Revamped MBA Program Turning Heads

UA redesigns, beefs up program; corporate America takes notice

Doyle Williams says he wanted to make the Walton College of Business Administration’s MBA program more like the real business world. What the dean ended up with may, at least for some students, seem more like a different realm.

“There have been a lot of sleepless nights this year that our students didn’t anticipate,” says program director Carol Reeves. “Using the students’ words, they say it’s been absolute hell.”

Five years ago, the University of Arkansas’ business college faculty made a commitment to seriously upgrade the master of business administration program. Based on responses from business leaders, Williams says, a curriculum was developed that would focus on the application of knowledge of business systems and managerial skills to real-life problems. The idea was to hit the ground running when the revamped program admitted its first class.

In July, 39 graduate students began a year-long journey through the toughest program in the business college’s history. Although the program has been grueling for students, the talent pool it’s producing is like heaven for corporate recruiters.

“The type of candidates that come out of the UA’s MBA program are well-rounded with good entrepreneurial skills,” says Russell Tooley, corporate division human resources manager for Tyson Foods Inc. in Springdale.

“They’ve always been good at applying what they’ve learned, and we believe the program the college has now is even more advanced than what it’s had in the past.”

With four months left until graduation, Reeves says the 36 remaining students are seeing all their hard work pay off in the form of multiple job offers and career opportunities.

Barbara Batson, associate director of employer relations for the college’s career development center, says no hard data exists for the program’s placement numbers in past years. But during the 1999 fall semester, 31 companies interviewed MBA students on campus and another 30 have requested resumes.

The companies include all of the “Big Five” national accounting firms, Ford Motor Co., Kraft, Energizer Battery, Andersen Consulting, American Airlines and Phillips Petroleum. Nearly all of the large Arkansas-based firms are also in the hunt.

Batson says at least 50 percent of the MBA program’s students have already accepted positions or are currently negotiating an offer. And that doesn’t take into consideration the students who plan to pursue doctorate degrees, enter law school or international students who are returning to their home countries.

“It used to be that our graduate students started looking for a job in May,” Reeves says. “But we’re already seeing a similarity here to some other prestigious business schools where our people are having job offers before the end of the fall semester.

“Many of them are getting their choice between three and four companies.”

The Godfather

Doyle Williams took over as dean of the UA’s College of Business in 1993. During his tenure, endowments for the college have increased 564 percent to $88.3 million, including a $50 million gift from the Walton Foundation that prompted a renaming of the college after Wal-Mart Stores Inc. founder Sam M. Walton.

But before the big bucks had even started rolling into the college, Williams says, the faculty was already clamoring for a big-time restructuring of the graduate program. The thinking was the business world was changing faster than the college’s classrooms, so it was time to shift gears. The influx of money, largely solicited by Williams, made a nationally prominent MBA program not just a pipe dream but a definite possibility.

Williams called David Pincus, a former colleague from the University of Southern California.

Pincus had just finished his book, “Top Dog,” which was based on research with CEOs across the country. The book criticizes MBA programs for not teaching students the “systems thinking” behind making solid business decisions.

Williams liked the criticism and decided to put Pincus on the spot. He challenged Pincus to come to Arkansas and lead the effort to integrate the MBA program using strategy issues like finance, marketing, accounting and labor force studies. Pincus couldn’t resist and accepted a dual appointment as director of the MBA program and as research professor of communication within the business college.

“It wasn’t me,” Pincus says. “Doyle Williams is the godfather of all of this. He epitomizes what a college dean ought to be. He’s a magnificent listener and enjoys juggling several balls at once rather than feeling pressure from it.”

Pincus led the redesign team that came up with the new curriculum. He fulfilled his term as director but stepped down in 1997 to work on his latest fiction novel.

The ropes

Reeves, whose three-year term as MBA program director expires June 30, set the tone for the year last July during orientation. A hands-on professor who used to play softball for one of the business college’s teams, she arranged for the students to go through the Charter Vista “Challenge Course” in Fayetteville. The course features a number of exercises designed to promote problem-solving through teamwork, including “the ropes” drill that requires participants to move objects around a course.

“We had some students say, ‘During orientation, I thought you would show us where the football stadium is and stuff like that.’ But we had them working on teamwork, negotiations and a case competition. Because time is such a commodity, we wanted to package the program in a year’s time frame rather than 18 or 24 months.

“That meant our people had to come in at a certain level so that we weren’t spending time getting people up to speed.”

A week later, the students hit the program’s six-week “foundations” section, a six-credit hour immersion into everything from information technology to operations management. Then came the first of two seven-week core curriculum modules, a murderer’s row of accounting, management and economics that emphasized quantitative studies. The second batch focused on information technology, corporate finance and managing ideas, products and services.

“We have reorganized that for this next year to mix the quantitative and qualitative stuff so that after each section we don’t have students who aren’t in the area of their strengths going on probation,” Reeves says

After each module, the program takes a week to focus on a different element of business. Guest speakers from overseas and from companies such as Wal-Mart participate by teaching students the tricks of their trade.

The program’s signature component is a spring partnering project where students are required to work with a firm like Proctor & Gamble or Wal-Mart. Reeves says the real world experience is what the college hopes will set its MBA program apart from others. Faculty members refer to the partnering projects as “real time learning.”

“The one thing we can guarantee,” Reeves says, “is that even if a full-time student goes straight through our undergraduate program to the MBA program, they will have work experience when they graduate.”

The word

Reeves says the camaraderie created this year, by the program’s team-oriented atmosphere and intense workload, is exactly the kind of spillover effect the faculty hoped an integrated program would produce. Reeves says she believes the same attitude will continue when Julie Gentry, who also served on the redesign team, takes over the director’s post July 1.

“The cohesiveness of this group is due to it being such a lockstep program,” Gentry says. “The interdisciplinary modules help students understand how all of the different areas of business fit together. There’s so much technology available to us, thanks to gifts like the one from the Walton family, and integrating the technology and many different fields of business exposes students to real-life deadlines and other business frustrations.

“It’s helped them develop the interpersonal experience that a lot of business students have lacked in the past.”

Walton College now has its own graduate business school, a luxury not afforded by most universities, and a new managerial program that includes satellite distance education courses will come online next fall.

Students in Walton College’s graduate program for the 1999-2000 school year paid 15 percent more in tuition than any other graduate program on campus, other than the UA School of Law. Walton College tuition will increase by another 15 percent in 2000-2001. But Reeves says most of the students have indicated they don’t mind investing an extra $1,000 in tuition for a program that might help them make an extra $10,000 per year.

“If the state of Arkansas is going to support a first-class college of business, then we believe we can contribute enormously to the overall economic development of the state,” Williams says. “Without a nationally competitive university and college of business, it would be more difficult to recruit international companies and to retain employees for the ones already here.

“For the state to continue to grow, we have to continue to supply talent, and our MBA program is only one of the efforts we’re making toward that end.”