Dean’s Q&A: David Platt of University of Texas

What are you seeing at your school in terms of application numbers and general interest in an undergraduate business degree? 

Applications have gone up every single year that I have been aware of. A business degree is well-accepted, and it is a lower-risk degree when compared to others. I don’t have the final numbers, but I’ve heard they are up again this year. Our application numbers for 2010-11 were 5600, and for 2011-12 they were 6100, and last year they were 7100. That’s the growth I was talking about, and I just think it has probably to do with being a practical discipline where jobs are fairly plentiful, and I think that fits what people are looking for right now.

It is a challenge for us to keep up because we can’t necessarily scale our resources to match that high a number of students. In the last three years, we’ve seen the number of students who go out to our school go up. In the 2010-11 academic year, we had about 3,600, and then 3,800 students in 2011-12 and 4,100 in 2012-13. The numbers have climbed some but not in proportion as much as the applications. That is a challenge to try to take more students but do so without harming the quality of education. We draw the line at doing anything that hurts the quality of education. We wind up at times having difficult conversations about why we can’t take more students because the resources aren’t there to do it properly for the kind of program we want to be.

How does being in Texas impact the business school, and what are some of the benefits?

Since we are a state school, we fit in with well the business-friendly philosophy of Texas. We have a large population that we serve, so we have tons of students who want to come here. We accept relatively few students compared to the applications we get, so I’m sure there is some self-censoring on who applies. We start with a very large population, having big cities like Houston and Dallas to draw from. That’s where students come from, as well as the rest of the state’s large population.

As a state school we have an obligation by design to serve the state and the population of the state. Legislative restrictions mean that a very high percentage of students here come from the state of Texas. In our case, it is a quite explicit expectation, and we take the vast majority of students from Texas. The university has a requirement that 90 percent of students from the state of Texas. That brings great opportunities and great challenges. It is a great population to draw from and doesn’t constrain us in terms of quality, but we have to think about how we get appropriate diversity.

In the business school, 86 percent come to us from the state, while the remaining 14 percent we come from out-of-state. We have huge international exchange programs where each year we take upwards of almost 200 students from international schools, and we send abroad 200 students. Those students create a whole lot of diversity among the student population here.

On the outgoing side for student graduates, we also have to be cognizant of the fact that a lot of students want to stay in and around Texas. It used to be a huge problem actually going back 10 years. It is not a huge problem now, but it is something we have to be aware of. We have large community centers like Houston and Dallas, so a lot of them wind up there. There is significant recruiting in Texas because of the huge oil and gas industry, and nearly every major company you can think of, particularly in the professional services field, has a location in the state of Texas. We have a top-ranked accounting program. It’s not a huge program, but students who want to stay in Texas go to Houston, Dallas and sometimes San Antonio and Austin.

How involved are parents in the application process these days, given how competitive it is to get into the school?

There are an awful lot of students who want to be admitted who can’t be. It’s a big state, and we have to turn away an awful lot of students. The average SAT last year for the program was 1362, which puts it in the 91st or 92nd percentile. This is a population of about 1000 entering students with an average SAT of 1362

There are 7000 applications for these slots. That’s a lot, especially for a state school that is taking less than one-seventh of people who apply. It is challenging because people from the state would like to have their student attend the best program in the state, and that is us, so we do get a lot of pressure from parents. There are just a lot of phone calls and a lot of follow up by students themselves and follow-up by parents. They’ll say “My son or daughter had really good results, and did a lot of things in high school, and I want to know how come they didn’t get in.” It is very selective and that is about all we can tell them.

You’re about two years into the dean role now. What would you say some of your most significant accomplishments are so far? 

I’m looking at learning technologies and how classrooms are changing. I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately. There’s a new active learning classroom this fall we’re doing with support from Deloitte, and we’re actually modeling it on the type of classroom Deloitte uses in training classes in their Dallas center. We started hearing back from people about this great training facility Deloitte used and since we’re not to far away from there, we had a chance to look at it. We have a close relationship with Deloitte because of their accounting program and consulting side.

