Emory Goizueta’s New Dean Wants To Take The B-School From ‘Strong’ To ‘Premier’

Q&A WITH GARETH JAMES, NEW DEAN OF EMORY GOIZUETA

Poets&Quants: You spent 24 years in Southern California. What are you going to miss as you move East? 

Gareth James: Obviously I’ve spent my entire academic career here at USC and Marshall. So, I’ve been very happy here and I’m pretty proud of what we’ve achieved over that time period. I wasn’t looking to make a move, I was pretty happy — but Goizueta was just such an amazing opportunity that I felt I needed to make that move. It was certainly bittersweet — a lot of close friends and colleagues, 600 faculty and staff at Marshall. So that part of it was really tough.

But on the other side, it was sort of an easy decision after learning about what’s going on in Emory, what’s going on at Goizueta. Emory’s got a new president and a new provost, and they’ve got an incredible ambition for Emory. I sort of see it as repeating what USC’s done over the last three decades, but starting at a much higher level than USC started at — USC 30 years ago was a pretty mediocre university.

Emory’s already a top-tier research institution, but I see that same level at ambition and resources and strategic planning and leadership to achieve that. So even though at the start, I was sort of just applying to learn more about the process and the job, by the end, after talking with both the senior university leadership and some of the faculty staff and the students, it just felt like an incredible opportunity to be part of a new journey in that direction.

In the announcement of your hiring as dean, you mentioned your ambitions for the school. What kind of sneak peek can you give us about those ambitions? 

I think there are a number of potential opportunities for the school, and obviously I’m a little biased coming from Marshall and the things that have been successful here. And I don’t want to try to overly transport what’s worked here and say ‘Obviously it will work at Goizueta as well,’ but I can tell you that at Marshall, both our online MBA program and many of our specialized master’s programs have been tremendously successful, both in terms of quality and in terms of student demand and the revenue side of things. Our graduate revenue has increased about two-thirds as a result of those new programs at Marshall — and in turn, that revenue helps us to improve the quality of our full-time MBA program, which is obviously a big revenue and reputation driver for the school.

And I think that Goizueta there’s some opportunities to do some of that there as well.

Goizueta is already has one specialized master’s program and it’s just launching a second one for the fall, which looks great to me. They there’s a brand new finance lab. I saw the construction of it last week when I was there. It’s just about to come online. It looks very innovative and very practical, applied, producing people who can actually work in the industry straightaway and things like that. So I’m excited about that.

The challenge for the school, I think, is figuring out how to balance the MBA programs against all these other opportunities, both the online opportunities and things like specialized master’s. It’s interesting, the specialized master’s: If you look worldwide in the last decade, they’ve doubled the number of specialized master’s students. It’s gone from about 6% of all business students to about 13% of all business students. And then if you look at the top sort of 25 business programs, seven years ago when Marshall was starting a specialized master’s, there were concerns: ‘Oh, is it going to hit the reputation of the school? It’s only lower-tier school, so they’re doing specialized master’s.’ Now, when you look at the landscape, you see only maybe the top two or three are not doing specialized master’s. I have a list of the top 25 business schools and the vast majority of them are doing anywhere from two to seven or eight specialized master’s. And that’s both because there’s some really high-quality students — we have some amazing students in our specialized master’s at Marshall here — and that there’s a lot of demand for them. So that allows the school to provide some flexibility to do other educational mission things that otherwise would not be possible. I can tell you that Marshall would not be the school that it is without those specialized master’s.

I don’t want to pre-judge, and I think Marshall probably launched too many specialized master’s and online programs and things like that — we sort of got a little over-excited, but actually the vast majority of them have been very successful. So I think there’s some opportunities to do some of that at Goizueta as well. But again, I want to talk to people. I want to learn a lot more about the school before trying to say, ‘Oh, this is the right direction to go in.’

