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B-school Reaches Out to Middle Schoolers
Middle school students became business students for a day in a program organized last fall by the Black MBA Association at Goizueta Business School at Emory University. A contingent of university students, staff, and faculty members hosted an October visit to the school by 16 middle school students. The visitors toured Goizueta facilities with current students and participated in rotating panel discussions, learning about how program, career and library services contribute to the MBA experience. The middle school students also took a crash course in key academic areas of a business education, including finance, from Goizueta Associate Dean Andrea Hershatter.
Shaun Caldwell, president of the school’s Black MBA Association, says the event reminded him of his own experience in middle school, when volunteer-organized trips to the US Naval Academy and Norfolk Naval Station helped him envision career options and recognize the rewards of hard work. “I still remember how someone in the community came into my life and changed everything,” Caldwell says. “Those experiences were pivotal.”
Worthwhile Reading: Harvard Business School Discusses Future of MBA
To help assess the relevance and vitality of its curriculum, Harvard Business School convened a symposium with business school deans, corporate recruiters, and executives to discuss the future of the MBA. Participants had contributed to an HBS research project that looked at the MBA in depth.
Project leaders interviewed 30 business school administrators and approximately 100 students, wrote case studies on MBA programs at Chicago, INSEAD, Stanford, Yale, and Harvard, collected trends data on MBA enrollments and program designs, and analyzed the curriculum of 11 business school programs. Among other provocative findings, the researchers found that financial services and consulting firms increasingly develop their own talent through in-house programs designed for employees with just undergraduate degrees.
HBS’s Working Knowledge website posted a summary of the discussion, which will be of interest to everyone who has a stake in the future on the MBA.
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