How Business Education Must Change for the Future

Transcript

Anne Balaz: [00:04] Colleges of business have to be leaders. They have to be out in front of change. People are looking to us to recognize that change, to identify that change, and to build programs to meet that change and those challenges.

[00:29] At the University of Toledo, where I am the new dean of the College of Business and Innovation, and that's very special, too, because I believe we're the only college of business and innovation. We're building new programs. We're meeting new partners. We're bringing new ideas to our students and our community.

[00:47] Our community is very engaged with us, our alumni, the businesses in our community. We're reaching beyond our city and our region, and frankly making an example of what a college of business should be.

Augustine Lado: [01:00] Business schools need to adaptive to changes in the marketplace. One of the changes obviously is globalization. I come from a school in northeastern end of New York. Our kids, who are largely from that region, are not exposed to traveling in other parts of the world.

[01:22] What we did, as an example, is to globalize, to internationalize the students. We created a course that exposes students to doing business in different parts of the world.

McRae Banks: [01:33] One of the things that we've seen is a severe need for doctoral education around the world. We have an initiative that AACSB has written about before. It's called the X Culture Project, that brings together about 100 universities worldwide to have their students do real time consulting projects for organizations.

[01:53] They're learning about virtual teams. They're learning about cross cultural communication. They're learning about the ways to address time zone differences, to address institutional differences, and so on. Because of that, we've made these relationships with all of these universities and faculty members in those universities.

[02:16] Two thirds of them don't have PhDs. They say that it would be important for them to have a PhD to continue making progress in their institution. As a result of that, we've designed an online PhD program, research based PhD program, in business administration. First two concentrations are in management and international business. That's to meet those particular needs.

[02:40] Now it's available to domestic faculty members as well. These are people that are place bound. They cannot afford to give up their jobs, their day jobs, in order to come to the US, or go to the UK, or wherever it may be, to work on a PhD. That is going to have an impact on the students around the world.

Melani Machinea: [03:02] We have lots of challenges [laughs] in an emerging economy. It's very cyclical. We're going through a crisis right now. Business education suddenly becomes expensive for most of the population. We are looking for ways to attract international students, which is also challenging because they want to come down to Argentina.

[03:22] People are realizing of the importance of having higher education. There is a market there. It's not a huge market. It doesn't grow too much every year. That's why we have to be agile. We have to adapt and maybe launch new programs, or shortened programs to accommodate the demand.

Rama Yelkur: [03:39] We need to prepare students for jobs that we don't even know exist. Technology is changing so rapidly that classroom instruction is not enough anymore. We need to provide students with the experiences and a holistic type of preparation that will prepare them for the jobs out there in workplace as business students.

[04:01] For example, accountants, CPA firms are saying, "Oh, you don't need to teach students accounting. You need to teach them to work with clients. You need to teach them the soft skills. You need to teach them to interact in the workplace."

[04:16] All these things that we thought came naturally, now we're going to have to incorporate in the curriculum.

Bing Liang Chen: [04:21] As a business school from China, we will do lots of research and try to bring the traditional, local wisdom to the world.