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Chapter 9. Why Business Schools Need to Know What MBAs Want to Learn and How to Find Out
Abstract
If business schools want to
maximize their prestige and funding, they must help their students to
succeed in their business careers. Many MBA students have
valuable insights of what they need for success in business. A
survey for obtaining MBA’s ideas is described. Results were
surprising, but on closer examination, made sense.
Introduction
Business schools adapt their
curricula to requirements defined by the AACSB and to needs expressed
by employers. The literature does not report any research aimed
at discovering MBA students’ perceptions of their learning needs.
If the lack of such research reflects practice accurately, a grave
injustice is being done to the students. Furthermore, graduate
business schools are not doing a good job of pursuing their own
objectives.
Why Business Schools Need to Know What MBAs Want to Learn
The research I am presenting was based on three assumptions:
1. MBA students
want to succeed in their business careers, either as corporate managers
or as entrepreneurs.
2. The business
school wants its students to be successful in their business
careers. The rationale for this assumption is that the school
stands to gain a lot if alumni succeed because they:
a) Increase the
prestige of the school.
b) Are able to
give large gifts, especially if they succeed as entrepreneurs.
c) Are likely to
offer desirable positions to future alumni of the school.
3. MBA
students have valuable insights. This is likely to be true if
they have business experience and have had opportunities to observe how
people succeed in business.
These assumptions appeared to be
eminently reasonable. I have presented them to faculty colleagues
and no one has disputed them. My intention was to use information
obtained from students about their learning needs to modify my teaching
methods and to make the information and methodology available to those
who are interested.
Finding Out What MBA Students Want to Learn
I conducted the study in
September and October of 1999 at Pace University. The business
school, located in downtown Manhattan and suburban Westchester County
enrolls 2000 MBA students. Eighty percent of the students attend
school part-time and work in the daytime in entry level and supervisory
jobs mostly in finance and computing. The school is AACSB
accredited.
Previously, I had done eight MBA
exit surveys during the 1988-1993 time period. These studies had
revealed consistently that less than half of the graduating MBA
students were willing to recommend the school’s MBA program to good
friends. The likely reason for the low level of satisfaction with
the program was that students reported that most of the core courses
were not valuable. While courses in their major fields received
higher ratings, there was room for improvement there also. On the
basis of these findings, the school made changes in the MBA curriculum
and I made many changes in my teaching methods. These changes
aimed at helping students to develop interpersonal skills and in my
courses to improve students’ ability to market themselves.
During the Spring of 1999, the
director of the MBA program asked me to conduct another exit survey to
obtain information that might lead to further improvements in the MBA
curriculum. The exit survey was to be conducted during
November-December 1999.
In preparing the questionnaire
for this exit survey, I reviewed previous student surveys, findings of
an internal career planning task force, interviews with corporate
recruiters, my personal experience in business at Mobil Oil and IBM, my
consulting work, reports of 1,000 students over the previous 8 years
for which they had interviewed 10,000 alumni, managers, executives,
recruiters and headhunters and my reading of the school catalog,
strategic plan, internal memos, and other university publications, as
well as reading many books, journals, proceedings, magazines,
newspapers and attendance at 17 professional and academic meetings.
As I was completing design of the
survey form for the exit survey, it occurred to me that the first page
of the survey questionnaire could be administered productively to brand
new MBA students to discover their perceived learning needs. See
Exhibit 9.1, which asks new MBA students to evaluate 16 abilities from
the point of view of their value in helping them to maximize their
success in business and with respect to the respondents’ perceived need
for improvement.
The Survey
Questionnaires were distributed
to instructors of the 16 sections of the first course that MBA’s
take. The covering letter, written by the director of the MBA
program asked the instructors to administer the questionnaires as soon
as possible. A total of 310 usable questionnaires were returned
within two weeks. This represented an 82.2% response rate.
The questionnaires were tallied, some simple math was performed and the
results are presented in Exhibit 9.2 and Exhibit 9.3.
Exhibit 2 shows the averages of
the data submitted by the respondents. Exhibit 3 presents the
same information ranked by Composite Index (sum of the “Valuable” and
the “Need Improvement” averages). The interpretation is that if
the school wants to help its MBA students to succeed in business (the
school’s mission statement says that it does) the school should help
the MBA students to improve the abilities that they identify as most
valuable and in which they require the most improvement. The
school should help students to improve the abilities shown in the top
part of Exhibit 3:
1. To be able to recognize business opportunities.
2. To be able to solve business problems.
3. To market themselves skillfully.
4. To do a good job of giving oral presentations.
Lower rated abilities were, in order:
5. Competence in an important business discipline.
6. Ability to apply theory to practice.
7. Ability to integrate global issues into business decisions.
8. Skill in resolving conflicts.
9. Skill in writing business reports.
10. Skill in directing the work of others.
11. Understanding of business areas outside your major.
12. Skill in starting your own business.
13. Ability to prioritize activities.
14. Ability to work well with people of diverse backgrounds.
15. Ability to develop spreadsheet models.
16. Ability to use the Internet.
The lower ratings were caused
either by low perceived value or by low perceived need for improvement,
or both. Many of the school’s MBA students have jobs that require
heavy usage of computers so that they do not perceive a great need for
improving their spreadsheet and Internet skills. Some of them are
professional web-site and systems designers.
Recommendations to The School
I made the following recommendations to the business school faculty (verbatim):
First we should evaluate the results of this study:
1. Do our students’ evaluations
make sense? Should the Indexes of these particular four abilities
be at the top?
2. If our students’ evaluations
make sense, why is the AACSB emphasizing other abilities and giving
light attention to our students’ top 4?
3. Furthermore, if our students’
estimates are based on good understanding of the business world and
their needs for improvement, are we looking at a superb opportunity to
do great deeds: vastly increasing the value of the school’s MBA degree,
increasing our prestige, getting many more applications so we can be
more selective and raise GMATs of incoming students, and in the future
receive bigger gifts from more successful and grateful alumni?
In my opinion, the answers to these questions are:
1. On reflection, yes and
yes. If a student does not improve in these 4, how useful will
the others be?
2. The AACSB, in all their studies, do not ask the right questions, of the right people.
3. Yes, we are looking at a superb
opportunity, a far greater opportunity than the ones discovered in the
1988-1993 exit surveys.
The final conclusion is that we should start helping
our MBA students to improve the four abilities identified here.
What About Undergraduate Students?
I have administered the same
questionnaire to several undergraduate classes. The outcome was
the same. The top four categories were:
1. To be able to recognize business opportunities.
2. To be able to solve business problems.
3. To market themselves skillfully.
4. To do a good job of giving oral presentations.
Recommendations to Readers of This Paper
If readers of
this paper want to increase the usefulness of their programs in helping
their students to achieve success in their business careers, they
should follow the procedure described here to discover their students’
learning needs and then they should make appropriate changes in
curricula, teaching methods and teaching evaluation systems.
If you need the questionnaire in
MS Excel format, go to http://webpage.pace.edu/lwiner/ and click on the fourth item.
This Page was last update:
Monday, February 20, 2006 at 5:46:00 PM
This page was originally posted: 9/25/2005; 7:33:30 PM.
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