In early December, Columbia Business School announced that it plans to shake things up a little. The school will revamp its core curriculum in 2008 in an effort to give students more of an opportunity to tailor their business education to meet specific individual career goals.
Make no mistake. The fundamentals are not getting tossed. All students will still be expected to complete several required courses, including finance, accounting, leadership and strategy. But in the new core, the number of required first-year courses has been reduced from nine to six, freeing students up to choose from a range of eight electives spread across three main categories in their second semester. These electives constitute the “flexible” part of the new core.
The categories of the new electives are Organizations, Performance and Markets. “They represent a cross section of areas that we wanted to make sure students had as part of their foundation, but where we wanted to also give students a little more flexibility to tailor that material to their career interests,” Paul Glasserman, the Jack R. Anderson professor of business and senior vice-dean at Columbia, told BusinessWeek in an article posted last week.
Within the Organizations bucket, students can select from Organizational Change, Power and Influence, and Social Capital. In the category of Performance, they can opt for Operations Strategy or Performance Measurement. And for Markets courses, they can choose between Game Theory, Global Economic Environment II: Business Cycles and Financial Markets and Strategy, Structure and Incentives. Some of these courses will be available beginning in spring 2008, and all will be offered by spring 2009.
The choices individual students make within the flexible component of the core can help them shape their education to fit specific career interests or goals, says Glasserman. “For example, under Markets, which includes courses in economics, some students interested in a career in strategy consulting might choose an economics course that would fit with that objective,” he told BW. Meanwhile, all students will get the necessary fundamentals of managerial economics and macroeconomics as part of the required part of the core, he continued.
The changes to the core were put into motion following a unanimous vote last May by a committee convened by Columbia Dean Glenn Hubbard. “The whole process of reviewing the curriculum was a very positive one,” Glasserman, who served on the committee, told BW. “This really was the outgrowth of a faculty effort,” he added.
Students and corporate recruiters, too, provided input into the core changes, according to Glasserman. In addition to completing teaching and course evaluations, students also were asked to participate in focus groups as part of the review of existing courses. Columbia also brought in representatives from six consulting firms to provide targeted feedback on the proposed syllabi for some of the new courses, which Glasserman anticipates will be done in other areas as well.
Students’ concern about being prepared for summer internships was a major driver toward increasing flexibility in the core curriculum for the first year, Glasserman says. “Being able to take more electives in the first year allows them to tailor some of the foundational knowledge to what they plan to do during the summer,” he said.
But the faculty felt strongly that this flexibility should not come at the expense of providing a strong educational foundation for the rest of their careers, Glasserman continued. The resulting core, with its required and flexible parts, attempts to strike a balance between the two.
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