A peer-to-peer discussion with Dean Gareth James of Emory University's Goizueta Business School.
James shares his insights on navigating the waning popularity of the full-time MBA, despite its consistent hold on business school reputation, and the necessity for diversification in revenue streams. In recent years, specialized master’s programs have emerged as an answer to this conundrum, simultaneously serving an emerging pool of students from non-business backgrounds and positively impacting the recruitment of graduates from all business master’s programs.
Faculty buy-in has been key to the successful introduction of new programs under his leadership, with involvement from ideation to implementation increasing their engagement and excitement in the process and future direction of curriculum.
“The next five to 10 years are going to see possibly more rapid changes… With the technological innovations going on, we’re all trying to get a handle on that and I’m sure that’s going to have a big impact on not just what we teach but how we teach it and the type of students we’re teaching…”
Hear how James encourages the integration of new ideas within your established knowledge sets to maximize your ability to adapt and respond to rapid change. By leveraging the strengths of your business school and seizing opportunities in your backyard for growth, episode 50 offers a positive story of progress in the academy.
About Dean James:
Gareth James became the John H. Harland Dean of Goizueta Business School in July 2022. Renowned for his visionary leadership, statistical mastery, and commitment to the future of business education, James brings vast and versatile experience to the role. His collaborative nature and data-driven scholarship offer fresh energy and focus aimed at furthering Goizueta’s mission: to prepare principled leaders to have a positive influence on business and society. Read full bio here.
Photos courtesy of Goizueta Business School
Transcript:
Music.
Dave 0:13
Welcome to Deans Counsel, a podcast aimed at supporting university leaders holding one of the more critical jobs on a university campus. Your panelists, Ken Kring, Jim Ellis and Dave eichenberry, engage in conversation with highly accomplished deans and other academic leaders regarding the ever complex array of challenges that Deans face in one of the loneliest and most unique jobs in the academy. Welcome to our 50th episode of Dean's Council, wow. Where has the time gone? We hope you've enjoyed our shows as much as we've enjoyed putting them together for you. We always enjoy hearing your feedback, so please keep that flowing. Our guest today is Gareth. James Gareth has had a remarkable publication run as a data scientist with over 30,000 Google Scholar citations, and while distracted with other duties, today, he's still active in research. Interestingly, Gareth has levered that scientific data inspired approach to academic leadership, both in the Marshall school at USC, where he served for 24 years in various capacities, and now as dean of Emory's glissade Business School, a role he assumed in 2022 since his arrival, Gareth has wasted no time in reshaping Rosetta's portfolio of revenue generating master's programs, with two new offerings already launched and with more planned, he has Fundamentally reshaped the risk profile of Rosetta's business model through programmatic diversification, schools, revenues are now reliably predictable, even though individual programs naturally experience volatile enrollments. In this interview, we gain interesting insights and pearls of wisdom, for example, while the full time MBA program is often the dominant driver of a school's reputation worldwide, enrollments in that program as a fraction of total business school student body are probably much lower than you might expect in such a dynamic, strategic environment, driving change is always challenging. Here, Gareth shares insights into tools he has used to drive faculty buy in as he has shifted attention away from the traditional MBA and as an outside leader coming into a well established organization, we hear his advice on things to try and also things to avoid. We hope you enjoy.
Ken 2:37
We're here today with Gareth, James the dean of the guisetta business school at Emory University. Gareth joined Emory in July of 2022 and had a distinguished career as a scholar and an administrator, having been extraordinary over 30,000 citations. Area of Interest, extremely relevant to the deaning, we would guess. Eager to hear, sort of, your thoughts, and maybe even just beginning. Gareth, sort of, why'd you choose to become a dean in 2022
Garreth James 3:15
Well, first of all, thank you for having me on here. It's great to have a chat about all of these topics. So lots of interesting stuff to talk about. How did I end up as a dean? Yeah, the same sort of story, I think as a lot of people, I started off doing a PhD, and I was going to save the world through my research publications and the work that I was doing there. And had a lot of fun doing that, and as you noted, some some success with that work, some visibility and some impact, for sure, but what I discovered over time was that what really gave me joy was not just writing the research papers, which I still do and still have fun With, but the opportunity to have a much smaller impact, but on each of a larger number of faculty and staff through this Dean position and other administrative positions that I was in and through them collectively having a larger total impact on both the research environment and the education of literally 1000s of different students that as one individual I couldn't impact directly.
