Georgetown’s Plan To Stay Relevant In A Flooded Market - Poets&Quants

Prashant Malaviya is the Senior Associate Dean of MBA Programs at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business. Georgetown McDonough photo

“I had to almost force myself to not put on a tie,” Prashant Malaviya jokes in a breakfast spot at the Ritz Carlton in the middle of San Francisco. This might be the Ritz, but it’s still San Francisco, where ties aren’t necessary and the table comes with shots of cranberry-grape kombucha: “morning happy hour,” the waiter exclaims to Malaviya, the senior associate dean of MBA programs at Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business.

Malaviya, who is also an associate professor of marketing at Georgetown McDonough, came to the school ten years ago after stints at INSEAD, the University of Illinois, and Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. As the senior associate dean of MBA programs, he spends a lot of time connecting with alums — hence his visit San Francisco. Increasingly, McDonough is placing alums on the West Coast and in tech, which is a draw for Malaviya.

Poets&Quants had a chance to sit down with Malaviya and chat about everything new at Georgetown McDonough, including how the school is staying relevant in the marketplace and to international applicants. In a wide-ranging interview, Malaviya spoke about early interest in the school’s new Flex MBA program, how McDonough plans to continue to be a place that appeals to international applicants, the school’s plan to explore more in the online and specialized master’s spaces, and how the school keeps its alums relevant to employers who are increasingly looking for technological ability alongside business know-how.

(The interview below has been edited for length and readability.)

P&Q: First, I’d like to know about any and all changes you’ve seen since coming to Georgetown McDonough in 2018.

Malaviya: Yeah, I joined Georgetown McDonough in 2008 as a professor of marketing. I think the biggest change has been that we have recognized that we need to grow the portfolio of products that we put out on the market. Looking at more executive degree programs and specialized masters programs, but doing it in a way that builds on our strengths and assets. So for example, one of the master’s programs that we launched two years ago now is a Master of Art in International Business in Diplomacy. So it’s a joint master’s program with the School of Foreign Studies. Now actually six years ago was when we launched out first online master’s program in finance.

And the other big thing that I’ve noticed is that we have really doubled down on our faculty research productivity and output. So, if you actually follow the Financial Times research rankings, I believe the most recent one we were 19th in the world which is amazing. When I joined Georgetown we were probably closer 40th or something. So it’s been a pretty steep and impressive improvement. And that has been fueled by a careful curation of Centers of Excellence. For example, six years ago we added a Center on Real Estate that has now become a huge magnet for students, executives, and faculty. In fact, real estate is now becoming the fourth largest industry for the full-time MBA.

Around the same time we started our Institute for Entrepreneurship, which has become a huge magnet for again for students, alumni, and faculty. We just opened a new space, our Georgetown Venture Lab in the WeWork facility near the White House.

So, again, really focusing on growth from the graduate side and the faculty scholarship, seems to be the main push on the strategy side. I think moving into the future what’s going to be happening is we are going to make some important moves and changes to respond to the technology. Not so much technology in education which we have to adapt to, but also the impact of technology in the workplace. If the future of work is changing then the future of business education should change in response to that.

Can you share anything specific about how Georgetown plans to move and evolve in the online space, and whether the master’s in finance will have any campus components?

It’s all online. Although not surprisingly for many online programs, there are several local students who take the program and they like to come to campus and hang around and stuff. But it’s a fully online program. But the other big change that we are making is our part-time MBA, or what we call the Evening MBA. So that’s evolving into what we have now relabeled as the Flex MBA.

The Flex MBA will officially admit the first group of students this coming fall, in August 2019. One part of that flexibility is the technology and courses will be hybrid in nature. Several of the courses and sessions will be online, but there will always be an on campus element. The feedback we got from current students, prospective students, and alumni was that the on campus element really made the program special, even though they are part-time students. It really made it a cohesive, close-knit group that not just created a network but also significantly enhanced the learning outcomes. We wanted to preserve that.

