In San Francisco, A Small B-School Undergoes A Big — And Impactful — Transformation (2024)

Otgontsetseg Erhemjamts is the first person from Mongolia to earn a finance doctorate from a U.S. business school. She is also the first, and only, U.S. B-school dean of Mongolian descent.

But more important than her country of origin or her academic climb is her approach to the job — and what it has meant to the school she now leads.

Dean Otgo, as she is known to everyone at the University of San Francisco School of Management from students to faculty to kitchen staff at the university dining hall, came to the small Jesuit school in summer 2022 with a charge to reverse a worrying years-long slide in enrollment. That charge has become a mission to change … well, everything.

THE DECLINING ENROLLMENT CHALLENGE

“I came here two years ago and was given a charge of basically helping the school turn around,” Otgo tells Poets&Quants. “Like many other universities around the country, we’d been experiencing declining undergraduate enrollment. Because of our location, we tend to be more heavily reliant on international students. Tension between the Chinese government and U.S. government, Trump government policies, Covid — all those things had a huge impact on international enrollment, and our enrollment dropped more than universities that didn’t have such a heavy international presence.”

Undergraduate enrollment at the McLaren School of Management has dropped by about one-third since 2019. Though it’s a smaller population, enrollment is also down by a third across graduate programs at the Masagung Graduate School of Management.

“Enrollment is a common challenge all of higher ed is grappling with, combined with the demographic cliff and everything else,” Otgo says. “So coming here, and looking at the size of our school, I felt that we need to rebalance and re-optimize the program portfolio, sunsetting some programs, launching new programs, launching some new initiatives we’ve been working on on the undergrad side.

“But basically, the dean’s job is resource allocation. How do we allocate the limited resources we have? If you have declining enrollment, that means your finances or budgets are also declining, so we have to do more with less, basically.”

CLASS SIZES, ALL USF BUSINESS GRAD PROGRAMS, 2019-2023

USF MBA CLASS SIZES, 2019-2023

USF UNDERGRAD CLASS SIZES, WOMEN & MINORITIES, 2019-2023

‘LET’S ELIMINATE DEPARTMENTS’

USF School of Management’s Dean Otgo: “We are proud of the work we are doing. We are pushing ahead. Ultimately, if we succeed with this experiment, and find a nice way of settling somewhere and not revert, I think it would be a nice example for the rest of higher ed to follow”

With an enrollment collapse hanging over everything, 2023 became a year of “reimagining” at USF’s Schools of Management. That meant taking the pulse of students through surveys. It meant a massive undergraduate curricular overhaul. And of course it meant sunsetting some grad programs and launching others — as Otgo says, resource reallocation. Among the changes, three programs, including the Master’s in Financial Analysis and Master’s in Nonprofit Administration, were phased out; two more, the MS in Organization Development and Master’s in Management in Sustainable Social Impact, have been announced, launching this fall. The school will also launch a new online part-time MBA program in the fall.

Still bigger changes loomed. Beginning last summer and fall, the B-school initiated its most daring approach yet, phasing out its seven departments in favor of three “impact areas.” The effort catalyzed in late January 2023, when Dean Otgo and school leadership convened a day-long workshop facilitated by faculty from Stanford University’s Design School. In attendance were USF faculty, staff, students, members of local NGOs and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, and a representative from the education unit of Mayor London Breed’s office.

The central question they grappled with: “If USF were to fail in five years, what would be the reason?”

“And a few things bubbled up, such as, maybe we didn’t have good partnerships with industry, whether it’s the government or local businesses,” says Otgo, who before joining USF was a professor of finance at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts for 17 years, holding various leadership positions including associate dean and associate provost for strategic initiatives. “Maybe our curriculum is not innovative or not agile, not flexible. Maybe the way we are doing things, we are also not agile enough ourselves, we need to be adapting to industry needs. And one final thing was that we need to be more student-centric. If we’re not student-centric, then students won’t come.

“And then the second part of the day was, if these are the core reasons why we might fail, how do we fix it? What kind of things can we do? So that started this reimagining the school process, and we had multiple meetings, surveys, all sorts of things. And then we said one way to address that, along with all the curricular work that we are doing, is we could experiment with a new structure.

“Most universities have this structure that we’ve inherited from the 17th, 18th centuries — that every school has a department and it’s based on disciplines. And that kind of leads to silos and turf battles. And when we try to innovate curriculum, faculty will be like, ‘This is my department’s program or course.’ And so these silos, we felt, were getting in the way of being more agile. So we floated different ideas: ‘What if we get rid of departments and completely organized around themes?’ People were freaked out about that. People felt, ‘Well, we need still some sort of community and way to gather or identify around something.’ And then we talked about consolidating departments. We had seven, so what if we consolidated into three departments, two departments? Then the issues that were identified about silos and everything still kind of sticks, in a different scale maybe, but it’s the one we saw.

