The Wealth of Choice on Offer in an MBA Course List

There are as many as 150 elective courses on offer to MBA students of Stanford GSB this year, according to the school.

The number of electives on the MBA course list menu does vary from school to school, but it’s not unusual to see a school offer somewhere in the region of 100 different options – this being true at Dartmouth Tuck, the University of Toronto’s Rotman School and IESE Business School in Spain, for instance. Narrowing down which courses you want to take might prove to be something of a challenge, however. At Stanford GSB, students can take up to 18 MBA electives in their second year of study.  

This is why a thorough understanding of the differences in course content available from one school to the next lies at the heart of the process of finding the right MBA program for you and your individual needs and interests.

28% of electives at Stanford GSB are new in any given year

This may not be quite as easy as it sounds as schools will endeavor to keep their MBA course list fresh, by making changes to their roster of electives each year. This is something that was emphasized by Stanford GSB’s dean, Garth Saloner, at the start of the academic year when he told the school’s entering class that 28% of electives available on the MBA course list are new in any given year.

Examples this year include courses on sustainable energy and the psychology behind startup teams. A further new offering has even been designed directly around the experiences of – and mistakes made by - recent graduates.

“We created short video vignettes of them (graduates) describing the problems they faced, how they handled them, and what they learned from them,” management professor, Charles O’Reilly, says of the course, entitled, ‘Becoming a Leader: Managing Early Career Challenges’.

Madhav Rajan, senior associate dean at Stanford GSB, believes that continually reassessing and improving the electives on offer to students helps distinguish the school from its peers. Offering students a wealth of program choice is also a response to student demand. As Rajan recently told the FT, the breadth of options goes hand-in-hand with the number of MBAs at the school who are enrolled in joint degrees and thus have a “multidisciplinary mindset”.

Specializing and pursuing interests through MBA electives

Regardless of whether you intend to pursue a joint degree or not, electives allow participants to pick and choose from the MBA course list and thus, customize their business school experience. They can also pave the way to a full MBA specialization or concentration that will be name-checked in your eventual diploma. Alternatively, you may just really like the sound of taking a class called ‘The Opposable Mind’ at Rotman, or one entitled ‘Why Can’t Women Advance?’ at Tuck.

However, the allure of exciting electives should by no means detract from the importance of the core modules that are taken by every single member of a cohort – a viewpoint underlined by Stanford GSB’s dean:

“Our priority is to continue to innovate in our programs and at the same time focus on keeping the core of the institution strong.”