The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania will add several short-term classes in countries overseas, including China, Israel and South Africa, and offer new concentrations in global finance and management, according to a Wall Street Journal article earlier this month.
Wharton’s move toward greater global offerings is part of an effort to better prepare graduates for an increasingly global, fast-changing environment, Wharton Dean Thomas Robertson told the Journal.
The changes come in response to interviews Wharton conducted with 4,000 executives, alumni, faculty and students. Other planned changes include an increased focus on soft skills like writing and leadership, expanded microeconomics and statistics course offerings and free continuing education for Wharton graduates beginning with the class of 2010.
One of the most surprising findings of the interviews Wharton conducted was the fact that 25 percent of its graduates today are taking international positions, up from 10 percent a decade ago, Robertson says. “If you interview international companies, or executives from international companies, they’re going to want the students to be more and more international and more and more able to operate in different cultures,” Robertson told the Journal.
The addition of eight new global courses – in the United Kingdom, Israel, India, China, South Africa and Brazil – is part of Wharton’s response to the interview findings. The courses will be relevant to the countries in which they are taught, Robertson says. “So as we’re teaching in Brazil it’s about sustainability, and when we’re teaching in Israel it’s about technology and one of the courses in India is about health care in India and what we can learn from that experience,” he told the Journal.
Other interview responses have propelled Wharton to increase its focus on soft skills, such as presentations and writing skills, Robertson continued. “Certainly faculty, and probably most importantly, our business community and our recruiters are saying that [they] want students who can read and write,” he told the Journal. “I don’t know there’s really been a deterioration of those skills, maybe there has,” he continued. “Maybe Powerpoint and writing in bullet style has led to deterioration of the ability to write reports,” he suggested.
Wharton’s decision to offer a week of free executive education to MBA graduates every seven years was also an outgrowth of this recent series of interviews. The new open-campus policy, which Robertson expects will cost the school an additional $1 million a year, gives graduates a chance to refresh their skills or to take courses that didn’t exist when they were students. Robertson told the Journal that Wharton is also looking into how it can serve the 86,000 alumni who graduated before 2010 and are thus not included in continuing education offer.
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Read the full article: University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School Expands Overseas Course Offerings