Major Curriculum Changes at Goizueta

The faculty of Emory’s Goizueta Business School has approved major changes to the curriculum of the full-time MBA program, which will be implemented beginning with the class entering fall of 2008. Goizueta says the new curriculum comes in response to the changing landscape of business. Corporations demand more from their MBAs and want it sooner. In addition, there are the new realities of business including globalization; heightened complexity of business environments; an acceleration in the pace of change; and, an increased focus on data-driven decision-making. Curriculum reform is emerging as a key competitive tool amongst top business schools.

Key structural changes include more linkages from management theory to ”˜management practice,’; greater degrees of freedom for students to pursue a concentration earlier in their studies; and better integration of courses, career planning and leadership development. Before designing the new curriculum, the MBA Curriculum Committee conducted extensive research which included surveying Goizueta alumni and current students, employers, and deans of other top business schools, as well as benchmarking Goizueta’s curriculum with other top MBA programs.

According to the school, the committee’s research highlighted the need for enhanced rigor, and continued emphasis on building analytical skills. The core class structure is re-engineered to improve the sequencing of courses and their content, eliminate duplication of material across classes, and to achieve better integration. Foundational analytical skills are sequenced right at the beginning of the first semester, allowing for more analytical rigor in core courses and core material that follows. There also is explicit structure to better integrate career planning and leadership into the curriculum.

Under the new curriculum, students will:

* Begin the Fall semester two weeks earlier;
* Complete all but one of their core courses by the end of the first semester; and
* Complete twice as many elective courses before going into their summer internships.

“With the new curriculum, Goizueta students will continue to have the benefits of our small, close-knit community, combined with increased flexibility to pursue a tailored plan-of-study,” says Doug Bowman, Professor of Marketing and Chair of the MBA Curriculum Committee whose charge was to design the new curriculum. “This places Goizueta Business School at the forefront of the next generation of MBA curriculums.”

To hear more about the Goizueta experience from current students, check out the following blogs:
The Dream Hunter
The Right Experience
The Yanec

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