In San Francisco, A Small B-School Undergoes A Big — And Impactful — Transformation

In San Francisco, A Small B-School Undergoes A Big — And Impactful — Transformation

San Francisco School of Management is based on Lone Mountain in the center of the city. USF photo

POETS&QUANTS’ Q&A WITH USF SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT DEAN OTGO ERHEMJAMTS & COURTNEY MASTERSON, ASSOCIATE DEAN OF FACULTY, RESEARCH AND IMPACT

P&Q: Big changes underway, and big changes planned. How’s it going?

Dean Otgo: I came here in July 2022, two years ago, and was given a charge of basically helping the school turn around. Like many other universities around the country, we’d been experiencing declining enrollment: Because of our location, we tend to be more heavily reliant on international students. Tension between the Chinese government and U.S. government, Trump government policies, Covid — all those things had a huge impact on international enrollment, and our enrollment dropped more than universities that didn’t have such a heavy international presence. 

Enrollment decline is a common challenge all of higher ed is grappling with, I think, combined with the demographic cliff and everything else. So coming here, and looking at the size of our school, I felt that we need to rebalance and re-optimize the program portfolio, sunsetting of some programs, and launching new programs. But basically, the dean’s job is resource allocation. How do we allocate the limited resources we have? If you have declining enrollment, that means your finances or budgets are also declining, so we have to do more with less, basically.

New initiatives — whether it’s new programs or new faculty hires — need new resources, and I need to make room for those new resources from a declining budget. So we thought, “OK, maybe we need a business model innovation.” All of higher ed is trying to figure out how we get out of this kind of situation where most universities have declining enrollment, but rising costs.

So we, with faculty and staff input, went through a year-long reimagining of the school management process. In January we invited Stanford d.school faculty to facilitate an all-day design workshop. It was an interesting workshop. It was an all-day workshop in January 2023, and we gave everyone homework. So it was faculty, staff, students, some of the local NGOs, and San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, or education unit of the mayor’s office, so local business people, government people were there.

And the homework was, imagine the School of Management is closing the doors five years down the road. So if that ever happens, what would you think the main reasons are, why did we fail? And then everyone thought about it, came up with, “If we fail, these would be the reasons.” And then we came to that workshop and spent the first half of the day at each table like, “OK, what’s bubbling up? What seems to be the common theme? What seems to be common concern from all these different stakeholders?” And then we shared all with everyone.

And a few things bubbled up, such as, maybe we didn’t have good partnerships with industry, whether it’s the government or local businesses, what have you. Maybe our curriculum is not innovative, not agile, or not flexible enough. Maybe we are not agile in the way we do things, we need to be adapting to industry needs. And one final thing was that we need to be more student-centric. If we’re not student-centric, then students won’t come. So those were top things that bubbled up.

And then the second part of the day was, if these are kind of core reasons why we might fail, how do we fix it? What kind of small experiments or things we can do? And all sorts of people came up with ideas. So that started this reimagining the school process, and we had numerous meetings, surveys, and discussions. And then we said one way to achieve more agility, along with all the curricular work that we are doing, is to experiment with a new structure.

And most universities have this structure that we’ve inherited from the 17th, 18th centuries — that every school has a department-based structure and it’s based on disciplines. And that kind of leads to silos and turf battles. And when we try to innovate curriculum, faculty will be like, “This is my department’s program or course.” And so these silos, we felt, were getting in the way of being more agile. So we floated different ideas. “What if we get rid of departments and completely organized around themes?” People were freaked out about that. People felt, “Well, we need still some sort of community and way to gather or identify around something.” And then we’ve talked about consolidating departments. We had seven, so what if we consolidated into three departments, two departments? Then the issues that were identified about silos and everything still kind of remained, in a different scale maybe.

So we ended up deciding, “Okay, let’s eliminate departments.” 

If you think of department chair roles, it’s a very faculty-centric role, it’s supporting other faculty, working on scheduling, mentoring younger faculty, hiring adjuncts. So it’s very faculty-centric, all the responsibilities. So we removed departments, that right away was a lot of cost-saving, like department chair compensation. Instead of having full-time people taking on these administrative roles and then having to hire temporary adjunct faculty to teach courses, now these department chairs go back to classrooms, so we have more full-time faculty teaching courses, less adjunct teaching, so we save money from the adjunct teaching as well.

