BGA | BUSINESS IMPACT
ROUNDTABLE REVIEW
We have a philosophy of lifelong learning, so students may be of any age. We have also a policy at school which is called 'Happy Student Maker’ where society and the companies take participative action to make sure what we teach makes students happy and will give them access to the jobs that are out there, now and in the future.” PART TWO: Are business schools under pressure to change their fundamental value proposition to become more commercial? Dieter Vanwalleghem, director, iMBA programme, Rennes School of Business “You can be commercial in the sense that you can try to deliver a product that adds value for your customer in the long term. Whether you’re a private school or a public one, if you’re creating a product that is valuable to your customer, you are commercial – and that’s not a negative. I fear that what can be negative about being commercial is that sometimes academic standards come under threat due to competitive and commercial pressures. It’s basically the constant struggle to attract the best students – and that can jeopardise the value that you deliver.”
“We liken education to a gym membership; you get from it what you are prepared to put in. Learning requires some sweat”
Sofia Brito Ramos, academic director, Global MBA, ESSEC Business School
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“I have a slightly negative outlook in terms of this competition because it’s very related to the switch to skills-driven education (the skills that you perhaps don’t need a traditional university to teach you). For example, if a student wants to gain skills in Excel, they can go to LinkedIn or YouTube. In skills-driven education, we are seeing more and more competition because providers do not have the research background that is very expensive to provide. And we know that some students don’t care about research; they just want to learn practical things, and go to work in an investment bank. So, if the whole paradigm of education is about to change to skills-driven education, I see an additional level of (tough) competition for business schools.” Julio Villalobos, director, EMEA CXO strategic industry advisor for education, Salesforce.org “One of the major issues we all agree on is addressing the challenges and opportunities of the trend towards lifelong learning; not only for individuals, but also for companies to re-skill their employees. Another important challenge we all observe is hybrid learning. This impacts where we teach, where the students learn (in class or online), plus how we, as institutions, have to change the way we teach and how we deliver the learning experience in terms of content, format, platform, credential validation and networking. We have mentioned the importance of keeping students’ and professors’ wellbeing front of mind, since we all agree that learning and teaching in a hybrid ecosystem (anytime, anywhere) is a lot more complex and stressful.”
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