Two-Year Full-Time MBA New Curriculum

Two-Year Full-Time MBA students entering in Fall 2008 will be the first to experience Goizueta’s new Full-Time MBA curriculum, recently approved by the faculty. The new curriculum will be applied to the One-Year MBA beginning in May 2009.

The new curriculum was developed to prepare students for the changing landscape of business. Corporations are demanding more from their MBA hires, and they are demanding it sooner. In addition, new realities of business, such as globalization, increasingly complex business problems, and the need for data-driven decision-making, make it important for the curriculum to evolve to meet those changes.

The MBA Curriculum Committee engaged key members of the Goizueta community, including faculty, recruiters, alumni, current students and others when analyzing ways to enhance our curriculum. As a result, they have developed a new curriculum that features several key structural changes:

More Links Between Theory and Practice

Now students will have more opportunities to put their management theory into practice. A key innovation is a new core course with the placeholder name of “Management Practice.” It will be a vehicle for real integration, exposing students early to various career perspectives, and providing opportunities for contextual problem solving and decision analysis.  A key objective is to address a crucial managerial responsibility: quickly solving a business problem with ambiguous or less than perfect information at one’s disposal. Framing problems and finding the data to analyze and support making a timely decision is an important skill that needs more emphasis in MBA programs.

Degrees of freedom

Students will have greater degrees of freedom – the ability to pursue greater depth of study in a chosen concentration earlier in their plan of study. There will be more room in the second semester for students to take more electives in preparation for internships. This is enabled by the Committee’s strategic decision to reduce the number of required courses from ten to eight, where two of the remaining eight courses have been shortened to a partial semester. In addition, the new sequencing of the core courses will allow students to have all but one of their core courses complete by the end of the first semester.

Integration

The Committee’s research highlighted the need for enhanced rigor, and continued emphasis on building analytical skills. The core class structure has been reengineered to improve the sequencing of courses and their content, eliminate duplication of material across classes, and to achieve better integration. For example, foundational analytical skills will now be taught at the beginning of the semester so that students can apply those skills across all the courses that follow.