“So we ended up deciding, ‘Okay, let’s eliminate departments.”’

WOMEN IN THE USF MBA, 2019-2023

MINORITIES IN THE USF MBA, 2019-2023

INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS IN THE USF MBA 2019-2023

YEAR ONE OF THE EXPERIMENT

Since last August, the School of Management has implemented a plan that “ambitious” doesn’t begin to describe: Along with the ongoing programmatic makeover, including a major revision of the undergraduate core, the B-school’s leadership is attempting a total rethinking of the school’s administrative structure. Instead of departments, programs are now categorized under three themes or “impact areas”: Sustainable Management Education, Racial and Social Justice in the Business Community, and Digital Transformation.

Dean Otgo makes a compelling case for how such a radical administrative recalibration will help the school financially — but above all, how it will help the students.

“If you think of department chair roles, it’s a very faculty-centric role, it’s supporting other faculty, working on scheduling, mentoring younger faculty, hiring adjuncts,” she tells P&Q. “So it’s very faculty-centric, all the responsibilities. So we removed departments, that right away was a lot of cost-saving, like department chair compensation. Instead of having full-time people taking on these administrative roles and then having to hire temporary adjunct faculty to teach courses, now these department chairs go back to classrooms, so we have more full-time faculty teaching courses, less adjunct teaching, so we save money from the adjunct teaching as well.

“But ultimately, more than money, it’s supposed to help us with this interdisciplinary collaboration, not just with your group, but with other faculty, whether it’s research or curriculum or service, all that stuff. And then we created these new roles called undergrad major faculty leads. So their job description, we made sure that there’s nothing administrative in there, nothing faculty-centric, it’s all student-facing responsibilities. You should be looking at your student experience or student success in your major, come up with metrics, track them, monitor them, find out ways to improve them. And also have kind of community-building events and activities with the students so that they feel that they know the faculty more, they feel supported, they feel connected with each other and with faculty.

“So those are new roles that we created, and this is basically year one of that experiment.”

USF MBA COST 2019-2023

APPLICATIONS, ADMITS & ACCEPTANCE RATE FOR THE USF MBA, 2019-2023

GRE & GMAT SCORE AVERAGES IN THE USF MBA, 2019-2023

USF UNDERGRAD MILITARY & FIRST-GEN STUDENTS, 2019-2023

‘IMPACT AREAS’: BENEFITS TO CURRICULA, RESEARCH & SERVICE

Paradigm shift? USF’s Schools of Management are in the midst of what amounts to a paradigm overhaul. At a school with a long and storied history — and the entrenched interests that come with it — Otgo is fulfilling her mission to an extent no one could have expected. Perhaps even herself.

“I think what’s encouraging is the impact areas: Faculty are getting together from different disciplines,” Otgo says. “They’re working even with faculty from the College of Arts and Sciences — very interdisciplinary. And we’re seeing closer connections between curricular development, research, and service areas. For example, in sustainable management education, the faculty lead is Marco Tavanti, he’s an expert in sustainability and sustainable business in general. And it used to be that he was doing that work for his research. His teaching was public administration, non-profit management. But now because he’s leading this impact area, he’s working with other faculty and students on this, so his impact has broadened within the school. And a new program, the Master’s in Management in Social Impact, was largely designed by Marco as well. So it’s bringing together and leveraging these talents or resources that we had, and expanding the impact of it.”

The experiment has only begun, but she’s encouraged by the progress she’s seen so far at both the graduate and undergraduate levels in the school’s three impact areas.

“So I would say the ‘impact area,’ since it’s kind of a new thing and then we are giving resources around it, there are more upsides than challenges,” she says. “The undergrad faculty leads part is, relatively speaking, more challenging because faculty are still comparing it with department chairs, and they’re still somewhat reminiscent of the former department walls. So I think it will take time to really embrace the opportunities and possibilities with the new structure. Faculty are starting. Some get it completely, some are kind of confused.”

See page 3 for a Q&A with Dean Otgo and Courtney Masterson, associate dean of faculty, research and impact.

The University of San Francisco is literally a school on a shining hill — on a sunny day, that is. Since the late 1970s, the school has been housed in the buildings of a former women’s college perched on a hill called Lone Mountain in central San Francisco, with 360-degree views of the city, Golden Gate Park, and the Bay.

The “Hilltop” is the grand centerpiece of USF’s 55-acre campus, with a series of buildings nestled below in a semicircle that makes up the main campus of the university and its B-school. The Graduate School of Management — which has been known since 2000 as the Masagung Graduate School of Management, bearing the name of an Indonesian businessman whose three sons have also graduated from the school — also has a satellite campus in the Folger Coffee Company Building at 101 Howard Street, a few miles east in the shadow of the Bay Bridge amid an urban setting that these days is beginning to finally feel recovered from the unnatural quiet imposed by the coronavirus pandemic.