Dave 4:28
Gareth, you've spent some time at some quality institutions us, the USC Marshall School and now, Dean of quasetta, I was wondering if you could share for us the change in the marketplace, if you will, the change in the the landscape for Business, School, higher education. What's your take of where things are going? And I guess, as a quick follow on, what steps are you doing now, and how are you doing it at Emory,
Garreth James 4:55
yeah, so I think, I think it's fair to say, the last 10. The 15 years have seen a very significant change in the business school, financial marketplace. It was always the case, of course, that the full time MBA program was the King, the leader, and in terms of reputation, that's still the case. I think it's fair to say, whenever I hear congratulations or people upset about ranking of our school, what they're actually talking about is the ranking of our full time MBA program. But to them, the two things are synonymous, so sort of a very, very high fraction of your school's reputation and quality metrics and things are related to that full time MBA program. But there's an interesting statistic which I like to sort of quiz people on, and that is, if you were to sort of take a guess as to among all students doing a business degree worldwide, what fraction of students are doing the traditional full time two year MBA program. Anyone want to take a guess as to what fraction of students are doing that two year MBA? Given we got some experts in the audience here,
Dave 6:12
I was told there was no quizzes on this exam today. It's
Garreth James 6:16
a spark quiz, but everyone gets it wrong, so maybe we be closer. I was gonna
Dave 6:22
say 8% but
Ken 6:24
I don't know if that's high or low. Well, and I was gonna say, I only can bet that it's descending, not increasing. Yeah.
Garreth James 6:32
So that, yeah, that so, so Dave, that 8% is closer than most get. It's actually 3% so first of all, about 60 to 70% of students are undergraduate students. But even among graduate students, it's only about 10% of graduate students, even that are doing that two year full time. So so you've got a program that represents a very small fraction, on average, of students. Of course, at the top business schools, it's a little bit higher fraction than that, but it's still a relatively low number generally. And then in terms of the revenue side, even among those 3% of students, often the revenue is pretty low because there's a lot of scholarship in discounting going on lot of expenditure in terms of career support resources going into those students. So you've got this program that basically drives the reputation of your school, but is essentially a loss leader in terms of revenue and costs, and so that's become more and more significant issue over the last decade. So business schools are trying to figure out how to adjust to that changing marketplace. So if you're one of the sort of two schools out there that has an endowment of two to $5 billion and then you can rely on your endowment, but for everyone else out there, they have to generate revenue in other ways. And of course, the big change has been the increase in specialized master's programs. So that number has gone up tremendously worldwide and certainly in the US in the last decade, to the point now that if you look at the top, say, 25 business schools in the US, there's over 100 specialized master's programs collectively among those different business schools. So on average, is maybe four or five per school. And if you look at my previous institution, USC, as I think you know, because your colleague was, was the dean there for a long time, they've started up probably 10 different specialized masters programs just in the period while I was on the faculty there, and at the time, it was very controversial. It was sort of thought that you were lowering the quality of a business school to do that, but the reality has been that it's actually increased the quality of the USC Marshall School over that time period, because those were good programs, but just as importantly, they generated revenue that the school could then use to bolster up the quality of some of the traditional programs out there, and overall, was a net benefit to the school. And to answer your second part of your question, yes, we're doing some similar things here at goise WETA, we have now four specialized masters programs, three of which just started in the last couple of years. One started right when I first arrived here, and two brand new ones have just arrived. So
Ken 9:31
Gareth, without sort of picking on any one program or another, clearly your statistical modeling and evidence based decision making must come to play in terms of looking at the portfolio of programs and then setting directions in terms of investments and enrollments. And be interested to hear, sort of behind the surface or under the surface, sort of how you have. You've gone about leading and facilitating change around different programmatic emphasis. So
Garreth James 10:07
when I was an undergraduate student, I majored in both finance and statistics, and throughout my career, those those two areas have been very useful even even in a dean type role, and that the concept of portfolio diversification really comes to mind when you think about these various different programs. So just as an example, we had to present our budget to the provost last April, and we had projections in there for student numbers, how many students we are expecting in each of the individual programs. And what I like to tell the faculty is that every one of those projections was wrong, but the total actually came out of basically exactly what we'd predicted. And so there you get the sort of diversification aspect that some some numbers were higher than we were expecting. Some numbers were lower, but because we had a reasonable portfolio of different programs, it really reduced the overall risk of our estimation. And so the reality is that without that portfolio of programs, your risk really becomes extremely high. The full time MBA program, as everyone has experienced, has gone through a period of decline in terms of domestic applications. This year, I think everyone's seen a