Undergraduate Program Associate Dean Jeffrey Furman, Senior Associate Dean of Programs Barbara Bickart (top right), and Senior Associate Dean of Faculty Anita Carson led the curriculum overhaul that involved . more than 60 professors and staffers at BU Questrom School of Business
Overhauling the curriculum of a business school is highly challenging work. Professors invested in their courses often dig in to fight change if their class scheduled are altered or put completely on the chopping block.
Updating a business school curriculum typically requires multiple levels of approval from different stakeholders, including university officials outside the B-school. And then there are the inevitable student and market expectations to insure that grads leave the school with relevant skills for future employers.
That’s why curriculum reform tends to be slow, incremental, and highly negotiated.
REDESIGNING QUESTROM’S UNDERGRADUATE BUSINESS EXPERIENCE
In the past three years, a trio of professors at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business have been confronting these challenges and more in overhauling an undergraduate business curriculum for the first time in 30 years.
Associate Dean for the Undergraduate Program Jeffrey Furman, Senior Associate Dean of Programs Barbara Bickart, and Senior Associate Dean of the Faculty Anita Carson led the initiative. But more than 70 professors and staffers have worked on the redesign.
The result: A curriculum that doubles down on real world, job ready skills for students through a major expansion of experiential learning, a reshuffling of the sequence of courses to help students more easily land internships between their sophomore and junior years, and the embedding of more critical thinking and analytical skills throughout the curriculum. It is a redesign that will impact more than 2,300 students and 250 full-time faculty in Questrom’s undergraduate business program, a highly selective Top 20 experience that admits just 8% of its applicants. The school expects to roll out the new curriculum in the fall of 2025.
‘THE FACULTY BELIEVED THAT WHAT WE WERE DELIVERING WAS IMPACTFUL FOR STUDENTS’
The dramatic changes involved losing an iconic part of the core undergraduate curriculum that had been a true innovation three decades ago. The four tightly-coordinated core courses–quantitative methods, finance, marketing and operations–were all taught together generally in a student’s junior year, culminating in a required business plan for the launch of a new product. But the timing of those courses was out of sync with market expectations that put students at a disadvantage in competing for internships, and the capstone exercise had become stale and less challenging.
An earlier change initiative led by a faculty committee of ten professors came up short. The group identified problems and proposed some potential solutions but was unable to gain consensus. “Our faculty really believed that the then existing core was a gem because it was an integration among marketing, finance and operations and all that we taught the students in class could be leveraged for their projects,” recalls Carson of the effort more than three years ago. “The faculty believed that what we were delivering was really impactful for students. The concern was that we were dropping the best part of our undergraduate business program. But it was hard to update the curriculum because everything was tied to this project, and the projects started to get repetitive.”
The story of how Furman and his colleagues reengineered the program and lobbied to gain its approval is nothing less than a case study in change management. It involved the direct support and encouragement of Questrom Dean Susan Fournier, the building of trust that Furman had with his fellow faculty, and reams of benchmarking data and employer feedback. A strategy and innovation professor, Furman has been a steady fixture at Questrom for nearly 24 years, ever since earning his PhD at MIT Sloan. He is soft-spoken, personable yet driven, willing to invest the time and energy to gently twist arms and persuade the most change-resistant professors. If there was anyone on the faculty who could successfully lead a major overhaul, it had to be him.
THE DAY ONE READY COMMITTEE
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He took the lead role in redesigning the first business course a freshman would take: Introduction to Business, Markets & Society.” Some 1,000 undergrads a year enroll in this course taught by 20 faculty members. “That course changed almost completely from the Spring of 2024 to the Spring of 2025,” says Furman. “The theme of the course is business as a force for good, and it was designed as part of a student quest to understand competition, markets and the role of business, all with the newly created Ravi K. Mehrotra Institute for Business, Markets, and Society in mind. The redesign ended up with higher ratings than the earlier spring version.”
Dean Fournier had appointed a three-person committee co-led by Associate Dean Monica Parker James who heads up industry relations, career services, and alumni initiatives. Dubbed the Day One Ready committee, the group engaged a firm to do extensive research with alumni and employers. They did exit interviews with recently graduated students who often felt at a disadvantage in competing for internships because most of them were not being exposed to finance–the most popular concentration among Questrom undergrads taken by 60% of the students–until their junior year.
The Day One Ready committee set three primary goals for the redesign: To improve the rigor of the curriculum, increase its real world relevance to students, and boost the range of critical skills students would gain, from analysis and critical thinking to teaming and leadership.”
TRYING TO GIVE STUDENTS A GREATER SHORT AT EARLIER INTERNSHIPS
The upshot: “Students were taking finance too late because employers hire as early as sophomore year,” says Furman. “We also heard that students need to be better at unstructured problem solving because that is what people are expected to do from day one. A lot of what we were doing was too templated. The other thing was relevance. Alumni and employers told us that students need hands-on experience and should be embedded in real business today. It was nothing that was super surprising but we could see things were missing in the curriculum.”
An outline of the major goals of the redesign for Questrom’s undergraduate business program. Source: Boston University Questrom School of Business.
With that research in hand, Dean Fournier and Bickart engaged Carson to lead the next phase. Furman was then brought aboard as the new head of undergraduate programs. A smaller, close-knit group, they believed, could more easily come to agreement and then recruit more of the faculty in the redesign. “You want a small group of people making these decisions,” agrees Bickart. “A lot of people doesn’t help, and you need people who are not political.”
Carson took on a benchmarking project, looking at 52 undergraduate business programs at both peer schools and those ranked higher. She found that 70% of the programs allowed students to take finance in their freshman year. Programs also showed greater flexibility to choose courses with few to no prerequisites.