So for now the plan is to leave our core curriculum on campus and significantly change our elective component. And the way we are doing it is to basically provide several delivery formats. For example, we will have evening classes where our students come to campus during the evening. And then also adding a slew of electives that we offer over the weekend, so students don’t have to miss work. What we hear from students is that if they can take off three to five days from work and go 9 to 5 and complete a course, that is much better than having to come for a semester every week, twice a week. So we are creating more of those opportunities.

So, again, it’s really about making it flexible so students can customize courses to whatever works in their schedule. The bigger benefit of this is we hope that it will also allow them to change the duration of the degree. So right now it is three years long standing, everybody starts and ends at the same time. But now we are going to create an accordion model where you can either slow it down and take three-and-a-half or four years. Or speed it up and take two-and-a-half years.

Eventually I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these innovations will bleed into the full-time program. I can see electives being offered in the hybrid format where full-time students go to class but they also have the material online.

Georgetown University MSB Students (Photo by Leslie E. Kossoff/Georgetown University)

How has interest been in the Flex MBA program so far?

We are literally we just in the midst of closing round one applications, so we will see. One of the leading indicators that we track is number of people who have started an application. And that number was up 25%. But I don’t know how many of those will actually submit an application.

The other thing that we have been following is the number of people who come to our information sessions. And that was up in the first couple that we did. So I’m hopeful, but you never know. People may be interested because of the marketing that we’ve done and the fact that it’s a new program. But when they look into it, they might still discover that, okay, this is not really flexible enough for me.

Either way, we will learn. We want to make it as flexible as the market really wants it to be. But we’ll see how the first round of innovation in the program does. And then we will respond accordingly.

Speaking of interest and applications, have you been seeing the same slowing in full-time MBA applications like many other schools have seen?

Yeah, I think that’s a trend. We also saw a decline with all the other schools. But I think if you dig a little deeper into the data it looks like — at least for us — the big part of the decline is being fueled by international applications. There is a decline in the domestic application pool as well, but it is much smaller in terms of overall stats compared to the international decline.

International declines could very well be in the 20% range but the domestic applicants are probably single digits. I think the domestic decline is understandable because the MBA market is counter-cyclical. When the economy is doing really well there are fewer people who are motivated to leave their job. They’re doing well at work. But what is interesting and what I try to tell my team and also to any prospective students who’s interested is that while the application market is counter-cyclical the job market is cyclical.

For example, when the economy is doing well, students get really good jobs. With our newest employment report, we have some of the best numbers in the10 years that I’ve been here. Almost 98% of our students received offers and 94% of them accepted those offers, which are better than the last seven or eight years. Salaries have also increased pretty significantly. It’s still dominated by consulting and finance but now technology is also popular. Almost 20% of our students are now going into technology.

If you have a reason to think about moving careers or changing what you are doing, this may be the best time to do an MBA because there is less competition on the application side and great job prospects outside. But actually, our overall admission stats improved in that we had higher average GMATs, we maintained the GPA, and we have an equally diverse class. So it’s people who are really motivated to get an MBA for the right reasons who are now applying.

I’ve heard from other schools they believe there is a direct cause and effect from the Trump administration’s policies and rhetoric toward immigration and work visas and the international population in general that is playing a large role in declines in international applicants. Is that something you’re seeing as well? 

Well, I don’t think any of us can escape that. That’s the reason that international prospective students give us. One of things that was a little striking, at least for me, was when the admission team went to go recruit students abroad, one of the questions they were asked more often was, will I be safe in America? And that’s a sad question to ask. That’s a said question.

I mean, I don’t know what aspect of safety exactly. Is it physical safety or just sort of a social safety net? People are just worried. First it was the work visa issues — which have always been there but people were adapting to it — but now just the overall political and social climate is starting to make international students nervous.

And you know, I would love to know what other schools are doing to sort of counter that and provide reassurance or programming on campus welcomes. It would be good for us as schools to collaborate on something like this because it is affecting all of us.