But ultimately, more than money, it’s supposed to help us with this interdisciplinary collaboration, not just with your group, but with other faculty, whether it’s research or curriculum or service, all that stuff. And then we created these new roles called undergrad major faculty leads. So for their job description, we made sure that there’s nothing administrative in there, nothing faculty-centric, it’s all student-facing responsibilities. You should be looking at your student experience or student success in your major, come up with metrics, track them, monitor them, find out ways to improve them. And also have kind of community-building events and activities with the students so that they feel that they know the faculty more, they feel supported, they feel connected with each other and with faculty. So those are new roles that we created, and this is basically year one of that experiment.

In San Francisco, A Small B-School Undergoes A Big — And Impactful — Transformation

San Francisco School of Management has a satellite campus in the Folgers building in the city’s downtown. USF photo

Courtney Masterson: I wouldn’t be sitting here without the restructuring because this was a new role where traditionally we would have an associate dean of undergrad, an associate dean of grad, an associate dean of academic affairs or faculty — just a very common model across business schools. And Otgo and the team last year, we updated the position so now I am AD of faculty, research, and social impact. And I think what I really appreciate about it is that it’s not just that impact is in the job title, it’s a very critical part of the portfolio I’m working on.

It’s baked into the DNA being a Jesuit school, we know we’re doing it, but when it’s actually formally a part of the dean’s team portfolio, we take it very seriously. It’s like, “How could we be more intentional about it? How can we,” as Otgo was saying, “allocate resources that are needed to that role?”

And so one of the first things I was able to do in the role because of the restructuring is help launch what’s called our three impact areas. So we put out a call to faculty in August and said, “It’s up to you. If you could lead an impact area, which means that these are the themes that maybe we’re all going to eventually merge around or converge around — these areas where we would generate research, we could help inspire curriculum development, we could strengthen our industry partnerships, be more of a thought leader — what would they be?”

We know that we can’t just tell faculty, “These are the areas,” it’s like, “Where are your passions and expertise?” And so we had three launch this year, which was great. We have Sustainable Management Education, we have Racial and Social Justice in the Business Community, and we have Digital Transformation. And it was not planned this way, but they so nicely fit with (the Jesuit pursuit of) cura personalis where it’s, say, care for the planet with the Sustainability one, care for the people with Racial and Social Justice, and then care with technology is sort of an extension of that.

And they’ve been doing great work throughout the year. It’s our first year, but they really just are the seeds that we’re planting right now to see how they might continue to develop, how might we get more faculty aligning themselves with these impact areas or students? Maybe they’ll turn into centers or our new versions of centers, things like that.

As you say, 2023-2024 was the first year. What encourages you about how the year has gone?

Otgo: So I think what’s encouraging is the impact areas, faculty are getting together from different disciplines. They’re working even with faculty from College of Arts and Sciences.

Very interdisciplinary. And we’re seeing closer connection between curricular development, research, and service areas. So for example, one of the impact areas Courtney mentioned, sustainable management education, the faculty lead is Marco Tavanti, he’s an expert in sustainability and sustainable business, in general. And it used to be that he was doing that work for his research. His teaching was public administration, non-profit management. But now because he’s leading this impact area, he’s working with other faculty and students on this, so his impact has broadened within the school. And this new program Richard must have mentioned, master’s in management in social impact, was largely designed by Marco as well. So it’s bringing together and leveraging these talents or resources that we had, and expanding the impact of it.

The flip side of that is the challenges are still there. What’s been more difficult than you anticipated?

In San Francisco, A Small B-School Undergoes A Big — And Impactful — Transformation

Courtney Masterson: “The narrative is, how can we leverage AI to help students?”

Otgo: So I would say that since the impact areas are kind of a new thing and we are giving resources around it, there’s, I think, more upsides than challenges with the impact areas. The undergrad faculty leads part is, relatively speaking, more challenging because faculty are still comparing it with department chairs, and they’re still somewhat reminiscent of the former department walls.

So I think it will take time to really embrace the opportunities and possibilities with the new structure. Faculty are starting. Some get it completely, some are kind of confused.

