 million, which, you know, we received just this year, a couple of weeks ago.

So what we have done? We extensively diversified into non-degree education and really, seriously thinking about lifelong learning. And to us, it’s not just educating people after they come to us and get a degree. We actually start early and start educating high school and even middle school students. And that’s very different from any other business schools that I know.

[08:20] Serguei Netessine: For us, we have these massive programs that prepare high school students for business education, and we run them in summer, which means our facilities are empty, we have spare capacity, our instructors are not busy. And so it’s a perfect balancing act on all our resources.

[08:39] Eileen McAuliffe: And with those programs that you described there, do you measure the transition? How many of those attendees during the summer actually convert into enrolments for you? Because there’s obviously quite a strong brand loyalty there, as well, isn’t there? That kind of kicks in whether, if they’ve had a good experience, they want to stay with you; if you’ve got good professors, they want to stay with you.

[09:01] Serguei Netessine: Honestly, Eileen, many students want to stay with us, but you know, one student out of 15 for undergraduates studies, so, I’m sure all of them apply to the University of Pennsylvania. How many of them get in is very hard for us to track, you know, unless they come and tell us, Hey, I got into a good school. But we do know anecdotally that many of them get into very good undergraduate business schools.

[09:29] Eileen McAuliffe: That’s wonderful. It’s a good grounding for them and a good flavor of what’s going to happen. So, you’ve got lots of experience, not just in America, but let me move you back out into Europe a little bit more. And with the European business schools in mind, do you see any innovative advantages that you’ve experienced or shared or led at some of the schools that you’ve worked at in Europe?

[09:51] Serguei Netessine: Certainly. So what we see among top business schools in Europe, which is INSEAD, LBS, for example, they are not part of the university. And so they don’t get really big state support, and so they have to struggle on their own and establish a business model. So their business model is very different. For them, more than half of their revenues is executive education, non-degree programs. And that’s a very, very big market which is continuing to grow. Like last two, three years, executive education all around the world has been skyrocketing, and all the top schools that have significant executive education have increased revenues there drastically.

Top business schools in Europe, which is INSEAD, LBS, for example, they are not part of the university. ... more than half of their revenues is executive education.

[10:34] Serguei Netessine: And that, I think, is one kind of a source of revenue that many schools underappreciate and don’t really have a good capacity to have like a sales team to grow this revenue to have a separate facility maybe for executive education because the format is different. You probably need a hotel, you know. So European schools, top European schools, have that business model right.

[11:00] Eileen McAuliffe: Yeah. And in terms of the faculty, teaching, or you know, delivering those programs around exec ed, they don’t typically want the absolute, you know, traditional theoretical professor. They do want a flavor of that, but they like the kind of war stories from practice, from industry. So it’s kind of a blend. Your faculty starts to look a little bit different then, doesn’t it, when you’re working with the exec ed area.

You also said something interesting there, that schools like INSEAD, LBS, I might put IMD into that mix, as well, they’re not centered as part of a bigger university. But in some ways doesn’t that give them the agility, then, to be able to pivot to where the money is and go after it and perhaps be a bit more agile in terms of their approach to this strategy?

[11:49] Serguei Netessine: Certainly, certainly. It’s a double-edged sword. So there are lots of useful things that the university provides support for processing all kinds of expenses and, you know, some campus maintenance and so on. But yeah, agility, certainly we as a part of the university, it’s very hard for us to start new degree programs, launch new courses, and so on.

[12:13] Eileen McAuliffe: That’s great, I’ve really enjoyed that conversation. Let’s look at collaborative opportunities. Everyone I speak to at the moment is wanting to collaborate with somebody somewhere in the world. It’s the biggest way of, you know, building in that international mobility, maybe research partnerships and so on. So in our recent publication, the State of Business Education Report, it highlights the critical role of collaborations and partnerships in supporting schools’ financial sustainability. So we’ve touched on this a little bit.

But in your view, by deepening that engagement with industry, external partners, other funding bodies, business schools can diversify revenue streams. But can they do it without compromising their academic mission, do you think? So they’re chasing the pounds, but they’ve got the academic kind of rigor that they’re trying to balance still.

