Business Schools Include Pandemic Crisis Management in MBA Lessons
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Here's your Money Briefing for Thursday, January 7th. I'm J.R. Whalen for The Wall Street Journal.
Why are MBA applications rising after the pandemic?
Applications to MBA programs are on the rise, with more students hoping to learn how to succeed in business. But the rules for success were upended by the pandemic. To reflect that, more business schools are updating their curricula with corporate pandemic challenges and lessons on crisis management.
How are business schools updating curricula to include pandemic lessons?
One of the popular criticisms of an MBA for years was that their curriculum is out of date, that it only focuses on numbers. Is it worth the cost? I think programs would point to what they're doing now with some of these new cases as look how up to date we are with current happenings in business and their attempts to modernize to fight that criticism.
Coming up, our business education reporter Patrick Thomas will take us inside the classroom with details of real-world lessons MBA students are learning to prepare them for the business world. That's after the break.
The pandemic forced the corporate world to rewrite its business plans, and now MBA programs are following suit. Our reporter Patrick Thomas has been checking in with some of the country's top business schools on this, and he joins us now to discuss. Patrick, thanks for being with us.
Thanks for having me.
So let's start with the allure of MBA programs. Why are people interested in them, and what do they hope to get out of them?
So students go to MBA programs for a variety of reasons, whether it's to get new skills, to advance in their current careers.
What do students hope to gain from an MBA during COVID-era disruptions?
It's highly encouraged at a lot of Wall Street firms and investment banking, private equity. Some people go to switch careers if they were in something like teaching or even journalism. want to go into finance. They want to go into consulting. That's a popular feeder from MBA programs is a career at McKinsey or other firms like that. And that's one of the main reasons why people go is career switching. And it's a good life reset. It's two years outside of work. And at a time when the job market's down, a lot of people use it to kind of reinvent their careers.
Now, you've reported on the growing popularity of MBA programs.
Which real-world pandemic case studies are being taught in MBA classes?
What are business schools doing to attract students?
Well, if you think about it, a lot of students are kind of going to these MBA programs right now. Applications are up because their lives were, for many of them, their lives were disrupted in some way by the pandemic or the economic downturn caused by the pandemic, right? So they're going and they're kind of getting a new lesson this last fall. We've seen that schools are starting to teach some of the management lessons we're seeing out of the pandemic.
How did Harvard, Columbia and others frame Operation Warp Speed and automation cases?
So students can kind of learn the new reality they're stepping into, right? If they're going into consulting, they're getting kind of a two-year education on what are some of the problems businesses are facing. And it kind of gives them a good grasp so they can go into the new reality in two years after they leave their MBA and go into the business world, having studied some of the management decisions that, good and bad, that were made during the pandemic and gleaning what lessons can be taught given the benefit of hindsight.
Right. So now let's talk about that. The pandemic forced many businesses to review their operations and others to go into survival mode. So there's a lot for business students to study. Take us through some of the examples that MBA classes are now including in their plans.
Yeah, so some of them are really interesting. For example, at Harvard Business School, which authors a ton of case studies that are used at MBA programs throughout the country, they're one of the main authors of case studies. And one of them that was taught was about Merck, the big vaccine maker in the US. And it was kind of a situation where they asked the class, should a vaccine maker like Merck accept government money from Operation Warp Speed? Would that be beneficial to your business, which cuts down the costs on manufacturing a vaccine and the cost of clinical trials and things like that?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:05–0:10
2
Why are MBA applications rising after the pandemic?
0:10–0:27
3
How are business schools updating curricula to include pandemic lessons?
0:27–1:33
4
What do students hope to gain from an MBA during COVID-era disruptions?
1:33–2:11
5
Which real-world pandemic case studies are being taught in MBA classes?
2:11–2:38
6
How did Harvard, Columbia and others frame Operation Warp Speed and automation cases?
2:38–4:23
7
How does pandemic-focused coursework differ from pre-COVID MBA curricula?
4:23–6:44
8
Can crisis-management training in MBAs justify their high cost?
6:44–10:29
Speakers
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