Georgetown McDonough Students. Courtesy photo

I was actually going to ask next if you are doing anything or have any plans to try to overcome that rhetoric coming out of the political sphere and parts of the country, to try to rebound those international applicants. 

Yeah, you know, we are trying to approach this on two fronts. First is to reassure them that there is a strong social culture — at least at Georgetown — in collaboration. We are a cohesive culture and group. People take care of each other. And then on the job side it is really trying to strengthen relationships with employers who are willing to sponsor H-1Bs or recruiters who are willing to consider overseas appointments. So we have been working with a few of our really close corporate partners to see if they can open up international offices in Canada or the U.K. or anywhere else, like Singapore for the Asian students. Besides that, there is a bunch of programming that we do for international students. We have special orientation for them when they come to campus. We do more international co-curricular activities. But you know it’s hard. It’s hard. It’s difficult to convince them to consider U.S.

And the applicants can go elsewhere. Applications have increased in Canada, they have increased in Asia. They are probably increasing in Australia as well. People have options.

Do you think this is something that will flip back once the current administration moves on, or will you all be fighting this rhetoric for years beyond this?

I think one of the things we talk about in D.C. is that it’s one of the most diverse cities in the country. I mean you literally have every single embassy and so many Fortune 500 companies have offices here. You have more international visitors, from a political perspective, than most other cities in the U.S. It’s a place where you can find a like-minded group of people who are reasonable and thoughtful and likely more so than many other parts of the country. So that’s the message we send. And lucky for us, D.C. has really invested a lot in making itself a much more welcoming city.

New neighborhoods that have come up. My son just graduated from undergrad and he now works in D.C., and lives in a neighborhood that ten years ago I would have said, you better not go there. Now it’s a thriving place with lot’s of young people. And many parts of D.C. have become like that. You know prices have gone up so that’s the concern that many international students have, especially with their decline in their currencies which is a problem that they all face compared the U.S. dollar. But there are many good things that we can promote and we can talk about.

What are some other things you all are doing to not only stay relevant to international applicants, but our domestic applicants looking at you all and other schools?

You know, on the D.C. front, one of the things that we are really spending some serious energy on is to create a meaningful collaboration with local institutions and organizations on the curricular front. So a couple of years ago we launched the certificate on non-market strategies which really looks at the impact of all of the other non-business forces on business decisions. So whether it is policy or regulation or law, how do all of those forces impact business decisions. That certificate has become really popular, I would say about a quarter of our students end up doing that certificate.

This year, we launched a new required course called Managing the Enterprise. So it’s really a course about how do you manage an enterprise so that it’s primed for success in the future while focusing a lot more on your most important asset, which is your people. So how do you design the organization, how do create the best, most efficient structure? How do you create a culture that promotes mentoring and learning? How do you create an agile environment? The course is based on a project that runs in collaboration with the folks who run the D.C. Metro. So that’s a public sector enterprise with lots of government funding, and all kinds of stereotypical and real issues about labor and motivation — or lack of motivation. We the CEO of this organization called WMATA and their senior leadership team come in and they spent an evening with the students presenting. All the students were required to work on this project and come up with some recommendations. That course was just completed and is a great experiment for us to see how we can really leverage our D.C. strength. If the model works, it’s something we’d love to scale.

I’m looking forward to hearing what the students have to say about the new course. And we’ll we learn from it. We will adapt. Because it’s an opportunity that I don’t think we should let slip. We’ll continue to work on increasing our D.C. connection, but using it and doing it in a way that’s more about business and society going hand-in-hand, which is part of the value that we strongly believe in at Georgetown.

McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University: Washington D.C., Architect: Goody Clancy

What are you hearing from employers now in terms of what they’re looking for in the MBA graduate?