Marshall of course has a very large undergraduate program as well. Many other business schools — at least among the top schools — don’t even have an undergraduate program. So Goizueta has a smaller undergrad program actually, and I think it’s a manageable size where you can have a really high-quality program, but you’ve still got a large enough size that it’s a sustainable model. So in a lot of ways, I see Goizueta as just a smaller version of Marshall and small I don’t see as a bad thing here. I actually see that as a good thing. I think there’s some adjustments the school can make, but in most respects, I think it’s doing fantastically.

One of the things that we at Poets&Quants don’t talk nearly enough about — and we are trying to change that — is one-year MBA programs. And of course, Emory has one of the most well-regarded one-year MBA programs. As you talk about a different array of offerings, that’s one that sometimes gets overlooked in these conversations.

Absolutely. So I’m still learning about the one-year program, but that was something that fascinated me about the school as well, because certainly at Marshall, we’ve been talking about that for a while, and of course there are a relatively small number of top-tier schools that are doing one year MBA programs. Emory seems to be one of the few that’s been successful in doing that. The school is actually expecting a little bit of an uptick in that program, maybe because the economy’s doing well, the tradeoff, and a one-year program seems better than a two-year program for some of these students. And I think the reality is that we have a whole mixture of students coming into our full-time MBA programs.

We have the poets and the quants, and for a number of the students, the ones that have an undergraduate business education or an economics degree or some related thing like that, the first-year core classes are maybe a nice reviewer of the material they’ve seen previously, maybe some nuances in there and some added benefit, but maybe it’s not necessary to do a full one-year review of all of that material.

That, as far as I can tell, is the premise behind the Goizueta program. They spend the summer compressing that first year during the summer for those students who already have a lot of that background, and then you move to the second year with elective classes with the two-year MBA program. So that certainly seems like a model that can make sense for a certain fraction of students. Obviously it’s not going to make sense for all students, but it’s certainly a model that I think has a lot of potential. But again, I’m still learning about it.

Talking of the models that appeal to a growing number of people, just to bring it back to the idea of an online MBA, is that at least in the conversation for down the road at some point?

As I’m sure you know, Marshall has an online MBA. I personally have quite a bit of experience with our online MBA program. My experience tells me it’s an incredibly rewarding program. We have an incredibly high-quality program. It’s actually now generating some good revenue for us, and it’s incredibly hard to start. These programs are much harder than a regular program: the administrative complications, the financial expenses, and the faculty and staff work involved in them is an order of magnitude higher than a regular program — which is not to say it’s not a good investment. I’m very pleased that Marshall did it, but I was the vice dean of faculty when we started that program, and it was a lot of work just trying to figure out how to compensate faculty and what the right model was for faculty and staff working together.

It’s much more of a cooperative model than the usual approach with the faculty, which is like the god of the classroom and he or she does whatever they want to do. It has to be a real team effort. So it’s a challenging program, but also, yeah, I’m absolutely open to considering that.

But again, I don’t want to push ideas that have worked at Marshall and say we should transplant them all to Goizueta. I think they’ve got their own innovative programs going. And in particular, they’re just starting in the fall an online EMBA program which I’m very interested to learn more about. And that seems also a really interesting potential market.

Obviously one of the few positives of Covid has been this sort of increased ability for our faculty to teach online, that they’re obviously much more flexible in terms of Zoom and environments like that. And they have learned a lot over the last two years. So it’s clear that’s going to have some long-run impact on education in general and business schools in particular. But we are all sort of still trying to figure out where that model lies, how far to take these hybrid approaches where part-time MBA students or EMBA students are partly in person, and then partly online — to me that seems like possibly an ideal model, where you get the in-person networking, but you don’t have to drive in through rush-hour traffic, especially in a place like L.A. and Atlanta. So the ability to do some of that online while still having that in-person networking, that feels like a nice hybrid to me.

In talking of the challenges of setting up an entirely new online MBA program, I know that the new EMBA program at Emory was done in partnership with an outside company, Emeritus. So that could be a partial solution. 

The online MBA we set up at Marshall was also in partnership with an outside company. Sometimes these partnerships involve the outside organization creating the core, the asynchronous materials themselves, and obviously in conjunction with the faculty. We took an approach where we set up our own studio and created that material ourselves, so the partnership was more in terms of marketing the program and things like that.

