Yale SOM Cuts Enrollment to Focus on Core Curriculum Revisions

"SOM Overhauls Academics"
By Kate Aitken, Staff Reporter
The Yale Daily News - March 23, 2006

The Yale School of Management will implement a new interdisciplinary core curriculum next year as the first step toward a new style of management education that the school hopes to pioneer, following a unanimous faculty vote on Wednesday.

The new core curriculum -- which will be implemented this fall for the incoming SOM Class of 2008 -- is based on an interdisciplinary model that eliminates classes teaching discrete subjects. Instead of traditional classes such as finance and accounting, next year's students will take classes taught in three different modules, each incorporating aspects of traditional management courses relevant to a specific practical area of management.

"There's a lot of anxiety over the state of management education because of a fundamental disconnect between what management education today teaches and what leaders of organizations are looking for, and that is people who are able to independently identify problems, frame those problems in a larger context and draw together the resources necessary to solve them," SOM Dean Joel Podolny said....

Student Body Representative Josh Fried SOM '07 said that despite the initial shock of the changes, many current students prefer the new curriculum to the form of management education SOM currently provides.

"As I was leaving I hung around for a couple seconds to catch the buzz and heard a couple first-years say they wished they could start over again next year," Fried said. "I think we all feel a little sad that we're not in the Class of '08."

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"Rethinking the MBA Curriculum"
By David Epstein
Inside Higher Education - March 24, 2006

The world economy has changed quite a bit since the 1950s, but many MBA programs still have traditional core curriculums, with wholly separate courses in accounting, finance, and economics. Yale University’s business school has decided to take a new approach that will replace such courses in the first year of a program with interdisciplinary offerings that reflect the fluid nature of business.

Senior faculty members in the School of Management voted unanimously Wednesday to begin redesigning the curriculum. Dean Joel Podolny, who is in his first year, and a committee of senior faculty members regularly solicited information from alumni, recruiters, business leaders, students, and what they learned is that students aren’t necessarily ready for the interdisciplinary nature of the workplace.

“We can see connections between what we do and all kinds of applications, because we’re steeped in it,” said Sharon M. Oster, a professor of management and entrepreneurship. “We thought our students would, but it seems not to be true. We need to work harder to help them make those connections earlier in their careers, not just seven years down the road.”

Officials from the School of Management were careful to point out that all the faculty voted on concretely was to make change, not any specific changes. But senior faculty members said there is already an outline to start things off with what would significantly change the first year — and which will start right away....

Arthur J. Swersey, a professor of operations research, said he thinks that the business school’s relatively small size makes a complete overhaul realistic. “We have groups of people, we don’t have departments,” he said.

And the school will get smaller still. In order to free up faculty members for course development, next year’s class — the first under the new system — will be down from 220 students to 180....