24 March 2006

Is Yale SOM Throwing '06 Admits a Curve?

News sources report that faculty at the Yale School of Management voted unanimously this week in support of an extensively revised approach to the School's core MBA curriculum. The vote appears to clear the way for introduction of curriculum changes starting this fall. That means that 2006 admits will be the first to experience what is being called a radically new approach to teaching management concepts and skills.

The revised curriculum, as described in news reports, will replace separate skill-specific courses such as finance and accounting with thematic 'modules' that integrate several different skill sets. Students will continue to learn fundamental MBA concepts and skills, but they will be asked to apply this knowledge to the same examples of management problems as they go along. The idea of this teaching approach is to prepare students to apply the full set of MBA skills to the workplace immediately after graduation.

The Yale Daily News reports that current MBA students have been briefed on the new curriculum and are as supportive of it as the faculty are. In fact, one student joked that he had heard several first-year students say they wished they were doing their first year over again this fall, so that they could benefit from the new curriculum.

One of the benefits that future SOM grads are expected to gain from the changed curriculum is greater competitiveness in the hiring market. SOM Dean Joel Podolny noted that employers have been complaining of "a gap" between what MBA students learn and what they need to understand in order to perform on the job. The integrated approach to teaching core business skills is meant to close that gap.

We admire Yale for taking the initiative to stop merely talking about revising business education and to actually do something about it. If Yale's experiment works out, it may set the pace for MBA education for a generation to come.

But we also can't help wondering whether this year's SOM admits aren't being thrown something of a curve ball. If the news reports are accurate, the core curriculum changes are so extensive that 2006 admits may well find themselves getting a very different educational experience than the one they applied for.

This is, of course, the kind of dilemma that organizations and businesses always face when they want or need to introduce an innovation. You have good reasons for wanting to pursue change, but you also need to be fair to your existing stakeholders.

We don't doubt that the Yale SOM will deal with this situation in a responsible and ethical way, or that the students enrolling this fall will receive a quality MBA education. But the School would be doing itself and its admits a favor by acting now to communicate the timeline and implications of the curriculum overhaul more clearly. Sometimes it's not what you do but the way that you do it that determines whether people go away satisfied or not.

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