They Mean Business
The College of Business Administration Aims
for Market Leadership
By Daniel Penrice
Listening to college and university administrators these days, you notice
that they sound an awful lot like marketing executives. Here is Dean Ira
Weiss of the College of Business Administration (CBA), for example, in
an interview last year with the Northeastern Voice, the university's faculty-staff
newspaper: "We are going outside our traditional New England markets
. . . We're experiencing extraordinary growth because we're going into
new markets with a differentiated product . . . We think we are a solid
player in the graduate markets."
As a business school dean, Weiss speaks the new marketing-based academic
lingo more fluently than most. Yet there is nothing glib about his talk
of growth and new markets. His organization is indeed undergoing a boom,
with an undergraduate student body that has grown by about a third since
1995. And the college has been given a mandate to continue expanding: last
year's "Enrollment and Resource Plan" (popularly known as the
"sizing report") from the university's planning council targeted
the College of Business Administration-along with the Bouvé College
of Health Sciences and the Colleges of Computer Science and Engineering-for
increased undergraduate enrollments over the next decade.
Yet the business college is aiming for more than just enlarging its
student body. For Weiss has let it be known that he wants CBA to become
the premier practice-oriented business school in the nation-a goal in line
with President Richard Freeland's precept of an urban research university
that is practice-oriented, student-centered, and nationally based. This
means not just the undergraduate school but also the Graduate School of
Business Administration and the smaller Graduate School of Professional
Accounting.
What will it take to propel the business college to the top in "practice-oriented"
business education? In a field where virtually every institution claims
to offer opportunities for "real-world" learning, how exactly
can and should the college differentiate and market its product line? For
which segments of the market, and against the offerings of which competitors?
These are some of the questions Weiss and his colleagues, wearing their
marketers' hats, now wrestle with daily. How they answer these questions,
and then execute against their strategy, will determine whether the college
can make the transition from "solid player" to market leader.
Undergraduates, over the last few years, have been making CBA into a
growth business. The size of incoming freshman classes has increased steadily
over the past four years (from 318 in the fall of 1995 to 417 this past
autumn), exceeding university goals every step of the way. Last year, the
college found itself in the unprecedented situation of having a waiting
list for freshmen. Total enrollments have shot up from 1,848 in 199596
to 2,406 currently. With transfer rates that make it one of only two N.U.
colleges that are consistently "net importers" of students, CBA
seems poised to meet its sizing report goal of 2,739 undergraduates by
the fall of 2002.
What accounts for the boom, apart from the current
economic expansion having lasted longer than almost anyone expected? Dean
Weiss says that what his college offers undergraduates first and foremost
is a "breadth of opportunities for learning in core managerial disciplines"
with "co-op as a mechanism for adding value." These core disciplines
are found in the college's list of undergraduate concentrations: accounting,
entrepreneurship and small business management, finance and insurance,
human resources management, international business, logistics and transportation
management, management information systems, and marketing.
Beyond these basic offerings-which the college's undergraduate curricula
attempt to integrate during students' courses of study-CBA boasts of the
opportunities it offers for ranging outside the field of business. "How
we position the college," Weiss explains, "is very much as part
of a university, especially because our competition-schools like Babson
and Bentley, which really are boutique business schools-does not have that
breadth of focus. What we're talking about, really, is an overall strength
of the university."
For example, his college has just begun to offer two dual-major degrees
in collaboration with the mathematics department in the College of Arts
and Sciences: a concentration in math and finance, and another in math
and finance with an actuarial sciences track. Weiss reports that CBA and
the College of Computer Science have sent Freeland a proposal for a new
interdisciplinary program, and that he is exploring a similar collaboration
with the College of Engineering. Combined with N.U.'s network of co-op
partners in financial services and high-technology industries, these cross
college initiatives promise to strengthen and expand CBA's "breadth
of focus."
Perhaps the biggest factor in CBA's recent growth at the undergraduate
level, however, is the Bachelor of Science in International Business (BSIB).
Another program that crosses intercollege boundaries at N.U., this degree,
now in its fifth year, is a highly differentiated new product aimed at
a growing segment of the business-education market.
In a world in which every business school talks about "globalization"-just
as your local steakhouse now probably serves something it calls "pasta
primavera"-a claim to competence in international business has become
less a means of differentiation than a requirement for respectability in
the marketplace. Yet as early as 1990, Professor Heidi Vernon, a member
of the college's general management group who specializes in international
business, saw an opportunity for Northeastern to develop a "really
credible international business undergraduate program" she says. From
the outset, Vernon identified three key requirements for such a program:
foreign-language instruction; student exchanges with academically strong,
philosophically compatible institutions overseas; and the incorporation
of co-op into these exchange programs.
