by jlansber | Oct 3, 2018 | Notes from the Dean
Driehaus College of Business Dean Misty Johanson | Photo by Kathy Hillegonds
Here, our students are transformed into socially responsible leaders through a real-world education and experiential learning opportunities involving the Chicago business community and our strong alumni network.”
If you’ve ridden on public transportation or driven in Chicago over the past six months, you’ve likely seen billboards featuring DePaul’s new brand campaign, Here, We Do. The campaign succinctly expresses what’s uniquely rewarding about the DePaul educational experience. It proudly says that at DePaul, students learn by doing in an urban environment full of opportunity, inspired by Vincentian values that encourage our graduates to make a difference in the world.
This message applies especially well to our business college. Here, our students are transformed into socially responsible leaders through a real-world education and experiential learning opportunities involving the Chicago business community and our strong alumni network.
Our college recently expanded these opportunities by creating two new student success centers modeled after the Marriott Foundation Center for Student Development and Engagement, which opened at the School of Hospitality Leadership two years ago. We have established the John L. Keeley Jr. Center for Financial Services, which will encompass academies supporting finance students (see page 2), and an Office of Student Success and Engagement for accountancy majors with support from alumnus Kent Klaus. The goal of both initiatives is to engage industry partners and alumni mentors with our students to ensure that students not only gain business expertise, but also master communication, networking, teamwork and leadership skills that are essential for professional and personal success.
Our college’s centers and institutes also embody Here, We Do. In July, we opened the Women in Entrepreneurship Institute at the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center to promote the growth and sustainability of women-founded businesses through education, research and incubation initiatives. The institute is supported by an outstanding committee of Chicago women business leaders who believe that here, we can do more to help women entrepreneurs succeed.
Our belief in Here, We Do also is part of our future plans. This fall, we will finalize the college’s strategic plan for the next six years. The three pillars of this new plan are to strengthen our connections to the Chicago business community, alumni and donors; expand our student success initiatives that add value to earning a DePaul business degree; and deepen the culture of excellence in our academic community. The plan also challenges us to examine our graduate program mix to ensure that it is addressing the evolving needs of our students. As we celebrate the 70th anniversary of our flagship part-time MBA program, our college also is reaching new student markets through on-site corporate MBA programs, specialized master’s degrees and a doctorate in business program, which produced its first graduating class in June.
Together we are embarking on our 2024 strategic plan with a Here, We Do spirit. To learn more, I invite you to read this Q&A, where I’ll discuss where our college is headed under our new strategic plan.
Misty Johanson
Dean
Driehaus College of Business
by jlansber | Oct 3, 2018 | College News
Elijah Brewer, chair of DePaul’s Department of Finance, and Paul G. Savor, newly appointed Christopher L. Keeley Chair in Investment Management. | Photo by Kathy Hillegonds
Finance students will benefit from innovative academic and cocurricular programming at the newly named John L. Keeley Jr. Center for Financial Services, thanks to a $3 million commitment from the family of the late finance executive John L. Keeley Jr. and the Keeley Family Foundation to the business college.
The new center will support academies with cutting-edge curricula in several finance specialties, including a Wealth Management Academy that provides students with expertise in private portfolio management and financial planning. The center also will select students from the academies to become Keeley Scholars, giving them access to professional development workshops, mentorships, internships and career networking opportunities with the center’s industry partners.
John L. Keeley Jr.
Longtime donors to DePaul, the Keeley family and their foundation previously committed $2 million to fund an endowed academic chair in investment management and $1 million to develop a virtual trading room for students at the business college.
“The Keeleys have been DePaul supporters for more than a decade, ensuring that we provide our students with an education that bridges theory and practice,” says A. Gabriel Esteban, PhD, DePaul’s president. “We are grateful for their generosity and thank them for providing endowments that will prepare another generation with these skills.”