[13:07] Serguei Netessine: Most certainly. And I think those collaborations can take different shapes and forms. For example, you can collaborate with foreign governments. And if you look at the Middle East, many schools now launched campuses there, some extensive programs. You see INSEAD in Abu Dhabi and, you know, LBS in Dubai, and there are Carnegie Mellon universities in Qatar and so on. They all receive significant funding from governments of those regions as a result. And there are all kinds of contributions that they get towards research as well. So INSEAD gets significant contributions towards research. So you can actually align this funding with your mission, for sure.

If you look at the Middle East, many schools now launched campuses there. ...They all receive significant funding from governments of those regions as a result. 

I’m maybe less optimistic about degree collaborations, like you know, one school in the east running a degree program in the west—it’s still a degree program, it’s still subject to pretty small margins. It’s a lot of administration.

[14:08] Serguei Netessine: So whether you run it alone or with someone, I don’t think makes such a big innovation. You know, it’s attractive to some students, but at the end of the day, it’s kind of the same business model. And to me, degree programs to begin with are not the way to grow revenues because, largely, they are not profitable. It’s very hard to make them profitable.

[14:32] Eileen McAuliffe: Yeah, absolutely. And where I do hear stories of schools saying, this is my most profitable, accounting and finance, the joint degree—that often gets cited as being one of the most profitable degrees—I’ve got to worry about quality, then, when they start talking about profit, you know, that balance between, yielding profit in a not-for-profit organization in most cases.

But anyway, let’s go back to partnerships. So have you got any examples you can share with us from industry, where partnerships or joint ventures have successfully diversified revenue streams? I guess, you know, we see very large firms embarking on exec head still, don’t we? So you know, we see big car companies, we see big pharmaceutical companies. Have you got any examples of programs that you’ve either delivered or been part of where it did allow the diversification?

[15:29] Serguei Netessine: Yeah, for sure. I mean executive education partnerships are the easiest ones, and the value added is just obvious to everyone involved at some point. When I was at INSEAD, we ran a huge program for 30,000 salespeople at Microsoft, and it was a recorded program, but were in a live studio with Microsoft executives recording everything, including Q&A, to make it live and, you know, engaging. And then 30,000 salespeople would take those classes online and improve the way that they sell Microsoft products.

So that was a pretty massive program that I know Microsoft has done also with Wharton at the time. So some courses were recorded with INSEAD, some were with Wharton.

[16:17] Eileen McAuliffe: So here’s the golden-goose question for you. This is the million-dollar question: Where do you see the untapped opportunities for business schools? You know, maybe using their alumni a bit more to engage as long-term partners in innovation and growth. Can you see any avenues there for development?

Eileen McAuliffe (left) talks with Serguei Netessine(right) about the business model of business schools.

[16:39] Serguei Netessine: So, I see lots of untapped potential, again, not in maybe traditional degree, but non-degree programs which are not even executive education, for example, high school programs. We have big partnerships with companies, and even at the undergraduate level, I’ll give you one example.

We have a partnership called Alt Finance and it was started by three financial services companies on Wall Street, including Apollo Capital and a couple of others. And they put together 100 million USD over 10 years to educate students in historically Black colleges and universities about finance. And we are the exclusive education provider for Alt Finance.

So we essentially go to the students—they are already enrolled in undergraduate programs at historically Black colleges and universities—and we teach them finance. And then these companies guarantee them internships and hopefully full-time jobs eventually. Right?

[17:45] Serguei Netessine: So everyone benefits: students benefit, we benefit, financial services firms benefit. So that’s just one example of a massive undertaking that they have in the undergraduate space.

[17:57] Eileen McAuliffe: That’s huge. And the success, you know, the extended success of the young people being able to get hopefully jobs at the end of it in that sector, which is notoriously competitive, I mean, it’s wonderful.

Okay, we’ll move on now to the last of our three big questions, Serguei. So, for the last one, I’ve been fishing around in your profile and having a look at your research, and I know you’ve been doing some interesting research on AI and how AI can contribute to business model innovation. Now it’s fascinating, isn’t it, this whole area of AI, there’s so many different facets to it.

