WITHOUT EVOLUTION COMES EXTINCTION
The business education as we know it is in major transition.
Data are plentiful, easy to access and store, and full of valuable insights that a traditional MBA fails to adequately address. Competition is changing — the barriers to entry for startups have fallen and traditional boundaries dividing industries have disappeared. And business decision-making is changing, with many analytical techniques like machine learning, artificial intelligence, and big data becoming integral parts of the future of work.
For all that, a business education has become more important, not less. The
fundamental language of business — accounting, strategy, marketing, finance — is still very important to how work gets done, but technology is now at the core. For a business education to represent value in the workplace, it must teach aspiring leaders how to use technology to empower evidence-based decisions, generate smarter solutions to complex problems, and privacy, and develop innovative approaches to business cases.
Stevens has been relentlessly pursuing this transformation. During the last 10 years, our programs have been redesigned, while six undergraduate, six master’s, three doctoral, and many certificate programs have been launched, aiming to capture the growing interest and need to educate in areas around digital transformation. The response has been telling of the success of these changes: our incoming freshman class has grown almost five-fold, the number of our full-time graduate students has grown almost three-fold, and the number of corporate sections has more than doubled. The number of research-active faculty has more than doubled, and the school’s national ranking among the top 100 Business Schools in US News & World Report has been continuously improving. Other rankings also indicate the outstanding value of a Stevens education.
SPOTLIGHT:
Professor Wei Zheng
Richard R. Roscitt Chair in Leadership
Dr. Zheng’s work sits at the intersection of leadership and diversity, focusing on addressing the practical questions that enhance organizational diversity. Those questions become more complex with the introduction of technology into every aspect of our workplaces. “It’s an interesting time to be at a place like Stevens, because we have all of these technology-enabled means of human-machine interactions that are changing the meaning of work, but our leadership research hasn’t caught up,” she says. “Is the way we manage people changing? Are there ways we can expedite how humans work through different leadership techniques?” Dr. Zheng shares insights through a Women in Leadership seminar series and recently helped launch an Inclusive Leadership Certificate program for all first-year business students.