Misty Johanson, dean of the Driehaus College of Business, says the center supports the college’s goal to “produce well-rounded, career-ready graduates who possess not only the analytical and technical skills required to succeed, but also the leadership, communication and teamwork abilities necessary to thrive in the workplace.”
John L. Keeley Jr., who died in 2015, was the founder and chief investment officer of Keeley Asset Management Corp. (KAMCO, now known as Keeley Teton Advisors) and the Keeley Family Foundation. Keeley and his wife, Barbara, endowed the Christopher L. Keeley Chair in Investment Management at DePaul in 2006. The chair honors their youngest son, Christopher, a 1997 DePaul business college alumnus and KAMCO officer who died suddenly at age 29 from a pulmonary embolism in 2002.
John L. Keeley III, John’s oldest son and an adjunct professor of economics at DePaul, says, “The new center embodies our father’s belief that students learn best and ultimately succeed by doing. It will provide opportunities for students to apply their classroom knowledge to the real world of finance.”
In a related development, Pavel G. Savor has been appointed Christopher L. Keeley Chair in Investment Management at DePaul. The Harvard- and Yale-educated Savor joined the faculty July 1 to teach, conduct research and coordinate industry outreach for DePaul’s finance program.
“The new Keeley center and chair raise the profile of our finance program by giving students access to real-world skills and innovative thought leadership,” says Elijah Brewer, chair of DePaul’s Department of Finance. With the new academy as a model, Brewer adds, the department is seeking support to create student cocurricular programs for the finance department’s other academic specialties.
by jlansber | Oct 3, 2018 | College News
Abigail Ingram, assistant director of the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center, is leading DePaul’s Women in Entrepreneurship Institute initiative.
Entrepreneurship among women has been on the rise nationally for two decades, yet venture capital and other resources are often scarce for women business founders. To help redress this disparity and support the success and sustainability of women-owned firms, the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center has launched the Women in Entrepreneurship Institute (WEI).
Abigail Ingram, assistant director of the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center, says the intent is to create the nation’s first comprehensive institute for women founders that integrates academic learning, research, incubation, funding and public policy. “Right now, women are getting just 2 percent of venture capital funding, and less than 2 percent of women-owned businesses reach a million dollars in revenue,” Ingram says. Illinois also is in the lowest 20 percent of U.S. states when it comes to the economic clout of women-owned businesses, according to the “2017 State of Women-Owned Businesses Report.” “We would like to change that,” Ingram asserts.
WEI’s programming encompasses pitch competitions, business incubation space and women in entrepreneurship fellowships, as well as a research initiative to examine why and how women-owned businesses are funded. A new course in women in entrepreneurship featuring leading women business founders as speakers is being developed. Future plans include funding a women in entrepreneurship academic chair.
WEI is backed by a committee of prominent women entrepreneurs and business leaders, some of whom serve on the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center Advisory Board. A key champion of the effort is Joan Hannant, CEO of the Soma Institute, who says the challenges she faced when she entered entrepreneurship motivated her to support WEI. “The Women in Entrepreneurship Institute is very personal for me, as I see it as a vehicle to provide support and programming to help female founders succeed— support I craved, but could not find when I started out.”
by jlansber | Oct 3, 2018 | College News
Nicholas J. Thomas
Nicholas J. Thomas, interim associate director of the School of Hospitality Leadership at DePaul University, has been promoted to director of the school and associate professor with tenure effective July 1. He succeeds Misty Johanson, who was named dean of the DePaul’s Driehaus College of Business on March 1.
In his new role, Thomas will oversee the school’s academic programs, industry outreach and centers, including the J. Willard and Alice S. Marriott Foundation Center for Student Development and Engagement, which he has directed since it was established in 2016.
“I am confident that under Nick’s leadership the school is in good hands and its reputation as Chicago’s premier hospitality business program will continue to grow,” Johanson says.
Thomas’s passion for the hospitality industry began when he was a teenaged bellman in a Baltimore hotel near his home town of Ellicott City, Md. After finishing high school, he earned a bachelor’s degree in hotel administration at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). He worked in hotel operations while in college and, after becoming a hotel employee trainer, developed a strong interest in hospitality teaching and research.