By the time the BSIB program welcomed its first group of students in
the fall of 1994, the College of Business Administration and a network
of partners in western Europe had put together an innovative plan of study
and work revolving around a concentration in international business. Today,
in courses created especially for the program by the university's modern
languages department, N.U. students in the program learn Spanish, French,
or German. In their junior year, they participate in a one-semester exchange
program with one of three overseas business schools: Instituto Católico
de Administración y Dirección de Empresas (ICADE) in Madrid,
Spain; Groupe ESC Reims in Reims, France; or the Fachhochschule für
Technik und Wirtschaft in Reutlingen, Germany. While abroad, these students
also spend from three to six months working for a company in the host country.
Although the international business degree is still young, demand for
it so far has been strong, with approximately twenty percent of all undergraduate
applicants to the college now seeking admission to the program. The new
degree is also at the forefront of the college's marketing strategy as
it attempts to recruit more, and more talented, undergraduates. "BSIB
is the program," says Weiss, "that we think is most distinguished
from all other programs of its kind throughout the United States. We don't
believe there is any other school that can match that kind of opportunity
from an educational standpoint."
The most distinctive component of the international business degree,
Vernon and others say, is the foreign-language requirement. Yet this is
also where the program has already displayed weakness: N.U. undergraduates
who have gone to Germany so far have had trouble handling their course
work in German. (Language will not be an issue in two new exchange programs
being set up with Dublin City University in Ireland and Lancaster University
in England.) On the other side of the ledger, Vernon points to the fact
that American graduates of the program have already been hired abroad.
"That almost never happens from an undergraduate program," she
remarks, "and rarely from an MBA." In Madrid, Reims, and Reutlingen,
meanwhile, the demand for slots in Boston is high. "The perception
of Northeastern as an outstanding undergraduate institution in Europe is
amazing," she says.
CBA faculty and administrators are now working on boosting the reputation
of the undergraduate college at home. In addition to the international
business bachelor's, the development of other interdisciplinary programs,
and the increasing academic stature of the university as a whole, the college
has two strong selling points in the undergraduate markets: cooperative
education, and an undergraduate student body of increasing diversity and
quality.
The quality of the college's undergraduate students has been on a steady
rise for several years, according to one of the key yardsticks applied
by the marketplace: average SAT test scores have gone up in four of the
past five years, rising from 1,041 in 199495 to 1,100 currently. During
this same period, the national average for undergraduate colleges of business
has been significantly lower than CBA's and has risen much less sharply,
from 1,003 to 1,016. With the college now having a waiting list for undergraduates,
Brendan Bannister, associate dean for undergraduate programs, expects the
caliber of his students will continue to improve.
Moreover, with leading American business schools all touting their internationally
diverse student bodies these days, CBA-with an international enrollment
ranging between fourteen and eighteen percent at the undergraduate level
over the past several years-can wear the "global" label as well
as anyone. And these students are doing more for the college than just
lending it a patina of cosmopolitanism: Vernon speaks glowingly of the
quality of the international students now coming to N.U. through the BSIB
program, crediting them for a level of discussion in her classes that is
"light-years different from what it was ten years ago."
While the college's undergraduate program shows impressive strengths
and a great deal of improvement by many measures, it continues to face
some formidable competitors in the B-school marketplace. The college's
competition at the undergraduate level takes two forms, Bannister says:
"I think of the 'killer Bs'-Babson, Bentley, Boston University, and
Boston College-in [the Boston] area. And I think of other institutions
who are trying to do similar types of co-op programs [to Northeastern's]."
In the latter category, Bannister says CBA has been benchmarking itself
against six similarly sized public and private institutions on the eastern
seaboard, which he declines to name.
In maintaining and even broadening a niche in such a competitive arena,
the college may have to do some serious marketing. Consider, for example,
that in a ranking of leading undergraduate business schools last updated
in 1996, U.S. News & World Report included in its top fifty Babson,
BC, and BU-but not N.U.
While acknowledging the weight that such rankings carry in the marketplace,
Bannister notes that they fail to account for the educational value of
one of Northeastern's most distinctive programs: co-op. "I would like
to think that we have not leveraged this thing that we call co-op,"
he says. "We have a learning model that produces tremendous outputs
that we have not documented well."
The "outputs" that Bannister refers to are the achievements
of business undergraduates. "When you look at the students who come
here and utilize [the co-op] model very well," he observes, "you
can see it right in front of you: the evidence of incredible accomplishment
that these students emerge with."
One such student-Robert Boroujerdi, who will join Goldman Sachs as an
equity research analyst after graduating this spring-believes that co-op
has given him an edge over others from schools with flashier reputations.
"I've been on co-op in companies where there were interns," Boroujerdi
says, "and they don't place much responsibility on interns."