little bit of an uptick. We certainly saw a nice uptick in domestic applications. But over the last sort of five years, there's definitely been a decline. There's been an interesting corresponding increase in applications from international students. So if you just look at total applications, certainly at Goys weather, our total applications have gone up every year. But underneath that, you see sort of the hidden picture of decline in domestic and significant increase in international students. And of course, you can't make up a class that's 90% international students for your full time MBA program to start with, placement statistics become much more challenging with that population, so we've adapted to that with these specialized masters programs, some of them which are also relatively domestic students, but A lot of them are much more heavily international students, and that's what you also see with business schools in the US over the last five to 10 years, that our exposure to international students has become much larger. Collectively, I'm talking about among all US business schools out there. And the positive side of that is that it's added a buffer for any potential declines in domestic students. But the negative side of the risk, side of it, of course, is that with the increased exposure to international students, you become more exposed to international dynamics, the international economy, politics, geopolitics in a way that engineering schools have been exposed to for a while, but now business schools are also seeing that sort of uptick in exposure and risk, both the upside and the downside to it. Right. Gareth,
Dave 13:17
I was wondering if you could take us through you followed on introducing new programs. And what I'm thinking about here are, I just see a little bit of a I'll use the phrase culture clash. That may be too strong, but here you have your traditional graduate programs office with a strong MBA, a strong full time MBA ethos to it, let's say and, and you're now bringing on some master's programs. Did that create any stress or strain, either with faculty and or staff members? And how did you navigate those channels?
Garreth James 13:54
Well, if I if I told you, no, you know I was lying, right? So, yeah, of course, yes, I mean change. Change is hard. Humans don't like change very much, but I will say that the process of creating these new programs here was actually less challenging than I might have predicted ahead of time, and of course, I worked hard to try to facilitate that process, but I was fortunate that when I arrived here, I had a couple of advantages. One was that these specialized masters have been around for a little while now, so it wasn't as challenging as say, at USC when they they created them, it was much earlier in the process, and there was much more uncertainty, if you like, associated with both whether students would turn up for these programs, and also what would be the reputation and quality impact of doing that? And I think in the end, we discovered that there was a positive answer to both of those. So when I write Dick boys weather, the marketplace understands these programs better now. So there was also a second advantage I had. Had, which was, I think the faculty and staff realized that there were some changes that needed to be made, that that the school couldn't keep functioning just relying on the full time MBA program and our very high quality undergraduate program as well. So there was already a sense that that we needed to make adjustments. So it was more a question of which adjustments should we make, and to that regard, I worked very hard to involve the faculty very heavily in that process. So before I even arrived and started as Dean, the Interim Dean and I met with the faculty, we told them we were going to be creating some new programs, but we wanted them to make proposals on what those new programs would be. And of course, the first reaction was, oh, no one will submit proposals. You'll get nothing out of this. Well, in the end, we got 15 high quality proposals from faculty on potential new programs, and then we put together a faculty committee to evaluate those proposals and come back with recommendations based on the characteristics that make boys wetter a great school. Where are our strengths, the local economy? Where are we in the southeast of the country, and where does there seem to be demand from students for programs? And in the end, that committee came back with recommendations. And through a little bit of management on my side as well, they came back with recommendations that pretty much matched what I wanted to do anyway. But as a result of that process, the faculty buy in was much, much higher than if I'd come along and said, Ah, this is what we should do, right? So in the end, we had a vote from the faculty on these two brand new programs that we just created, and the faculty vote was something like between 95 and 98% of the faculty voted in support of these programs, whereas I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have been at that level if I'd suggested these programs in the first place. So the two brand new programs that we have, our new master in business for veterans program, we're fortunate to have a retired three star Lieutenant General on our faculty who's running this program, and so that was a natural one for us, given our strengths in that area. And then the second one being new master in management program, which these programs are very popular in Europe, but they're becoming more successful in the US. And I know of at least two other Top Tier Business schools that are also starting up those programs this year. These are programs for new undergraduates from non business areas with very little business training, who are coming in and realizing that maybe it would be good to get a year of business training before trying to go out into the marketplace. And with both programs, have been successful. The first year, we have about 30 students, and each of those programs planning to grow them to 60 to 70 over the next couple of years. And each of them, and they bring different types of students into the business school, and we're excited about both of them.