But could you just discuss the potential for AI to reshape how business schools create and deliver value to students, employers, and my big project at the moment is around societal impact in particular, you know, how we look at impact and as business schools, how we demonstrate contributing impact?

[18:54] Serguei Netessine: So certainly, Eileen. So we embraced AI fully at Wharton, and I think were probably the first business school that kind of jumped all in, and we started offering a major in AI, and we basically told faculty they need to have an AI policy in every class and embrace AI in every class.

And, you know, I have to say that we are so early in the AI kind of era that even big companies are still struggling to articulate what added value AI is going to bring them. I think we are in the same boat. We are experimenting, we are trying to improve our classes, we are trying to, you know, use AI—like I teach innovation. I use AI for students to generate ideas for innovation and then articulate those ideas and create visuals and create pitches. And then I use AI to evaluate the pitches.

[19:50] Serguei Netessine: So I have AI throughout. and I tell students, If you don’t use AI in my class, you will be at a big disadvantage. Actually, I think it’s like a penalty, where you are trying to innovate without a copilot it by your side.

So, but then of course there are different views and there are faculty who teach more traditional, theoretical courses, and they struggle with assignments and exams. They’re wondering if students are not learning anymore. And there is some evidence that they are not learning if you’re not using AI properly—if you’re just using it as, kind of, you know, to solve problems for you. So we are certainly very early in the stage of evolving through AI.

You have to be very careful that there is enough of a human component and not too much outsourcing to AI.

[20:19] Serguei Netessine: What we have done extensively is we tried to launch all kinds of learning simulations which are AI-enabled and which are adaptive. And the promise there is that you can go at your own pace, and AI will adapt and it will help you more if you’re struggling, help you less if you’re doing well. Whether there is a big impact of that and it really works, kind of a little bit too early to tell.

We certainly have lots of online programs now which are AI-enabled. We use AI to help students in a variety of ways, like to support students. But of course, you have to be very careful that there is enough of a kind of a human component there and not too much outsourcing to AI.

[21:22] Eileen McAuliffe: At AACSB, we periodically get communications, not very often, but communications from students that would say, I’m really unhappy with my class being taught with AI. I don’t see the professor, or I don’t talk to him or her very much. What do you think of that challenge from students where they’re paying big fees and then it’s AI that’s kind of, maybe, running the course, or maybe there’s a feeling of that?

[21:48] Serguei Netessine: I mean, we never replace a faculty with AI, to be honest, or at least I don’t, and I don’t know of anyone who does. It’s more of a supplement in off times when I’m not teaching. So I tell students, like, Look, you created a presentation, you created a pitch deck, or you can actually use my AI copilot to run through it, and it will give you feedback, and it will help you improve it while I’m sleeping.

[22:15] Eileen McAuliffe: So, yeah, so more complimentary than kind of just there as a crutch. So for business school leaders, there’s a balance, isn’t there? And how do we balance the possibility of AI as an enabler, as you’ve described it, to support this quest for financial innovation versus another bucket of costs that we’ve got to pay for and train, and the actual inevitable associated risks that maybe come with AI?

So, we did talk a little bit there about learning, well, what I would call “learning gain” or “learning loss” of a student, you know, if they’re just using it in a very kind of transactional way. What would you say to that?

[23:02] Serguei Netessine: So, first of all, I think there are several aspects of business schools’ kind of business model. And some, I think applications of AI are more obvious, like in research, for example. So in research, AI just helps a lot to write papers and to analyze citations and, you know, analyze data and write code and so on.

You know, I’m a computer scientist by training, but all the languages that I used to study, they are all obsolete by now. So I haven’t been writing much code in the last five years, and now I write code again because it’s so easy with all kinds of AI tools.

So, for example, speaking of business models for business schools, we have a major enterprise unit called Wharton Data Research Services.

[23:50] Serguei Netessine: And what we do, we take data from all around the world and we formalize it and make it easy to query. And then we sell subscriptions to hundreds of other business schools and universities. So that is a significant revenue source for us. Nowadays, many data sources are used to train AI models, for example, and we have to be cognizant of that. We have much more data available internally for our faculties and externally to other schools. So that’s a major source of innovation for us in the way we do research.

