If you’ve been following the news, you probably know that Columbia and Stanford are working on creating a STEM track for their full-time MBA programs. If you’re considering Anderson or at Anderson, you probably know that Anderson is working on the same thing; the difference is that Anderson didn’t announce their move. Anderson is good at staying under the radar, for good or for bad.
And I’ll be surprised if in 2 years any of the top 15 US business school will not have a STEM track for their MBA program. 13 of these already have such a track or are working on establishing one: Anderson, Booth, Columbia, Darden, Fuqua, Haas, Kellogg, Ross, Sloan, Stanford, Stern, Tuck, and Wharton. I’m sure Harvard and Yale will join the party soon.
It’s no secret that US business schools are doing this to attract more talents from abroad who otherwise would have gone to their European rivals. But, in order to have a STEM-eligible track, a business school has to have a sufficiently technical curriculum. If you have taken the MBA core classes, I’m sure you’ll agree with me these classes are not for mathematical lightweights. If you’ve never taken a college-level class in economics, finance, statistics, or calculus, your first year will be a struggle. The electives at Anderson have some technically challenging classes as well. Even for classes that aren’t analytics- or finance- based, you still need to run a financial analysis to assess a business. Marketing strategies need to be supported by profitability and budget figures. To say that the MBA is gravitating towards a Master’s in Management Science is not stretching it.
One thing is responsible for this shift in thinking about an MBA : technology.
Thanks to technology, there are lucrative career options for non-MBA’s. Data scientists, data engineers, and software engineers can comfortably make 100k+ without a graduate education. A master’s degree in statistics or computer science also costs much less than $200k, for those who want to change or advance their careers with a graduate degree. Because the appetite for an MBA has declined in the last decade, business schools have to find ways to attract more applicants and students. This brings us to point 2.
Because of technology, business managers need to be more technically savvy. Technology has resulted in unprecedented size and complexity of data available for analysis. If you’re not analyzing your customer data, your marketing data, or your sales data, and your competitor is, they are going to eat your lunch. To make informed decisions, business managers need to translate data to usable insights. Sometimes this involves going into a database and using SQL to pull some reports and perform analyses.
The largest companies in the world, which are among the largest employers of MBA graduates, are technology companies. Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet are all over $1,000,000,000,000 in market cap the last time I checked. If you want to work for one of those, and trust my guarantee that they are very data-driven, you need to be technically competent yourself. If you get into management consulting, good news for you: the MBB firms have all developed their sophisticated analytics consulting teams. The most prestigious management consulting firms are shifting part of their solutions from services to products. Over time, management consulting is only going to become more technical.
Just as technology permeates our everyday life and our economy, an MBA program needs to evolve to train its students to be an effective leader in a technology-driven world. The STEM revolution is therefore not only welcome, but also inevitable. If you’re not comfortable with numbers going into business school, you have 2 years to turn the tables. It’s going to be hard, but if you’re smart enough to follow my blog, I know you can do it.
-Richard
Richard Anderson 