Ken 18:07
You know, Gareth, one thing that we noted in anticipating this, this meeting with you, is that you've had a relatively fast start during a time when it's more challenging for some of your peers. Be sort of interested to just hear your thinking about, what did you know coming in? What did your previous experience sort of help you anticipate? What were you able to either import or get right from the beginning that made this sort of, what you might call a two way street of building a plan together, effective.
Garreth James 18:43
Yeah, so the challenges here on the administrative side, on the sort of logistical side, of getting these programs up and running and approved, certainly challenging. I think we have an advantage at Emory that it's a private university. So some of the challenges that a public university has we don't have though. Emory, I think, has historically, been slow at starting up these new programs, and there's a history through the University of not being in a rush to start these up. I had a couple of advantages on this track as well. When I arrived, we had an almost brand new provost and relatively new president, both of whom came in and were dedicated towards creating a larger portfolio of graduate programs, not just in the business school, but throughout Emory and so they were motivated to ensure that in terms of any processes we had to go through at the university level, received a relatively fast track. In fact, my biggest challenge was not convincing my faculty that these were good programs to launch, but actually convincing them that if we went in ahead and. To launch them, the university would allow us to launch them. They were convinced that Emory would stop them and that they wouldn't get approvals. I knew that wasn't the case because I was talking directly to the provost and president, and they were motivated. So once we got these programs approved, and really record time and under one year, the whole approval process went through, they were actually shocked at how rapidly that had happened, and suddenly they were motivated to propose new programs and additional things. So there was a positive cycle from that, that they take. There was some trust built up that not only trust with me, that I could get these through, but trust university would have proved them as well. And so that's that's all been very positive. And you know, I like to say that if, if you, if you sort of owe the provost a million dollars, then you have a problem. But if you owe the provost 10 million then he has a problem, and he's more motivated to help, help you out in that sense. So I think that, you know, the I seen this in not only our school, but a number of business schools at similar levels that I've visited, the budget model has been turning around in the last decade, and there are a number of new deans coming in and being asked to sort of okay, you have to sort out the budget challenge. And fortunately, in a business school, we have a lot of opportunities for dealing with some of those budget challenges, and it's more a question of just putting in the hard work. And there are students out there that really want to learn about business some other schools and some other disciplines, I think it's much more challenging. I wouldn't want to be the dean of law school, or some other schools like that that really don't have as many options for new financial possibilities.
Dave 21:50
Gareth, I wanted to circle back a little bit into these, this mixing of populations between your constellation of MBAs programs with these one year programs earlier, you mentioned that the MBAs, there's a level of service and support that is that's requisite for supporting that program. Are you extending that same ethos over into the one year degree programs. Are you keeping those populations really relatively separate in the classroom? Are you integrating them into the classroom? What? How are you managing these, these various groups and cultures and keeping their identities as well? Yeah. So
Garreth James 22:36
again, lot, yeah, lots of answers to that question. So first of all, in terms of mixing within the classroom, there are both positives and negatives to mixing within the classroom, and this is one area where there's been a bit of a difference between my prior experience at USC and that here at Emory voice weather at USC, there was a lot of mixing of the specialized master students and the MBA students in the classroom. And there were some challenges associated with that and different demographics and things, but there were also some positive aspects, one of them being that it allowed us, for example, the master in business analytics program that USC started up over a decade ago now and has grown very large. There were a number of classes created for that program. The MBA students were able to sit in to experience and get some stronger technical skills, which we never could have created just for the MBA students. Here just wasn't enough demand for those classes. And as a result, our MBA students graduating were graduating with