The faculty at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business (GSB) last week approved changes that will allow its students even wider latitude in the courses they select, making a curriculum long considered to be one of the most flexible among MBA programs even more so.
The faculty also voted to create a new academic concentration in analytical management and to require a leadership development course as part of its evening and weekend MBA programs, as it currently does for its full-time MBA program.
“We had the most flexible MBA program in the world even before these changes, and now we dialed up that flexibility further,” said Dean Edward Snyder in a statement announcing the curriculum changes. “Our philosophy remains that our students own their experience here and each student should play the major role in determining the course of study that is best for him or her.”
To graduate, full-time MBA students will still be expected to complete nine required courses, 11 electives and a leadership course, but more substitute classes have been added to satisfy the required courses. To meet the 11 elective requirements, students can select from hundreds of courses both at the business school and in other university departments.
More rigorous courses have been included among the new options within the required portion of the curriculum, a result of the higher quality of students entering the program, according to Snyder.
“We have added a hybrid finance class containing five weeks of corporate finance and five weeks of investments that will allow all the standard corporate and investment classes to be taken up a notch in difficulty,” he said.
The curriculum changes, which will be effective for students entering in summer 2009, will apply to each the full-time MBA program, evening MBA program and weekend MBA program.
The framework of required courses will also shift some under the newly adopted curriculum, part of an effort to make the program requirements easier to understand. Students will still select courses from the foundation areas of accounting, microeconomics and statistics, but in place general management course requirements, students now instead will select classes representing functions (finance, marketing and operations), management (decisions, people and organizations) and the environment in which firms operate.
Steven Kaplan, Chicago professor of entrepreneurship and finance and co-chair of the curriculum review committee, underscored that the curriculum changes, while introducing greater flexibility, are not a radical departure from the existing curriculum, which received consistently high marks from alumni, current students and corporate recruiters. “More than 92 percent of our recent graduates say they are satisfied or very satisfied with the business education they received here,” Kaplan said.
Chicago’s enhanced commitment to flexibility within its curriculum is based on a school-wide philosophy that there is no singular path to career success, says Snyder. “Research on the career paths of our alumni by Professor Marianne Bertrand shows that successful graduates varied their coursework,” he said, adding that such variation would not be possible under a lock-step MBA experience.
For more on Chicago’s recent curriculum changes, click here.
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