Building Relevant Business Education in Asia

• Business curricula are aligning more closely with employers’ daily priorities, translating classroom theory into real workplace purpose.
• Regional case studies and industry-tested faculty are reshaping the Asian classroom experience.
• Hands-on simulations and real-world scenarios are turning classrooms into living laboratories that deepen student engagement.

Transcript

Joseph Cherian: [00:12] When individuals, employers, and students question the value of the business degree, they’re questioning everything: the entire model, the value it brings to the table, the relevance to industry (especially employees asking, ‘is this relevant for my workplace?’) and the costs.

[00:33] Fortunately, Asians still value education. The half-life, or the duration for time decay in terms of its relevance, will be longer than in the U.S. or Europe, which are more impatient. But that said, Generation Z is also getting impatient in Asia.

[00:51] They’re asking and questioning: why should I get this degree? How does that add value to my career trajectory or my relevance in society? Many Gen Zers want to do good. They want to give back to the community more than I did—now I do, but in the old days, I did not. As a result, they begin to question, even in Asia.

[01:14] What employers are signaling is that the stuff that you learn in business schools—if we can focus on business schools, since this is what we’re here for—has to be relevant to what we are doing on a daily basis: our vision, our mission, our purpose.

Many Gen Zers want to do good. They want to give back to the community.

[01:29] The last thing an employer wants is to take in talent from a business school, retrain them, and put them through some kind of rotation program to drink the Kool-Aid.

[01:42] Schools should be doing that. We should make our curriculum and our programs relevant. If you live in Asia, you’d better be using Asian cases. It should be experiential, it should be hands-on.

[01:56] Sometimes it’s good in life that you fail in every aspect of your career. I failed in academics. I failed industry. And I failed in, I don’t know, what’s the last one? Policymaking...Just kidding.

[02:05] What I think is useful is the experience. The blended experience of working in academia, being trained in academia, and then having a career in industry is invaluable. I don’t say it for self-serving purposes. I say it because that’s what a business school is about.

[02:23] It’s like talking to a professor of surgery at the top medical school who says, ‘hypothetically speaking, this is how you perform an incision for a type of surgery.’ You don’t want to go to such a school. You want to make sure you get a surgeon, a professor of surgery who’s performed surgery.

[02:42] Somehow, business schools are exempt from this rule, but we can be straight through from university with no experience, and yet be teaching students how to become professionals. Something doesn’t add up.

We run simulations, conduct scenario analyses, and perform what-if situations. So we put students in a thinking-cap mode, and it’s more fun.

[02:55] At the Asia School of Business, we are doing modularized learning. Basically, you can take the education in bite-sized pieces. We call them stackable microcredentials. It’s not the newest concept on Earth. It’s been around for many years; many schools have been doing it.

[03:12] But we’ve made it into a unique form suited to the Asian audience. When students come to my class—I teach finance, particularly portfolio management and investments—they watch my videos asynchronously, and at the end of the week, they can dial in or come in person. Most come in person if they’re in the neighborhood or in that zip code.

[03:34] What happens is we have the jam sessions. I mean, I don’t mean we plug in the guitar, drums, and all that. What we mean is that we run simulations, conduct scenario analyses, and perform what-if situations. So we put students in a thinking-cap mode, and it’s more fun.

[03:52] For the boring theory stuff, you can get it from any textbook or watch videos anytime you want—and you can rerun it as many times as you want, like on Netflix. You watch the series a gazillion times. But when you come to the class, we learn how to apply that theory in the living laboratory.