stronger technical skills, and that, in turn, actually changed the demographics of some of the MBA applicants to the business school programs. And so that gain had a virtuous positive cycle, that quality of the MBA applicants actually grew stronger over time. So that was the experience at USC here at Emory, traditionally, the business analytics students have been completely separated from the MBA. Students have had their own unique classes since they arrived. We've been working a little bit harder to have a little bit more integration, and over time, I think that's grown and will continue to grow, and I think we'll see some of the positive aspects in terms of the sort of various support structures you mentioned. Yes, so the full time MBAs have a lot of support. Obviously, careers office, one of the strongest characteristics of goyswaiter has always been the career placement statistics for both our BBA students and our MBA students, but with our specialized master's programs, historically, the ones that have have been around for a while, we've also seen very strong career support, and as these new programs come up, the career. Reyes office, we've been adding staff there. It's obviously a challenge for them, because they're having to learn how to provide support for different types of students, different demographics out there, but we have a great office, and I'm confident that we can make that work. Frankly, the economic environment has been challenging for placing students in all the different areas this year. I think all my colleagues I talked to around the country having having some similar challenges there. So So yes, there are challenges associated with doing this. When we first started these specialized masters programs at USC, there were sort of retrospect, somewhat naive belief that we could tell the students, we're not going to provide career support, you have to find jobs yourself. And they all agreed to that and in the abstract, but once they arrived on campus, of course, they wanted career support. So the first couple of years, there was a lot of demand from students, but also a lot of learning, as we're flying the plane, how to make that work. One of the advantages at Emory and boys weta is that because we started that process a little bit later, there's a lot of mistakes that we at USC made, and that others along the way have made, that I think we can skip over some of those errors, not that we're not making mistakes ourselves, but we can minimize some of that from the learning from previous problems.
Dave 26:24
Have you had to spend a little time coaching your employers as to how to distinguish you know, whether it's with experience requirements or salary expectations across the different degrees, or has that been has that smoothed out over time? Yeah,
Garreth James 26:43
so, I mean, it'd be interesting to talk to our careers office on that I my my sense is that the employers, these specialized masters, at least most of them, have been around for long enough that the employers have a relatively good sense of the different types of students, I think in terms of expectations, it's maybe more working with our students on setting what the right expectations are for them that typically students coming out of these specialized master's programs have less work experience than a full time MBA student would have, And as a result, their salary expectations need to be somewhat lower than full time MBA. And making those students, making them aware that, no, you're not going to get as high a salary as a full time MBA, but you're going to come out with a good job and and still a good salary. But it's not quite the same market as the full time MBAs. I think that's actually a positive, because when these programs first started, there was a concern that there'd be cannibalization, that the students graduating would make it harder for our MBA students to get jobs, or something like that. In fact, if anything, it's been the opposite, because the specialized master students have added to the pool of total students graduating. And actually it's sometimes made it easier to get recruiters onto campus, because they can simultaneously recruit for both MBA students and specialized master students and somewhat different jobs that they might be looking for. But it actually encourages them to come onto campus, especially schools that have relatively smaller full time MBA programs, and both for goy sweater and Marshall, they don't have the largest full time MBA programs out there. And so the specialized master students actually add to that that bulk, if you like,
Ken 28:39
we'd like to do you to address another topic that we think our listeners will be interested in, and that is, here you are coming from elsewhere, and there are advantages and disadvantages. We're sure of that expertise from another place interested to hear in particular, sort of what you have, how you've gotten your arms around, sort of the skills capabilities within, and how you've deployed some of those so that you as a new dean, aren't pulled into everything.