And then in job interviews, he adds, "You're a little more like a
peer. Everyone's like, 'Tell me what you did and what you know,' rather
than, 'Let me quiz you.' "
Faculty and administrators also trumpet recent instances of N.U. students
going up successfully against the college's stiffest local competition.
For example, in the first three years of the Academic Beanpot Case Competition-an
undergraduate business-case contest for which Babson, Bentley, BC, BU,
MIT, and Northeastern field two teams each-N.U. teams have twice placed
first and once come in third.
Surveying the recent record, many would say that the College of Business
Administration's undergraduate program has already pulled abreast of the
competition, or at the least is poised to do so soon. But in the field
of business, graduate education is the locus of the real action and prestige.
Competition in the MBA arena is stiffer, and N.U. has more ground to make
up. The Graduate School of Business Administration (GSBA) has an important
role to play in Dean Weiss's quest to make the business college the market
leader in its category.
Yet what category can the graduate school be said to occupy? With an
array of eight master's-degree programs between GSBA and the Graduate School
of Professional Accounting (not even counting joint degrees in law, medicine,
and nursing that those schools participate in awarding), the graduate business
offerings at Northeastern are unusual in the degree to which they target
different segments of the market. GSBA offers a traditional full-time MBA
and a "Cooperative Education MBA" (also full-time), as well as
four "working professional" (that is, part-time) programs comprising
Part-Time, High Technology, and Executive MBAs and a master's in Finance.
The Graduate School of Professional Accounting grants a joint MS in Accounting/MBA
(a full-time program tailored for students with arts-and-sciences backgrounds)
and a part-time master's in Taxation.
This hodgepodge of programs actually reflects marketing opportunities
that CBA has successfully exploited. The five part-time programs account
for seventy-three percent of the college's graduate enrollments. Last year,
U.S. News & World Report ranked N.U.'s Part-Time MBA twenty-first in
the country. And with another of these offerings, the High Technology MBA,
the college has carved out a niche where it can compete against some of
the best brand names in the marketplace.
Founded in 1982 as the first program of its kind in the nation-and recently
given a redesigned curriculum-the High Technology MBA brings together a
learning model focused on real-world experience with a genuine business
opportunity. "We have this market of all these great high-tech companies
within twenty-five miles or so," explains Associate Professor of General
Management Marc Meyer, who teaches in the program. "And within those
companies, there are these mid-level to high-level managers who need to
focus on how to grow their companies."
What the High Tech MBA program does for such managers is provide them
with a general management education focused on high-tech industries, and
allow them to design and execute a project aimed at creating an actual
growth opportunity for their companies. Lew Levine of Visualization Technology,
an Andover, Massachusetts, firm developing computer-based visualization
models for use in surgery, is currently a first-year student in the program.
He says the curriculum "gives me the ability and perspective to communicate
to senior management why a certain technological approach would be beneficial
to the company as a whole."
The High Tech MBA reflects CBA's overall strength in one of the hottest
fields in business education: entrepreneurship. Last August, an entrepreneurs'
magazine, Success, ranked Northeastern as having the thirtieth-best graduate
business school in the country; in so doing, it gave GSBA particularly
high marks for strength of faculty, including the number who have actually
run a business. Besides having a contingent of experienced entrepreneurs,
the faculty has also produced such notable recent books on innovation as
The Power of Product Platforms, by Marc Meyer and executive-in-residence
Alvin Lehnerd, and The Human Side of Managing Technological Innovation,
edited by human resources professor Ralph Katz.
The kudos from Success have put the graduate business school in rarefied
academic company: while rating Northeastern thirtieth in the country, the
magazine put MIT's Sloan School of Management at number twenty and Harvard
Business School at twenty-five. Executive professor John Friar, director
of the college's Center for Technological Entrepreneurship (formerly the
Entrepreneurial Lab), affirms that N.U. stacks up well against MIT in technological
entrepreneurship-entrepreneurship involving engineering- or technology-based
products or services. Friar, who holds a Ph.D. from the Sloan School, says
that Northeastern is actually "a little stronger" than Sloan
on the business side of this discipline. He adds, "If you look around
within the local area, in effect we're a strong number two to MIT."
CBA's prowess in this area gives its graduate programs
some claim to national recognition; so does the Graduate School of Professional
Accounting's MS in Accounting/ MBA, a program that has had outstanding
success in preparing arts-and-sciences graduates for accounting careers,
and has only one competitor nationally (Rutgers). Yet when Weiss and others
speak about the competition at the graduate level, most of the talk is
about local institutions. "We run a very big part-time program here,"
Weiss explains. "I can't compete for California students when I'm
running programs that basically indicate you have to be working to get
in."
How does CBA, at the graduate level, stack up against the competition?
