Members of the Columbia Business School (CBS) communications team gave a presentation on the school’s revised core curriculum as part of the 2009 Association of International Graduate Admissions Counselors (AIGAC) Conference, which took place last week.
The presentation, as well as a private tour of CBS and New York University’s Stern School of Business, were among several activities organized as part of the 2nd Annual AIGAC conference, held June 16th and 17th in New York City.
Clear Admit’s own Graham Richmond, who serves as the current AIGAC president, was joined by fellow AIGAC board members, individual and business organization admissions consultants and school representatives from INSEAD, Haas, Tuck, Darden, Michigan and Yale for the two-day event focused on the latest news and trends in graduate admissions.
As follow up to the presentation about CBS’s revised core, communications officials distributed to conference attendees a white paper authored by CBS Dean Glenn Hubbard outlining the method and thinking behind the development of the new core.
In 2006, Hubbard convened the Foundations Curriculum Committee (FCC) to evaluate the existing CBS core and make recommendations for a smaller, more flexible curriculum that would still provide its MBA graduates with the essential skills and knowledge to excel in a global marketplace.
The FCC, made up of tenured professors from each of CBS’s five academic disciplines, set out to develop a revised core that would provide students with greater flexibility and the opportunity to tailor their management education toward individual career goals while preserving the exisiting academic calendar and the cluster system, which groups students into cohorts of 65 people for shared learning experiences and long-term career benefits.
The resulting new core – divided into “required core” and “flexible core” sections – reduces the number of required courses from nine to eight, introduces a new co-curriculur module on corporate ethics spanning the entire MBA program, lets first-year students take an additional full-term elective course in their second semester to be better prepared for summer internships and introduces new half-term “flexible core” courses that give students more opportunity to pursue their own professional and academic interests even within the core requirements. The new core was unveiled in fall 2008.
The corporate governance addition to the enhanced core is designed to introduce students to the positive economic effects of strong, responsible governance and ethics on business and society. The new segment, which begins during first-year orientation and continues through a capstone session in the program’s final term.
“The FCC introduced changes to the core that have effectively made a good product better,” writes Hubbard in his white paper. “The overall reducation in the length of the core and the options made available through the flexibile core will result in a more focused and customizable foundational education for all students,” he continued.
To learn more about the CBS core, click here. To learn more about the 2009 AIGAC Conference, click here.
Read the full article: Columbia Business School’s Revised Core Discussed at 2009 AIGAC Conference