When Everything Sounds Like a Good Idea

My college is rethinking its MBA program. The work is ongoing, and it is unclear where we will end up. But I think the effort illustrates a broader difficulty in higher education.

When universities face enrollment challenges, they tend to respond in two familiar ways. They add things they think prospective students will value, and they remove things they think prospective students see as obstacles. New concentrations may be developed, new delivery options introduced, new amenities built, new student supports created, or new credentials offered. At the same time, universities may reduce required courses, waive courses students have already taken, shorten the time to completion, or eliminate prerequisites.

Almost every one of these decisions can be defended on its own. But a series of individually reasonable responses to enrollment pressure does not necessarily add up to a coherent strategy.

The pieces must fit together. Decisions about programs, formats, requirements, and the student experience should make sense given what the institution is good at and which students it is trying to serve. A choice that makes sense for one group of students, in one format, at one institution may make much less sense when any of those conditions change.

My college’s MBA discussion is a useful example. One idea is to allow students who majored in business as undergraduates to skip some of the traditional MBA core. The argument for this is easy to understand. If someone already took finance, accounting, marketing, or management, why make that student pay to take those subjects again?

Perhaps that is appropriate. If an MBA finance course simply repeats undergraduate finance, I am not sure there is much of a case for requiring it. But there is plenty of room to go deeper in finance, just as there is in strategy or organizational behavior. A graduate course can ask students to work through harder problems, make decisions with incomplete information, question assumptions, and connect financial analysis to other parts of a business. Someone who studied finance as an undergraduate may find that easier than someone who studied English. That seems fine to me. Courses do not have to be equally difficult for everyone.

The differences among students can also be part of what makes a course, and a whole program, useful. A finance graduate might notice that an attractive growth strategy depends on unrealistic assumptions about cash flow or cost of capital, or push the group to quantify a risk everyone else is discussing only in general terms. An English major might be quicker to notice that the team has framed the problem poorly, that an argument does not follow from the evidence, or that a recommendation will be difficult to explain persuasively. An engineer, teacher, nurse, or marketer will bring still other habits of thought and experiences that shape what they notice and how they approach the problem.

Managerial problems, of course, rarely arrive neatly divided into academic disciplines. A capital investment can be a finance problem, a strategy problem, an organizational problem, and a communication problem at the same time. There is value in having people with different ways of thinking work through those problems together.

Some MBA programs have been designed around exactly this kind of interdisciplinarity. Babson, where I earned my MBA, has long emphasized integration across business functions. Yale took a different approach and organized much of its core around organizational perspectives and problems rather than traditional disciplinary silos. I am not suggesting that every MBA should copy either model. Instead, I offer them as examples of programs that have a recognizable thesis behind the curriculum. The courses are part of a larger conception of what the program is trying to accomplish.

Format is also important. A program built around interaction among students, learning from different professional backgrounds, and working through complicated problems together is easier to imagine in some formats than others. None of that is impossible online, but doing it well requires deliberate effort. Efforts to create more interaction might also run into one of the main reasons many students choose an online program in the first place, which is flexibility. That does not make online education bad, but it does highlight why putting a program online does more than change how the courses are delivered. The format affects what the program can do particularly well and which students are likely to find it attractive.

The same is true of the institution offering a program. A university does not begin from a blank sheet of paper. It has faculty with specific strengths, existing programs, relationships with employers, a reputation, a location, alumni, facilities, and a history. Some of those may provide real advantages while others may not matter very much to prospective students. A sensible program design should probably build around the strengths that do matter rather than trying to construct whatever collection of features students currently seem to prefer.

None of this is particularly novel. It is Strategy 101. A program should make choices about whom it serves, what it does well, and how its activities reinforce one another. Michael Porter made fit among activities central to his account of strategy decades ago, and some version of fit, tradeoffs, and alignment appears in almost every basic strategy framework. Universities teach these ideas all the time. Yet we are not always very good at applying them to our own institutions.

Enrollment pressure makes it especially tempting to respond one decision at a time.

A prospective student says a program takes too long, so we look for ways to shorten it. Students want more flexibility, so we add another format. Competitors introduce a new concentration, so we consider one too. Students seem interested in a particular amenity or experience, so we add that. None of that is necessarily wrong in isolation. Universities obviously need students, and it would be foolish not to pay attention to what prospective students value. Some requirements really should disappear, and some new programs and formats are genuinely better than what they replace.

The problem is less any one decision than what happens as these decisions accumulate. There will always be another feature some students would like and another requirement they would rather avoid. A program built by continually adding the former and removing the latter may become more appealing in particular ways without becoming more compelling as a whole.

That dynamic is especially difficult for institutions that cannot compete primarily on price or convenience. A relatively expensive private university is unlikely to win by offering the cheapest, fastest, or easiest path to a degree because there will almost always be another institution better positioned to compete on those dimensions. The same problem applies on the other side. New concentrations, delivery formats, amenities, and other features can be useful, but competitors can add them too. If the response to enrollment pressure is mainly to remove friction and match what others offer, the institution risks competing on dimensions where it has little real advantage.

The more important question may be which students an institution can serve particularly well and what kind of experience it can credibly offer them. That does not necessarily mean pursuing the largest possible market. It may mean finding a sufficient number of students who value something the institution is especially well positioned to provide.

Of course, figuring out what that is is much harder than saying it. Faculty and administrators can both overestimate what is distinctive or valuable about an institution, while students do not always choose programs for the reasons they say they will. Even a strategy that looks coherent on paper may fail to attract enough people to sustain it.

I do not know whether the MBA ideas being discussed at my own institution will work. I personally like some of them, and they may work very well. But the bigger question is whether and how they fit into a coherent strategy and market position. Answering that requires explaining why these particular choices belong together. Who is the program designed for? Why does the format make sense for those students? What is the institution unusually well equipped to provide them? How does the curriculum reinforce that?

Those questions do not eliminate the need to respond to the market, but they do give the response some direction.

Simply offering more of what we think students want is not much of a strategy. Neither is ignoring what students want and insisting that existing programs must be valuable because faculty designed them. The harder work is finding the place where the students, the format, and the institution actually fit.