Most people would define local competitors as the "killer Bs,"
since MIT's Sloan School and Harvard Business School are generally considered
to play in a different league.
Northeastern still trails its local competitors against certain criteria
widely applied in the marketplace. As figures drawn from U.S. News &
World Report's 1998 rankings of graduate business schools suggest (see
the chart below), N.U.'s full-time graduate business programs lag significantly
behind those of Babson, BC, and BU when these programs are considered in
the aggregate. The gap is noticeably smaller in U.S. News's ratings of
part-time programs, but the competition here remains stiff: for example,
Northeastern's Part-Time MBA shared its number twenty-one ranking with
BU and lagged well behind number nine Babson.
Weiss and his director of graduate programs, Assistant Dean William
Kelly, acknowledge that their marketing efforts are hurt by GMAT [Graduate
Management Admission Test] scores that, in Weiss's words, "in some
cases we're not overly proud of." While declining to disclose average
GMAT scores for currently enrolled students, Weiss and Kelly do reveal
that current average GMATs for both the High Technology MBA and MS in Accounting/MBA
programs are significantly higher than the scores reported to U.S. News
last year for all of CBA's programs. Their argument here-that averaging
GMAT scores over the college's whole range of full- and part-time offerings
obscures a large amount of variation among programs and students-is supported
by the unusually wide range of GMAT scores listed for Northeastern in U.S.
News's tabulation.
With all their strengths and weaknesses, CBA's graduate schools now
aim to make N.U. the leading name in practice-oriented graduate business
education. Yet what exactly does it mean for a professional school-as opposed
to an undergraduate college or a university-to be "practice-oriented"?
Any professional school might claim to be practice-oriented in the sense
of existing primarily to train practitioners. And in business education,
both the case method and, increasingly, various forms of field-based learning
are now virtually ubiquitous at the graduate level.
Weiss explains the meaning of practice orientation in his graduate programs
by making three points. First, the college has a "practice-oriented"
faculty in the sense that the majority have actually been practitioners:
"Very few, if any, of our faculty join this institution if they do
not have prior work experiences," he observes. Second, CBA has always
emphasized applied research as opposed to the more theoretical work in
which even business professors sometimes engage. Finally, Weiss points
out that co-op and other methods of bringing the classroom and the workplace
together can be-and, at Northeastern, actually are-a part of a graduate
education.
Of these three factors, it is co-op that is being groomed for the principal
role in CBA's run at leadership in graduate education. Weiss and others
at the college recognize that their competitive advantage lies elsewhere
than in a traditional, full-time MBA. Noting that only one other business
school in North America (at McMaster University in Ontario) currently offers
a co-op graduate program, Weiss says he plans to make the Co-op MBA N.U.'s
premier full-time MBA program. The refocusing may go even farther than
that: Heidi Vernon says, "My understanding is that Ira's moving toward
combining the Co-op and the Full-time [MBA programs], and that would be
called a co-op MBA."
In short, Northeastern's hopes of becoming a national brand in graduate
education would seem to ride mainly on something that has always differentiated
this university: co-op. Provost David Hall endorses Weiss's strategy for
the full-time MBA programs, saying, "One of the challenges of professional
education is to interweave a vigorous co-op program. I think co-op, by
its nature, adds a unique feature to a professional school that you don't
find in schools where a co-op program does not exist."
Building a first-rate co-op program at the graduate level and marketing
the very idea of co-op to prospective MBAs-promises to challenge the College
of Business Administration as it strives to become the nation's leading
practice-oriented business school. The issue for the college's marketers
will be to differentiate co-op from the offerings of other, more prestigious
business schools that increasingly integrate work opportunities and the
classroom in de facto co-op arrangements. In all of CBA's programs, meanwhile,
it will be essential to manage what Weiss calls the "balancing act"
of raising standards while also meeting undergraduate enrollment goals
and generating the revenues that the university expects from its graduate
programs.
Perhaps the most immediate need, in light of the growth that the university
plans for CBA, is simply for the college to hire more full-time, tenured
or tenure-track faculty. With the sizing report having recommended nineteen
new faculty members to accommodate the planned increase in undergraduate
enrollments at the college, the N.U. administration is promising to act.
"We are certainly going to do our best to ensure that there are faculty
resources there," says Hall.
With more teachers in the classroom, CBA will be geared up to produce
more of what many people would say has always been its greatest claim to
excellence. Asked how Northeastern can become the market leader that it
aspires to be, most faculty don't talk just about strengthening disciplines
or the college's programs. As Marc Meyer says, "I think one thing
we really need to do to achieve national prominence is to make an inventory
of all the successful careers of our alumni." Perhaps the College
of Business Administration's most differentiated product will turn out
to be the difference that it makes to its students.
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