Garreth James 29:12
Yeah, so my faculty started finding me $10,000 every time I mentioned USC. So now I just refer to it as my previous employer, or that place in California, or something like that. But it's true. I never like to hear when, when people came in from outside institutions talking too much about what, what worked at their previous place, because even if that's correct, it doesn't necessarily mean it will work at the current institution. The reality is that actually goiswater and Marshall are very, very similar in a lot of ways. Marshall is much larger school than goise wetter, but in terms of sort of the breakdown of undergraduate MBA, part time MBA, Executive MBA, now specialized masters program. Programs, the quality, the rankings of the schools, both of them are in relatively large cities and such like. There's a lot of similarities between them. And so it is true that a lot of what I learned in my previous job, a lot of that knowledge does transfer over to goy sweater, but a lot of it doesn't as well. And so one of the things I was very cognizant of when I came here was trying not to over interpret what I knew from my previous institution and realize that there are differences, and the challenge is trying to get the right balance. You shouldn't ignore what you already know from your previous place, but you shouldn't assume that all of it this directly transfers over. And even if it does directly transfer over, try not to tell people that you're just directly transferring it over, because they don't like to hear that. So so one of the reasons I think I got this job is that the provost realized what a great job Marshall had done, and did want to take some of that success and transfer to always wetter and Emery and I think, you know, we've done a good job, but we've also been able to build on things that USC didn't do. So the master and management program, I think, is the is the one degree program that USC doesn't have in specialized masters. They have just about every other possible degree program out there. I also think Marshall created too many different degree programs. In retrospect, I think it would have been better to create a slightly smaller number and concentrate on trying to grow a little more mass in those. And I think if you talk to people at Marshall, I would probably agree with that. So I've been cognizant of trying both simultaneously, relatively quickly, ramp up the number of specialized masters, but not but, but not try to get to 10 or something like what Marshall has, and also to take advantage of things like the fact that I mentioned we have a three star general retired on our faculty, and so that that made it a natural option to consider a master's in business for veterans, also the part of the country wherein there's a lot of veterans around, there's a lot of military bases and a lot of activity here, and just a lot of excitement about a program like that. So it's, yeah, there's a challenge in mixing both your prior knowledge from your previous institution, but updating it with your new knowledge. And you know, I'm a statistician. I don't think of myself as a Bayesian statistician, but it turns out, the reality is that I do have strong priors, but I also try to update those priors with new information as it comes along.
Dave 32:38
Well, Gareth, this has just been a great conversation. I really appreciate you digging into the into the weeds a little bit on these, these differentiated master's programs. It's been a great, great conversation. Thank you for doing that, of course,
Garreth James 32:53
and this has been a fun conversation. I really do think there are so many changes in the business school marketplace at the moment, and I think the next five to 10 years are going to see possibly more rapid changes. I don't claim to predict exactly how they're going to change, but with the technological innovations that are going on, we're all trying to get a handle on that, and I'm sure that's going to have a big impact on not just what we teach, but how we teach it, and the the type of students we're teaching, and the collaborations across other schools, within universities like Emory.
Dave 33:35
Well, maybe we'll have to circle back in a couple of years and get a update on what some of those, those new technologies and and the business models look like. Well,
Garreth James 33:47
the rate that this is changing at, I think it's a couple of months, not a couple another another meeting in a couple of months, and see how the whole world's changed by then,
Ken 34:02
indeed, you'll be on our speed dial. Yeah,
Garreth James 34:04
great. Well. Thank you very much. It's been a fun conversation.
Ken 34:08
Thank you,
Dave 34:18
Ken, what were your thoughts about our conversation with Gareth.
Ken 34:22
Oh, that was really interesting. You know, he is, he is a very nice combination of being a champion of business education, but also, you know, his underpinning statistics and data driven. I mean, he inspires a lot of confidence that his programmatic emphasis is based on substance, not not just words, right, right?
Dave 34:49
I, I completely. In other words, it's not just aspirations, you know, we're going to climb this mountain, but rather, it's a data driven, carefully scoped to the extent one can. Uh, look out into the future. But he's he's really used some logic that a lot of his faculty and staff will appreciate in terms of driving some of this change, and then on top of that, to have a supportive Provost, cutting some of the red tape and creating a little bit of a tailwind in what is otherwise can be a very heavy lift, just a remarkably positive story.
Ken 35:26
Yeah, and you know, I mean, relative success can come from a number of things. It can come from luck and tailwind and Right place, right time, and some of that occurs for everyone who makes progress. But I was interested, and he did a really nice job of unpacking, sort of what his contribution has been to getting a relatively fast start. And I think it's based on substance.
Dave 35:50
Yeah. Great episode.
Ken 35:52
Yeah. Thanks.
Dave 35:54
Thank you for listening to this episode of Dean's Council. This show is supported in part by Korn Ferry leaders in executive search. Dean's Council was produced in Boulder, Colorado by Joel Davis of analog digital arts for a catalog of previous shows. Please visit our website@deanscouncil.com if you have any feedback for us, please let us know by sending an email to feedback@deanscouncil.com and finally, please hit follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast player so you can automatically receive our latest show you.