Thomas completed master’s and PhD degrees in hospitality administration at UNLV and was chair of academic affairs for the UNLV’s Singapore campus hospitality program. In 2011, Nicholas and his wife, Lisa Thomas, who also earned a PhD in hospitality administration from UNLV, both joined the faculty of DePaul’s School of Hospitality Leadership, which is part of DePaul’s business college.
Thomas’s teaching and research interests include human resource management, generation Y hospitality employees and the casino and entertainment industry. He is excited to lead the school and continue creating real-world learning opportunities for its students through the school’s strong industry partnerships.
“I feel really confident that what we do inside the classroom is solid, it’s rigorous,” he says. “The students are acquiring knowledge and figuring out how to apply that knowledge. But I think what differentiates us is what we do outside of the classroom—how we do industry job recruitment, the kind of personalized career guidance that the (Marriott) center provides, the mentorships that faculty and industry offer students, and the half-dozen student clubs we have.
“For a program of our size, I think we have an extremely large footprint in the hospitality industry.”
By Robin Florzak
by jlansber | Oct 3, 2018 | Faculty Focus
Roots Remain, New Branches Emerge
Keeping the MBA relevant in an ever-changing economy and workplace has always been a central challenge for business schools.
By Erich Dierdorff and Bob Rubin
Founded in 1912, DePaul’s business college is one of the 10 oldest in the United States. This history reflects DePaul’s deep roots in the establishment of collegiate business education. These roots extend to the DePaul MBA, as well, which is set to celebrate its 70th anniversary. While it might seem that the MBA has always been a part of the business school landscape, it is interesting to note that it was a rather innovative idea at the time DePaul launched its program. In fact, by the 1955–56 academic year, only 3,890 university-based MBAs were awarded in the entire United States.
Today, the MBA is the gold standard of achievement in business education, with more than 100,000 degrees conferred annually. The evidence documenting the benefits of the degree is convincing. Decades of research by the Graduate Management Admission Council and the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business demonstrate the value associated with the MBA, including the development of business knowledge and skills, expedited career advancement, enhanced professional networks and increased economic outcomes. These benefits directly derive from the scope of the training provided by the MBA, which spans business acumen and foundational business knowledge.
Source of Value, Target of Criticism
It might be surprising to learn that despite the clear value of the degree, the MBA has been a continual target of criticism from both academics and business leaders in each decade since its inception. The earliest and most influential of these critiques were two commissioned studies published in 1959 by the Carnegie Foundation and the Ford Foundation. The reports lambasted business schools of the 1950s for their lack of focus on curriculum quality, low intellectual standards and overemphasis on vocational training. The report recommended the emergence of a new “managerial science” to provide a strong foundation for MBA education and a curriculum that would be steeped in the behavioral sciences, rather than intuition-based managerial practice.
The reaction of business schools to the Ford and Carnegie reports was to create what has become the modern business school curriculum, with functional coursework in accounting, finance, operations, statistics, economics, marketing and management. To facilitate a managerial science approach, business schools began to hire faculty members with doctoral training who not only could teach in their subject areas, but also would transform the school into centers of research excellence.
This blueprint took root in the 1960s and remains largely intact today. Beyond these early critiques and the resulting curriculum blueprint, the MBA has continued to be a focus of blame for faulty business practices and economic struggles. The degree has even been reviled, with headlines calling for the “End of Business Schools” and “Managers not MBAs,” and urging universities to “Bulldoze Business Schools.” Yet for all these criticisms, the truth is that the MBA has evolved continually to meet the unique demands and challenges of the business environment.
