Management Education at MIT Sloan Reaches 100-Year Milestone: MBA News

The dean of MIT Sloan School of Management, David Schmittlein, has been surveying the changing landscape of the MBA, as his school celebrated 100 years as providers of management education over the weekend.

Schmittlein pointed to the increasing depth and breadth of what an MBA covers and how hands-on-learning can be used as a key facet for today’s emerging generation of leaders.

Hands-on-learning is decade’s most important development

“The notion that there is one MBA, it is what it is, and you either do it better or worse – it’s always been an exaggeration but it’s less true now than ever…The MBA is no longer one single thing. There are people who pursue an MBA to learn more about marketing and managing people at work or a little bit of finance or to move ahead in their job,” MIT Sloan’s dean told the  Boston Business Journal.

The growth of hands-on-learning, or experiential learning, was singled out by Schmittlein as the most noteworthy development of the last decade in terms of the MBA’s teaching approach: “Hands-on-learning has become well understood to be the most effective way to develop as a leader in an organization.”

Looking ahead, Schmittlein expects to see further attention paid to providing students with exposure to unfamiliar terrain as a way of developing key leadership skills – arguing that leadership traits aren’t necessarily something you either have or don’t have, but that it is possible to work on and develop these traits via hands-on-learning. “It isn’t easy and it requires people to put themselves in difficult and challenging situations,” he said, before citing an example: “Sending people to work with entrepreneurial ventures in unfamiliar parts of the world – the next wave of management education is to do that kind of leadership development well.”

Anniversary and commencement celebrations at MIT Sloan

Over the weekend, MIT Sloan celebrated 100 years of management education with an alumni event, known as the Course XV Centennial Colloquium, showcasing faculty speeches and followed by a grand reception.

The cryptically-named Course XV was MIT Sloan’s first management education offering back in 1914.  The course predated MIT’s opening of the separate Sloan School of Management by some 38 years. The MBA is MIT Sloan’s biggest program, although the specialized master’s in finance has seen a huge surge in popularity in the five years since its 2008 launch.  Back then, the inaugural finance class attracted 180 applicants, but this number grew to almost 1600 for those starting last fall – of which only 174 students successfully won a place. 

MIT’s commencement took place the day before the management school’s centennial celebrations. CEO of chemical company DuPont, Ellen Kullman, told this year’s graduates of their significance in the wider world: “I recently read that if the active companies founded by MIT graduates were a single nation, it would be the 11th-largest economy in the world.”

At the same day’s MIT Sloan MBA convocation, CEO of the Bacardi Corporation, Joaquin E. Bacardi III, spoke of how the Sloan MBA broadened his horizons and how one must retain a sense of humility while challenging yourself to go further. “Don’t be a spectator, get in the arena. Get your hands dirty in the trenches of life,” he said.