For Columbia Business School, the current financial crisis is a valuable teaching opportunity to prepare students for any economic climate. Over the last few months, a faculty committee led by Professor Paul Glasserman, the Jack R. Anderson Professor of Business, Decision, Risk and Operations, created an array of recommendations to integrate the recent downturn into the school’s MBA curriculum.
“The committee’s ultimate goal was to use the financial crisis in order to advance students’ abilities for integrative thinking. The crisis is the result of the complex interaction of many factors, and we wanted to create more opportunities in the MBA curriculum to address these types of interactions that cut across traditional courses and disciplines,” said Professor Glasserman. The committee recommended that initial changes should include a team-taught course on The Future of Finance; an integrative case study on the collapse and the future of the auto industry; and a focus on promoting integration across disciplines—especially in core classes taken by first-year students.
Columbia Business School has already taken measures to respond to the financial crisis. Last fall, Dean Glen Hubbard established a series of forums focusing on the state of the economy. Additionally, this summer Thomas Russo, former vice-chairman of Lehman Brothers, Inc., taught a half-term course called “Credit Crisis: As Seen Through Different Lenses,” and the fall orientation speaker, Wei Jiang, Associate Professor of Finance and Economics, spoke to incoming students about how each of the school’s core courses relates to the economic downturn. Posing the question “How do we make decisions under uncertainty?” to frame her lecture about the financial crisis, Professor Jiang commented that making decisions under uncertainty is “the most important skill you can develop.”
To find out more about Columbia Business School’s response to the economic crisis, click here.
What do you think?
Is a timely curriculum a major factor in your business school decision?
What skills would you want to learn in business school to deal with an economic crisis?