Both the Folger’s Building and the Hilltop are perfect locations for a university and a B-school, placing them smack dab in the middle of a city long known as a tech and innovation haven. As the AI revolution continues to boom around them, USF’s B-school leaders have not been idle observers. The graduate school has launched a core MBA course, two electives, and a certificate course dedicated to the topic, while on the undergraduate side, courses include Societal Impact of Technology, which “aims to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of the intricate relationship between technology and society, with a focus on how businesses can effectively manage the societal impact of technological advancements.” There’s a new AI Club on campus, too.

DECISIONS, DECISIONS

But here again, USF’s B-school is at a crossroads — an important inflection point on how to proceed, says Frank Fletcher, senior director of MBA programs.

“I think we’re uniquely positioned for a variety of reasons,” says Fletcher, who joined USF in 2015 and oversees USF’s full-time MBA, working professional part-time MBA, executive MBA, Enterprise MBA, and newly offered part-time MBA online. “For location, obviously yes, we’re at the epicenter of it. It is in our backyard, we’re able to draw talent in who are at the forefront of this to meet with our students on a regular basis. And we have done that through guest lectures, through conference activities, speaker activities, so students are getting access to cutting-edge concepts around AI. And more than just generative AI, really looking at what influence AI is going to have on the world moving forward.

“So from that perspective, right now it’s manifesting itself on the co-creator side while the faculty are considering where can they leverage their areas of expertise in developing actual course content. What’s this going to look like? Thirty years ago, everyone was talking about how we can integrate the idea of global business into our curriculum. The thing is, do we do it as a major, do we do courses, or do we integrate it throughout the curriculum? I think we’re in those conversations right now around AI: Is it going to be standalone courses? Where do we have to discuss how it’s integrated into each course? So those conversations are taking place regularly at the committee levels, and at the faculty level — amongst faculty groups — as well.”

‘IT ALL COMES DOWN TO FLEXIBILITY & AGILITY’

USF’s Richard Stackman: “Right now I’m seeing the environment in many ways is selecting against some universities or types of universities. So it’s a time of chaos. But also opportunities”

Richard Stackman, associate dean of graduate programs since January 2021, says he’s not losing enough sleep over AI as he probably should be. “It’s become the number-one issue,” he acknowledges, and the the focus of his concern is that “you just can’t all of a sudden go all-AI. And so literally over the last couple months, I’m having more discussions and we are all having more discussions about where AI can show up so that it starts to grow in multiple ways and then hopefully becomes more connected. And hopefully there are initiatives in the undergraduate program that we can learn from and hopefully they can learn from us.”

AI can, and probably will, be a big part of how programs are recast and revitalized in coming years, Stackman says. “So the Master’s of Information Systems program is due for an overhaul and it’s like, ‘OK, can we teach information systems without AI?’ The answer is an emphatic no. So we’re going to have to do a program redesign at the same time that we’re rethinking the program because it’s 16 months — can they shorten it to a 10-month program? How can they get the content that the students need to have along with getting here and then hopefully going out and getting jobs?”

Then there’s the newly created Master’s in Management, which has become a “base program” in the gap created by the sunsetting of three older programs. “We sunsetted three programs, which was not easy but that created opportunity, an opportunity for us to create a program. I think I’ve referred to it as our base program because it can have multiple iterations, because it shares a core, it has capstone experience but then it has 14 credits of a concentration.”

AI isn’t the only topic everyone is talking about. USF’s School of Management has multiple undergrad and graduate courses on the business aspects of sustainability, too, from Social Entrepreneurship on the undergrad side, which looks at “an emerging and rapidly changing field dedicated to the starting and growing of social mission-driven ventures” to Sustainable Marketing, where students “explore how companies adopt a sustainable market orientation … that seeks to meet consumer needs and derive a competitive advantage, while addressing ecological and societal concerns.” The part-time online MBA launching this fall will have a social impact concentration; the Master’s in Management program basic is sustainable business solutions. The school also offers a dual-degree environmental management MS/MBA.

“It all comes down to flexibility and agility,” Stackman says. “I worked in the newspaper industry to get through college and I’ve seen what the environment has done to that. And right now I’m seeing the environment in many ways is selecting against some universities or types of universities. So it’s a time of chaos. But also opportunities — especially if you position yourself well so that when the pattern emerges out of chaos, you can pivot to that. And so I think that’s something Otgo was looking for and just resonated with me with respect to that.”