Now, Goizueta already has a great studio. I was touring it when I was there last week, so they already have a number of those resources in place. I’m not convinced that you want to go too far down that track; the revenue share is often not the best deal.

USC as a university has moved away from these partnerships. They’re ending most of these contracts; Marshall has ended our contract. So, yes, there are pros and cons to that approach.

In 2018, USC made international headlines by achieving gender parity in the full-time MBA, the first major MBA program to do so. Emory Goizueta has struggled in this area, with just 27% women in its latest cohort. What does Emory need to do to bring more women into its MBA program?

The effect of (USC reaching parity) seems have been to stimulate all the other top MBA programs to even more aggressively go after women. So it’s been a challenge for Marshall to keep that gender parity up, because of the competition for the top female students. And of course that comes back to the scholarship discussions that we had previously, that the competition for these students is just intense. Now, in some sense, that’s just shifting students around schools. It doesn’t necessarily increase the total number of women in these full-time MBA programs. So then the question is, What can Goizueta do, and business schools in general do, to encourage more female applicants?

One area I feel that Goizueta is doing particularly well in is their social enterprise- and ESG-related issues. There’s some wonderful work that the school’s doing in that area. Those are topics that resonate really well with students these days, but in particular with female students. So that’s an area where I think that there’s an opportunity to encourage more students to Goizueta based on the expertise that they have in that particular topic. The school also recently got a $5 million Brown Family Scholarship, which is targeted to increase women specifically in the full-time MBA program. And the school also launched a women’s leadership program recently. So again, I’m still learning about all of these at activities, but it’s very clear that’s a strong focus for the school itself.

I’m also comforted by the fact that at the undergraduate level, what we’ve seen at Marshall — and this seems to be a general trend as well — is gender parity in the undergraduate programs. At the undergraduate level, we’re having more success than the full-time MBA. Marshall just reach gender parity ourselves this year. And that sort of suggests that in a five years’ time, as these students move through and start considering MBAs, that there’s going to be a general trend in that direction as well. I don’t think it’ll be maybe a stronger trend, but it’s moving in the right direction in that demographic as well.

What should somebody who’s going to apply to the Emory MBA program know about the exciting things that are on offer, or that will be on offer under your deanship?

Let me just start by saying I’m still learning a lot about the school. What I’ve seen so far, I’ve just been incredibly impressed — the more I learn, the more impressed I am about the quality of the programs and the quality of the faculty, the building they have there. And as I said, the leadership at Emory itself,.

I really feel like the university and the school itself in the next five to 10 years are going to go from really strong institutions to really premier places. And when you do one of these MBAs, there’s many dimensions to it, but one of them is, it’s an investment in the future. And so you’re trying to make a bet on, not necessarily just what the quality of that degree is going to give me today, but in five and 10 years time, how will people look at an MBA from Goizueta? And I’m betting that it’s only going to go up in value over time. That’s my goal. And I know that’s the provost and president’s goal as well.

Now, the question is, how to make that happen. And, honestly, when I look at Goizueta, it feels to me like they have an incredible asset base in terms of the quality of all of the faculty, staff, students in the university itself. And maybe that hasn’t been fully operationalized. I think there’s the potential there to take the school even further than it has been. But I think one of the keys is the revenue base. And I think even though I like the size of the school. I think we do need to grow the size of the school a little bit so that we have a good, sustainable revenue base for the quality of students and faculty and staff that we want to maintain at the school.

The university’s very supportive of the school in providing support, but in the long run, we want the school to be doing this based on all the revenue that it’s generating. So we’re going to start a five-year strategic planning process. I’m already informally thinking about it now. And my plan is that by the end of the fall semester, we have in place that plan. The school already has a strategic plan, but obviously there might be some adaptions with me starting now. I would tell the students: Look forward to not just their next two years at Goizueta, but the return on investment that they’re going to be getting on that degree over the next five to 10 years after they graduate.

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