A lot of it is what you would expect: technology focus. So literally this fall we launched six new electives in the full-time MBA on AI and machine learning, Python and R data management, and SQL, data visualization, and Tableau for product management product marketing positions. There has been a growing need for it. Like I said, almost 18% to 20% of our students are now going into technology. But even in financial services, it’s all technology: fintech and blockchain. In fact, we also added a new elective on finTech and blockchain.

So it’s really a lot of responding to very direct and obvious market demands. I think the bigger challenge is going to be, what should our education look like five years down the road? If robots are really taking over some jobs, if there is some routinized workflow that humans are going to be doing less and less, what is the impact on management? What is the impact on our education?

And so we’ve started some discussions mostly with our senior alumni who are in positions of power in their company where they are making some of these decisions about their workflows. So learning from them, and asking, how are you thinking about this? And then, what can we do to help you get a more talented pipeline of talent down the road?

It’s still a bit of an open space. But I think we have some ideas and it’s going to be a lot about learning from our alumni partners.

Do you all gather the most market information from your alumni contacts or are you also learning from recruiters coming to campus and are there any differences between groups? 

Alumni and recruiters both, yeah. There’s a fair amount of overlap between the two. A lot of times it’s our alumni who are leading the charge on the recruiting side. But yeah, it’s both. We’ve been working with some of our alumni who are senior leaders at banks from their venture funds, from their incubators, from their initial technology, AI, just to have a dialogue. I think that’s the basic thing we’ve got to start, and slowly, we’ll keep learning.

We’ve been hitting around this question, but are there any other things that you all at Georgetown McDonough are thinking about or have planned coming in the MBA space for the next few years?

Yeah, so I mentioned the curricular changes we are making. We are also planning a new certificate on data analytics. One of the things that I’m exploring actively is to see if there is any STEM certification possibilities, especially for our international students. What I’ve learned is that STEM certification is a state-by-state issue. It’s not a federal issue, so we’ve got to figure out with the D.C. government how that works. We haven’t quite figured out the process and the bureaucracy that is involved there. But I’m looking at that.

Other than that, it’s really looking at the level of the school, looking at the portfolio of products really carefully. What would be the next programs we should launch? So one program that at the school level we are thinking of launching is the Master in Management, which would be a one-year master’s program for recent graduates of an undergraduate non-business degree. So people who have zero to one year experience, and they will get a business degree but they have to be from liberal arts or engineering or some other background outside of business.

On the MBA side, it’s really about continuing to strengthen our curriculum. That’s sort of the primary focus, with a focus on D.C. but also a lot more collaboration with organizations to create experiential learning opportunities. And some of that could be curricula, some of that could be co-curricula. So we are working with one of the financial institutions to create a new case competition, for example. We are also looking at more experiential learning opportunities with bigger corporations.

And finally, I think on the career side, it’s really strengthening our relationships with all of our recruiters and having constant conversations with them around the impact of technology on their talent pool and skill set so that we can respond to that in a timely manner.

Any final thoughts?

No, not really. I think it’s a time in business education where the next five years are going to be pretty significant because many schools are creating these specialized master’s programs and online programs. And that’s going to sort of permanently change the landscape of business education in the U.S. for sure. How that impacts the rest of the world, we’ll see.

But I think that’s the world we are living in, and it might actually make it more global in this education because people can be anywhere in the world, literally, and be doing our education. So, yeah, exciting times. And we have a dean, thankfully, who is a specialist in innovation. That’s what he did for several years before he became the dean, so we believe that we have the right person in the job at the right time to lead us through these times that are significantly changing the landscape.

It does feel like every other week we’re getting an email from a school saying they launched some new specialized master’s or launched some new online program, and yeah, it feels like schools are just kind of throwing punches at one another trying to compete and stay relevant.

Yeah, and that’s where we have to be. We have to stay smart because if we do these things that build on our strength, then it is more likely to be sustainable. Otherwise, we are just shifting competition from one product to the other. That’s not going to serve anybody well. My best example is this Master of Arts in International Business and Diplomacy. That’s a unique program that very few schools can offer that we have local strength that we can capitalize on.

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