Now there is another side of it, which is teaching, which I think is much more ambiguous. And of course there are some faculty who say, No, I don’t want AI in my class. I don’t want students to learn any other ways than traditionally.

[24:40] Serguei Netessine: What we achieved, at least now every faculty must have an AI policy stated. So whatever it is, just state it up front and explain to students how you’re going to use AI. And we recommend certain levels, you know, you can prohibit completely, you can say, Use it, but make it clear that you used it. Or like in my class, Use it, never tell me. I’m happy if you use it, and you never have to apologize.

[25:07] Eileen McAuliffe: Yeah, there’s quite a spectrum, isn’t there, of governance, well, classroom governance. You’re over here saying, you know, Go for it, use it as much as you can, you know, innovate, and so on. And then there’s others, I think, at the other end. So it’s quite interesting to see how that governance and a little bit of the ethics is creeping in there, as well, in terms of its usage.

But let me take you back to something else that I know you’re interested in, and that is the agentic AI, how these autonomous systems are being explored in industry. Are they really going to take over human beings, do you think?

[25:40] Serguei Netessine: I think we are years away from that, but they will take over some simple tasks like shopping. And, you know, I would easily see an agent shopping on behalf of a potential student for classes, for courses like an executive education, for example, which is not easy.

You know, say I’m an executive, I want to take a class, so what do I do now? I have to go to Wharton to check what they have, to Harvard what they have, and then, you know, keep going, and there are many schools. If I want something location specific, I want to be somewhere in Asia or something, it’s a nightmare, honestly. But imagine if I could tell the agent, go around, find everything in leadership for me, which is taught in Bali, you know, on a certain week in October.

[26:31] Serguei Netessine: And so that I can imagine as a much, much more reasonable task for an agent.

[26:38] Eileen McAuliffe: So I’m interested in pursuing this because we could talk about how it could be responsibly integrated into administrative or pedagogical functions.

When I was a dean, the one thing that all my faculty really used to find painful was the exam boards. You know, when they delivered their marks for the courses and they had to sit and listen to all the students’ names being read out. And if there was one that was borderline, they had to make a judgment. And then there was a bit of to and fro between, you know, different tutors and so on.

Do you see things like university administration perhaps becoming a thing of the past in terms of some of the heavy lifting around those sorts of processes that we have to do?

[27:22] Serguei Netessine: I am skeptical. I don’t think things change that quickly. And certainly we are beginning to use AI agents, AI chatbots, copilots for administrative functions. For example, customer support is one obvious one, where in summer we receive 10,000 or so applications from high school students. They’re all asking questions. and many of those questions have simple answers described somewhere on the website and some of our documents. And so AI can easily handle those. So we combine kind of a human response with an AI response.

But I think, beyond that, what tends to happen with any new technology is that, when something becomes cheap and easy, it tends to get overused. So if previously you get 1,000 questions, now if you can get them answered quickly and easily, then there’s going to be 10,000 questions.

What tends to happen with any new technology is that, when something becomes cheap and easy, it tends to get overused. 

[28:21] Serguei Netessine: And so I don’t think questions are going to go away, and I don’t think need for human response is going to go away. So it’s just going to be augmented—humans augmented with AI.

[28:33] Eileen McAuliffe: It’s that shift to a kind of exponential augmentation, isn’t it, that I think a lot of us are struggling to get our head around is, you know, how far will it go?

[28:44] Serguei Netessine: Yeah, that still remains to be seen. I think certainly there’s going to be space for some new types of educational organizations which are completely AI-enabled. And for example, I worked with the Gates foundation for several years trying to figure out how we can make software that would be able to bridge the gap, educational gaps, where certain groups of students are not just doing well in courses. And so maybe AI-enabled copilot would help them because they don’t have access to good teachers, right? So I hope this can happen.

Like in our format of a top business school, this is hard to see. We can still see big values that executives and students attach to talking to a faculty. We see that there is a big human element in everything we do in big organizations and businesses.

[29:42] Serguei Netessine: And so, yeah, AI can be helpful, but I don’t see it replacing us anytime soon, to be honest.