Over the course of the summer we took the biggest space for computer labs that we had and converted it into a totally different type of space for learning. It will be an active learning space. One of the interesting aspects of the model that really caught my attention is the idea that there is no front of the classroom. That is new to me. When I teach classes, I’m anchored to the front of the room. The projection equipment is all there, and even though I try to get out there and interact among students, it is like a rubber band on me forcing me to go back to the front of the room. So I wind up in the front of the room more times than not.

This new classroom design has faculty centered in the middle of the room where there’s a stand where you can control technology. It’s in the middle of the room, and it’s even to the point where there’s no obvious front of the room. There are whiteboards all around the room, and the classroom is built around group tables with technology controls and the ability to project. I think it will completely change the dynamic in the classroom. We are trying it out by doing two of these types of classroom. It’s a very small step, but we are moving towards a renovation and complete redesign of our building down the road, so this is our way of trying out new technology. We think this is the right direction for the future.

Another area we’ve been working on is the curriculum, and we have a pretty extensive set of leadership programs we are doing. LeaderShape is a common franchise leadership program done in undergraduate programs, and we do several sessions of that a year. Beyond that, we have a leadership program that our student sign up for in their first year. It is quite popular and builds on a variety of themes in their four years, culminating in a community service project they often do abroad in senior year. We are working on developing that further and making it more accessible to students. We have 100 students each year who do it. There are 400 students across four years, and we are working on broadening it, knocking down barriers and modularizing it. It has been a successful program for us and addresses one of the key things students have to learn in business school besides finance, operations and management.

We ask them to think about what does it mean to be a leader, what  they should expect in showing leadership and what it means to be a CEO. We try to help them think about what the skills are necessary for leadership, and how that applies to them at different phases of their career.

How does graduate level business education impact undergraduate education? 

We have a fair number, not a trivial number, of faculty who teach in both programs and seem to like it a lot. Teaching with MBAs and undergraduates emphasizes different aspects of what you want to teach. I had been teaching MBAs only for about three years at the point I became undergraduate dean, and I was glad to get back with undergraduates. Somehow talking more about the nitty gritty of accounting with undergraduates helps me provide better cases with graduate students. I find them to be very complementary with my own teaching. Having an MBA and an executive MBA program around for the undergraduates is aspirational for them, and brings along opportunities for them to be in touch with the real world of business and out there with executives.  They get to see another phase of the process and what MBAs are like. I think that is helpful

What advice do you have for both parents and would-be students in choosing a quality undergraduate business program? 

I would say look for a program that provides appropriate class sizes and that provides an extensive amount of support for the student program because so much of what happens is outside of the classroom. They should look at the commitment by the school to the undergraduate program. There’s an awful lot of emphasis on MBA programs, and in some cases that can draw too much attention to MBA programs. They should look for undergraduate programs that stand independently of MBA programs, appropriate value and how quickly can they get a return on their investment. It’s appropriate to think about that.

It’s also important to look at the university as a whole because half or more of undergraduate education will take place outside of the business school. They should make sure they have the appropriate resources and quality coming from the rest of the university as well. This way, they’ll have an interesting experience and become a better-rounded adult in addition to what they are learning in the business world.

What are some of the stories out there in undergraduate business education that you think are not being covered at the moment? 

I think that value one is one of them. When I did the student loan numbers, contrary to the conventional narrative on student loans, it really got me thinking about the issues and that there are really good programs that are very economical relative to what someone makes coming out of the program. I think there is another side of the story beside the crushing burden of student debt.

Outreach to underserved students is something we are working very hard on and have a long way to go. We serve underserved and minority student populations, and run summer camps. For instance for high school students to who would be helped by exposure to business. We want to make them aware of the possibility of business as a career and learn more about what business education means. We get corporate support for programs because corporations are very interested in our students in general, and in our underrepresented students especially. The corporate support side of it is not covered as much, and they work with us closely on this.

RELATED DEAN’S Q&A INTERVIEWS: 

Lori Rosenkopf of Wharton

Carl Zeithaml Of University of Virginia

Dale Nees of Notre Dame University

Edward McLaughlin Of Cornell

Steven Malter of Washington University

Lawrence Murray of the University of North Carolina  David Platt of University of Texas

Andrea Hershatter of Emory

Lynn Wooten of Michigan

Idalene Kesner of Indiana University

 

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