Courtney Masterson: Higher ed, well, it’s very slow to change, that’s why we’re many of us are in predicament that we might be in. So there’s always going to be a challenge of just any change, no matter what the change is. There will be resistance in having to build buy-in and bring people along. But what’s really exciting is we had five new hires last year, and they are the ones too raising their hand to lead these areas. And they are here because they want to be in a place where their expertise and passions are being leveraged right from the get-go. It’s not the kind of place around here, which I’ve always appreciated, where you have to wait your turn to lead an area, or lead a program, or be a major lead.

Yeah, no, this is very different. It’s like if you have the passion and expertise, which we do at all levels, assistant to full professor and all staff titles, you can raise your hand and experiment. And I think that’s what is very exciting to be here too, is that it’s a time where all ideas are on the table and to try things.

How are you gauging student response or student adaptation to all these changes? Surveys?

Otgo: I think down the road we’ll have to do a pre, post kind of thing. And since we didn’t really do a pre, “Okay, what’s happening?” kind of thing, we’ll have to be clever about how we do that. But I think survey will have to be part of it to get student input. But so far it’s been based on what we’re hearing from the undergrad faculty leads, and they’re doing a report out at the end of the year outlining what they’ve done, what they’ve accomplished, and what the challenges were so that we can course-correct, and improve things, and adjust things for next year.

You’ve talked about declining enrollment. How are you going to turn that around? Or is it turning around? Or is it partly a result of the pandemic, and maybe now that we’re mostly past that things are going to turn around? 

Otgo:: Yeah, I think in terms of the macro environment, the demographic cliff is going to be here for a while. Different people have done different forecasts and studies and they think it’s going to be here through maybe the late 2030s, almost. So the challenges in the undergrad space will continue to be there, and then challenge in the international students space will also continue to be there. China used to be the number one sending country for us, now that they have more universities in the global rankings, Chinese students are staying home, they’re going to Hong Kong, they’re going to Singapore, they’re going to Japan and Taiwan instead of the U.S., Canada and the UK. So those challenges will remain, but we see more upside on the grad side where the target student population is different from the undergrad student population, it’s more of these working adults, people re-skilling, and up-skilling. There are close to 40 million people with some credential but no degree. There are many adults who have two, three courses left but couldn’t graduate and had to work and all that. We need to go after that population. And for that population, online modality seems to be a better way to reach them because they’re busy working and everything.

So the three new programs we’re launching are all online. We are partnering with Andersen Global, with an online MBA program. So I think next year, because of the three new online programs we are launching, we’re hoping to have a hundred new graduate students. So I think on grad side, we can turn around more quickly. On the undergrad side, it should be more about a long-term play like, how do we not continue to decline? How do we keep that at bay, and try to stay differentiated and unique so that we don’t lose our market positioning?

What’s lost in Chinese enrollment could be gained from other international corners, India maybe?

Otgo: Yeah.

Courtney Masterson: Yeah, on the grad side too, talking about our admissions system, we are spending quite a bit of time in Africa as well, so absolutely. And I think on the undergrad side, one thing that I know is, the reputation of San Francisco is like a roller coaster. And so being the University of San Francisco, we’ve proudly leveraged our location, and we’re still incredibly committed to the city.

So that will take time, and so we are investing in partnerships with the Chamber of Commerce and other places in the city because we do want that to be a selling point for students. We are here because we think it is an amazing place for an education, and we’re not walking away from that. But it will take just a little bit of time on the macro side.

Business schools have been talking for a long time now about business as a force for good, but the Jesuit schools were way ahead on that. I wonder what’s the next step for business as a force for good. How does that evolve now that it’s basically embraced by all the top schools? Where are you guys going to lead next?

Otgo: I think that’s where our impact areas come in. I think we need to double down and focus on the actual partnerships with the community so that it’s not just curriculum, it’s not just research, it’s really community-centered. And so that’s something we have to do more. Not that we haven’t been doing it, we have been, but leverage it, expand it, and say our story. It’s almost, I feel like we’re kind of a hidden gem, if you will. Coming from the East Coast, not many people on the East Coast know about USF.

AI is what everybody’s talking about — how it’s going to change the curriculum, and how it’s going to change teaching. We’ve written a lot of stories about that. What are your thoughts about AI? Between now and when the students come back in the fall could be a completely different world, that’s how rapidly things are changing. How is your school going to approach it?