[29:45] Eileen McAuliffe: Particularly at the exec level, it doesn’t replace that sense of experience of cohort where you bring 10, 15, 20 execs from a huge range. They want to talk to each other. They don’t want to be talking AI stuff. They want to network with each other. They want to maybe start businesses together or innovate together. So I think it’s an interesting one. I mean, I’m watching with curiosity how things are moving. It’s moving so fast.

This time next year, if we’re having the same conversation again, what other kinds of disruption would you predict between now and then? I’m not going to hold you to it, by the way, Serguei, at all. So don’t worry. You can be as crazy as you like.

[30:32] Serguei Netessine: Predicting disruptions is very hard. Certainly AI models will evolve. Certainly we’ll have more and more of it implemented in various classes, and there’s going to be more opportunities for maybe taking classes remotely with the help of AI.

Like, for example, one of the innovations that we launched is a global executive MBA program, which is an in Asia time zone. You take classes online for a big part of it, and then you come for certain modules and a lot of it. Of course, what goes online, you can enable with AI, especially when you are in such a different time zone. Right now our faculty wake up at 6:00 a.m. to teach to China and India time zones, right? There is probably more you can do to support students of ours, and we are constantly evolving those tools.

[31:28] Serguei Netessine: We are supporting faculty who do this. We have a big AI research center that funds any and all initiatives in this space. So I certainly expect to learn more also from my colleagues and tell them what I do in my class.

But I don’t think there’s going to be a completely kind of a seismic shift where Wharton School is going to go away or, you know, most of our programs are going to go away.

[31:53] Eileen McAuliffe: Yeah, no, I totally agree with you on that point. I’m just curious and excited in same measure. I mean, if you think about looking back at the last 12 months and on all the level of disruption, you know, the geopolitical stuff, I just hold my breath and then with absolute trepidation and excitement as to what’s coming down the line next.

And I wish we could, you know, in some predictive manner, have a bit of a heads up, a bit of a glimpse. But it’s impossible, isn’t it, to do that? Maybe we’ll get a second series with you next year or in a few months. Actually, it probably won’t even take a year for this, but we can reflect on it a bit more.

So what’s next for you, Serguei? What are you working on going forwards?

[32:39] Serguei Netessine: Well, we are working on drastically growing and expanding a high school program. That’s one of my biggest undertakings. And we see big demand, for example, from high school kids to have research experience. And and that became kind of a prerequisite for getting into many top universities. And so we’re gonna offer, next summer, we’re gonna offer research programs.

We also working on partnering with some interesting organizations to offer kind of a co-op experience where students take classes from us, but also kind of do sort of an internship at a company because it looks like high school kids demand this from very, very early on.

We are also growing our Wharton Academy programs, which are undergraduate-level programs. So if an undergraduate student from somewhere in the world wants to come and take a couple of classes at Wharton in summer, that now will be possible.

[33:44] Serguei Netessine: So these are just a couple of things which are kind of trying to scale up from a startup stage.

[33:51] Eileen McAuliffe: And I look forward to the scaling up and the starting up happening globally as well. You know, your experience in Europe is so rich and so valuable.

[34:01] Serguei Netessine: Yeah. Speaking of collaborations, we are collaborating with Cambridge University on a high school program in Cambridge campus, we are collaborating with Oxford on Oxford campus, and we are now launching a summer high school program in Dubai as well. Singapore is going to come next, and so on.

[34:20] Eileen McAuliffe: So the scaling is happening in true innovation style, so,  wonderful. Serguei, it’s been wonderful speaking with you. It’s been a wonderful conversation. I’m so blessed and privileged to be able to probe into the minds of some of the world’s top professors. And some of the work you do is just absolutely transformative. So thank you for sharing your vast knowledge.

[34:44] Serguei Netessine: Thank you for having me, Eileen. Yeah, it’s always great to discuss all the challenges we have in the industry, you know, we are going through all kinds of changes. So, happy to speak again.

[34:57] Eileen McAuliffe: To our listeners, if you’ve enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow AACSB Pulse on AACSB Insights, Apple, or Spotify. We’ve got more great episodes coming up on the biggest issues shaping global business education today.

About AACSB Pulse

A podcast produced by AACSB International, AACSB Pulse explores current topics impacting global business education—three questions at a time—with business school deans, industry leaders, and other big thinkers of today.

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