I think another innovation has been in something called our First Year Seminar, which again spoke to our desire to really make sure our program is connected to and steeped in the liberal arts. And essentially, that is an experience students have in their first year at the business school. It’s a small seminar with 20 students or less, taught by a professor who is teaching a topic that he or she is an expert in, passionate about, and they teach it from a global perspective. It also has a service component. It is writing-intensive, including us providing writing coaches who are mostly graduate students in the literature department here at Georgetown. And now we offer that to about 75% of our students and we’re seeking the resources to make that a required aspect for every student here at the business school.
I think another area that we’ve unleashed innovation around is in the area of diversity and inclusion. One of the things that we noticed some time ago was that our students who were first generation college students in their families and our students who were underrepresented minorities, in particular, were having more difficulty getting traction in that first year than our other students. So we collaborated with students here at the school to create a program called Build. It’s an orientation program and students take responsibility of it as mentors and it’s proven to be highly effective in terms of aiding the integration of students from those populations.
And then connected to that, with a grant from PwC, we created another program called Smart Start, which helps us focus that same population of students on getting them career ready—making sure they have access to internships, mentoring from professionals, as well as other kinds of support that might make sense as they progress through the school year. We also have faculty engaged in that process as mentors, which we found to be very important and critical. And we’ve already noticed improvements in average grade point averages in that population in their first year, as well as our ability to retain those students at the business school, rather than have them transfer to a different college or other parts of the university that sometimes can seem perhaps a bit more familiar than the business school environment.
How is the demand and competition to get accepted and into the undergraduate program at Georgetown?
We’re seeing increase in demand and I think it’s represented by the fact that our admission rate in 2010 was about 20% and today we’re accepting about 16%. And in early action, we’re accepting around 14% or 15%. That’s one set of indicators of what the trends are. We also have one of the highest yields in the university. Our overall yield has gone from about 51% to 56%. And our early action population, which is probably our most competitive, has gone from 50% to just under 60%. And these are young people applying to the best schools in the country, if not the world.
And there’s no question in my mind that more and more schools are offering some kind of business education—even if it’s not a business major—because demand is out there. So it’s becoming a more competitive field at top-tier schools.
What advice would you give to prospective students and their parents who are trying to find a good business program?
The first piece of advice I would give is really try to be clear about what kind of education you think is important for your child to have. And if you are the student, what kind of education you want. And that’s why we have this question of how important is it to be in a business program that is clearly liberal arts in its orientation, because there are implications to that. One is, you will usually wind up having to take more required courses because you’ve got fulfill the core requirements and the liberal arts aspects of the university (versus a program that will allow you to become very quickly satisfied with three or four course requirements outside of the business school). And then you can spend the rest of your time in the business school. So being clear about what type of educational experience and outcomes you want for your child I think is the starting point.
Then, I think one of the things [that] students often underestimate about a business program is the extent to which it is important to have proficiency in math and quantitative reasoning. That’s one of the biggest areas where I think students are often challenged. So if you are a junior or sophomore and you’re already thinking that undergraduate business education might be a path for you, don’t shy away from taking those advanced quantitative courses in your junior and senior year because they will serve you well trying to get through the quantitative requirements of a business school.
The last thing I would say is, to the extent possible, find some ways to expose yourself to what business actually is. So if you can get an internship in the summer in a business, take advantage of those opportunities because it will make you a much more knowledgeable person about what you’re buying when you select a business program.
Is there a line where parent involvement in the application process moves to inappropriate behavior? If so, have you seen it in the admissions process at Georgetown?
I have not. And I’ll admit that when it comes to the admissions side of things, I’m not the front lines for that. Admissions at Georgetown is done centrally. So I don’t admit one student, personally, to our program. And having had three kids now go to fairly selective colleges, I know that parents pretty quickly figure out who the decision-makers are and if they want to influence anybody, they quickly understand that I’m not on that list.
If you could change anything in undergraduate education, what would it be?
I think that I would bring more experiential education to complement the traditional pedagogy of lectures and case studies. One of the things that I think makes our real estate program special is that from the very beginning, we designed it to be a highly experiential program.
An example of that is, we had one of our alumni who owns a building that has about 800,000 square feet in it, right here in Washington D.C. His firm had bought it and he’s offered it to us as a laboratory. So our students in one of our real estate classes use that building as a place where they can go and really understand what it means to finance and develop a building. So they’re given problems to determine the tenant mix and evaluate what the value is that will be lost or created if you reskin a building and how is it going to impact the surrounding architecture of the community. And how do you deal with neighbors and real estate boards to make things happen? It’s all very experiential and hands on, accompanied by what we know conceptually and theoretically.
The last thing I would say I’d change about undergraduate business education is to increase the opportunities and requirement for students to have global experiences and exposure and for the content of the courses that we teach to maximize their global relevance. Because I think there’s lots to be learned about business today from almost every part of the world—not just the Western world—that for so long has sort of defined what valuable knowledge is in too many domains, and in particular, business.
DEAN’S Q&A SERIES:
Charles Whiteman of Penn State
Roy “Chip” Wiggins of Bentley University
Carl Zeithaml Of University of Virginia
Dale Nees of Notre Dame University
Steven Malter of Washington University
Lawrence Murray of the University of North Carolina
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