Otgo: I’ll get it started, and I’ll hand off to Courtney to talk about how the impact area and digital transformation is already doing a lot of stuff in AI. So she can touch on that. But where I would start is, partly it’s leveraging our locational advantage. So San Francisco is the AI capital, basically, of the world, and the locational advantage shows already. So before even we go to AI, I think recently Financial Times put a ranking for undergrad business schools about salaries of the students and the debt. So if you have high salary but low debt, then you get ranked highest. So USF was top 20 among undergrad business schools, according to Financial Times.

So that’s partly in a way showing our locational advantage. We attract very low-income, very diverse student body, yet we are giving them these job opportunities because of our locational advantage. Same thing will happen in AI because of this locational advantage, it’s our job to make sure our curriculum and extracurricular activities mirror the AI needs of the students so that they can leverage it when they graduate. So we are starting with these impact areas, and lots of things are happening.

Courtney Masterson: The narrative is, how can we leverage this to help students? So we just had our startup summit in McLaren here that was organized by our startup club, which involves mainly graduate school of management students, but I believe some undergrads, and then Professor John Cromwell, who’s an entrepreneurship and innovation professor here, and they put on what is basically a pitch competition. The vast majority were AI-based pitches. And they were given seed money to launch these things. And so that’s just one example.

We are here for it. We want to use it to give our students the opportunity to launch products, services, things like that. We also, of course, have had student AI week, faculty AI week, and we have a new AI club that’s setting up a great week. I’m learning from them. They’re sending out a great “what are we reading each week” newsletter, AI in the news, and whatnot. So I’m really optimistic because I think here it’s like, “All right, what can we do with it?” We’re trying to leverage it, not suppress it at all.

You’ve talked a lot about making the school less faculty-centric and more student-centric. In a letter to P&Q last December you wrote, “We’re striving to become an agile organization where walls and lines are less important, and quick changes, flexible resources, and the innovative actions are more important.” I know it’s only been a little over half a year since you wrote that, but how happy are you with where you’re at since you wrote those words?

Otgo: I will say I’m both happy with our progress and also realizing more and more how difficult it is. It’s not easy to change the paradigm, as you said it. The faculty members are a self-select group, there is a reason why they chose academia and not industry. And when they grew up as students, grad students, assistant professors, tenured professors, basically all their adult life, they’ve known one structure. So for us to upend that structure and try something new, it has required a lot of courage, and it is hard, it’s very hard.

I admit, it’s harder than I thought. But we are proud of the work we are doing. We are pushing ahead. Ultimately, if we succeed with this experiment, and find a way of settling somewhere and not revert to the status quo, I think it would be a nice example for the rest of higher ed to follow, so I’m really optimistic for that. But I’m not going to lie, it’s not easy.

Courtney Masterson: But to your credit, we’re in it live with the students right now. Last year you surveyed students and said, “What do you want? What are the types of classes you are expecting? What are your interests and passions around the sustainable development goals?” The demand is there, so we have to meet it. This is why we’re in business. We are not an R1 institution, we are in business to serve our students. We are a teaching institution. We want to be here.

And so we need to meet their needs. They deserve that. With the amount of money that they spend to invest in this education, we have to innovate classes, we have to innovate. Getting a finance major, or an accounting major, or a management major shouldn’t look the same today as it did 50 years ago or 100 years ago. So to Otgo’s credit, she’s pushing us to advocate for the students, even if it’s painful at times.

Otgo: It’s painful at times. And if you look at all business schools’ core curriculum, they tend to look very similar to each other. All of them will have a course in marketing, a course in accounting, a course in finance because you’re introducing to the disciplines first, and then you go to your major. But it almost looks like a checkbox, if you will, “Okay, I took these courses in the business core, I took these courses in my major, now I’m a business school graduate.” But then we are not letting them intentionally connect the dots on how each of these things contribute to solving these complex problems.

So our goal with this undergrad core revision is, how can we be more intentional, not just hope that students connect the dots at some point? We need to make sure that our curriculum is designed to connect the dots for the students, so that students can do that more easily, and they can do that from smaller scale from the beginning, and then as they progress toward junior, senior year, they can actually solve more complex problem and see perspectives from different disciplines. Otherwise, what we are doing is higher ed is, okay, make them take a bunch of courses, throw them into the world, and just hope that they’ll somehow connect the dots.

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