Today, the MBA is the gold standard of achievement in business education, with more than 100,000 degrees conferred annually.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, as the economy began shifting toward more knowledge-based work, the demand for conceptual and interpersonal skills related to service quality, business strategy and leadership began to emerge within MBA curricula. Similarly, events and changing business landscapes shortly after 2000 brought about an increased focus on ethics and globalization that resulted in remaking MBA programs to cover topics such as international business, supply chains and business ethics. Thus, while the “administrative” roots of the MBA have remained consistent throughout the years, the MBA always has been a malleable degree designed to equip business professionals for the contemporary challenges they will face.
Challenges and Opportunities Ahead
The challenges that face higher education are well documented and include shrinking college-age populations, increasing competitiveness in the educational market and the integration of learning technology. We see four additional and emerging challenges for business schools in particular. Addressing these challenges will be essential to ensure the relevance and ongoing benefits of the MBA.
- Bridging the “knowing-doing gap” in business education. Organizations are increasingly expecting graduates not only to possess business know-how, but also to immediately convert such knowledge into skilled performance to solve today’s complex business problems. Addressing this challenge means MBA programs must more effectively integrate experiential learning with more traditional lecture and case-based learning techniques. In addition, translating knowledge into proficient execution requires that students receive accurate skill-based feedback to promote self-awareness and development. At DePaul, we integrate substantial skill-based feedback through all stages of the MBA program and utilize external assessment and simulations to accelerate self-awareness and professional development.
- Preparing students for the impact of technology and automation on work. A 2017 McKinsey report forecasted that one-third of U.S. workers will need to transition to new occupations by 2030 due to automation of occupational tasks. These workforce changes are also predicted to increase employment demand for managerial roles across nearly every industry sector, as individuals will “spend more time on activities that machines are less capable of, such as managing people, applying expertise and communicating with others … requiring more social and emotional skills, and more advanced cognitive capabilities, such as logical reasoning and creativity.” Addressing this challenge means MBA programs must ensure not only that students have the conceptual skills to extract value from the output of machines, but also have a clear understanding of how such machine power may be misused or socially harmful.
- Addressing the growing demand for critical thinking and data analytics expertise. Here, another McKinsey report points to the striking talent gap for managers that are “big data savvy,” that is, those with basic knowledge of statistics who can pose the right questions for analysis, interpret and challenge the results, and apply these insights to decision-making. This challenge requires MBA programs not only to continue traditional coursework that teaches basic quantitative skills (e.g., statistics), but also to offer new training that builds the critical thinking skills needed to understand how to use data-driven insights strategically, as well as to recognize the strengths and weaknesses inherent in the data being collected and analyzed. Through new coursework in business analytics, and a new MS in Business Analytics degree, plus a greater emphasis on data science and digital transformation, DePaul is looking to equip graduate business students with these technical and critical-thinking skills.
- Balancing the need for specialization and generalized managerial competencies. The MBA is a degree intended to provide general managerial skills that apply across any business function, organization or industry. Today, many MBA students have less work experience, especially managerial experience, and come to the graduate program with only an undergraduate business degree. The shifts described above have created the need for more specialized expertise in many areas of business. Thus, business schools need to build longer-term commitments to students’ learning by creating stackable degree programs from specialized master’s degrees to doctorates in business administration, as well as short-term certificate and professional education programs to keep up with the pace of change. At DePaul, we’ve made investments in such educational programs and, in keeping with our mission, have increased access to our programs by partnering with professional associations and corporations to offer customized approaches to learning.
The Driehaus College of Business has always evolved to meet the shifting demands of the workplace. Its faculty are nationally recognized as among the most prolific researchers of business education. From leading the integration of ethics into business education and using experiential and simulation-based learning to infusing multiple points of skill-based feedback for professional development and expanding degree offerings to include specialized master’s and doctoral degrees, DePaul remains at the forefront of graduate business education. It is through changes such as these that we see a bright future for business education at DePaul and look forward to the 100th anniversary of the DePaul MBA and beyond.
DePaul Professor of Management and Associate Dean of Graduate & Professional Education Robert Rubin (at right) and Professor of Management Erich Dierdorff (at left) are nationally known researchers and authors on graduate business education trends.