CONNECTING THE DOTS

Last October, Dean Otgo was named to a list of the “100 Most Influential Women in Bay Area Business” by the San Francisco Business Times. In talking of climate change for the newspaper article accompanying the honor, she said it is higher education’s responsibility to develop graduates prepared to contend with a world that is VUCA — volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. “Employers,” Otgo said, “are looking for graduates with high levels of climate change literacy, resiliency, adaptability, and agility. Higher education can transform the way we teach, and way we design programs so that our students are better equipped to tackle the grand challenges we face as a society. We need to emphasize skills necessary to navigate the VUCA world, and help our students to understand and approach problems from a systems perspective.”

A few months later, writing a 2024 New Year’s resolution for Poets&Quants, Otgo returned to the theme of resiliency in calling for the development of “anti-fragile” leaders. “At the University of San Francisco School of Management, we resolve to develop compassionate, adaptable, resilient, and anti-fragile future leaders, by combining the Jesuit values of cura personalis, magis, and being people for others with a forward-looking business curriculum that equips our students with the skills necessary to tackle societal grand challenges such as climate change and income inequality. As we continue to encourage and scaffold our students to embrace change, take risks, learn from failure, and challenge the status quo, we resolve to do the same ourselves.”

Seven months later — and two years into her role as dean of USF’s School of Management — Dean Otgo is pleased with the school’s progress in embracing huge, systemic change. And on the undergraduate side, in developing the leaders of tomorrow who will have to contend with the all-new problems of a rapidly changing world.

“I will say I’m both happy and also realizing more and more how difficult it is,” she says. “It’s not easy to change the paradigm. The faculty members, academics, if you will, there are certain kinds of people who self-select academia, there is a reason why they chose academia and not industry. And all their life when they grew up as students, grad students, assistant professors, full professors, basically all their adult life, they’ve known one structure. So for us to upend that structure and try something new, it has required a lot of courage, and it is hard, it’s very hard.

“I admit, it’s harder than I thought. But we are proud of the work we are doing. We are pushing ahead. Ultimately, if we succeed with this experiment, and find a nice way of settling somewhere and not revert, I think it would be a nice example for the rest of higher ed to follow, so I’m really optimistic for that. But I’m not going to lie, it’s not easy.

“It’s painful at times. And if you look at all business schools’ core curriculum, they tend to look very similar to each other. All of them will have a course in marketing, a course in accounting, a course in finance because you’re introducing to the disciplines first, and then you go to your major. But it almost looks like a checkbox, if you will, ‘OK, I took these courses, I took 10 courses, now I’m a business student.’ But then we are not letting them intentionally connect the dots on how each of these things contribute to solving these complex problems.

“So our goal with this undergrad core revision is, how can we be more intentional, not just hope that students connect the dots at some point? We need to make sure that the instructional design have to connect the dots for the students, so that students can do that more easily, and they can do that from smaller scale from the beginning, and then as they progress toward junior, senior year, they can actually solve more complex problem and see perspectives from different disciplines. Otherwise, what we are doing is higher ed is, ‘OK, make them take a bunch of courses, throw them into the world, and just hope that they’ll somehow connect the dots.'”

See the next page for a Q&A with Dean Otgo and Courtney Masterson, associate dean of faculty, research and impact. It has been edited for length and clarity.

San Francisco School of Management is based on Lone Mountain in the center of the city. USF photo

POETS&QUANTS’ Q&A WITH USF SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT DEAN OTGO ERHEMJAMTS & COURTNEY MASTERSON, ASSOCIATE DEAN OF FACULTY, RESEARCH AND IMPACT

P&Q: Big changes underway, and big changes planned. How’s it going?

Dean Otgo: I came here in July 2022, two years ago, and was given a charge of basically helping the school turn around. Like many other universities around the country, we’d been experiencing declining enrollment: Because of our location, we tend to be more heavily reliant on international students. Tension between the Chinese government and U.S. government, Trump government policies, Covid — all those things had a huge impact on international enrollment, and our enrollment dropped more than universities that didn’t have such a heavy international presence.

Enrollment is a common challenge all of higher ed is grappling with, I think, combined with the demographic cliff and everything else. So coming here, and looking at the size of our school, I felt that, a. We need to rebalance and re-optimize the program portfolio, sunsetting of some programs, launching new programs, some new initiatives we’ve been working on on the undergrad side. But basically, the dean’s job is resource allocation. How do we allocate the limited resources we have? If you have declining enrollment, that means your finances or budgets are also declining, so we have to do more with less, basically.

New initiatives — whether it’s new programs or new faculty hires — need new resources, and I need to make room for those new resources from a declining budget. So we thought, “OK, maybe kind of a business model innovation.” All of higher ed is trying to figure out how we get out of this kind of situation where most universities have declining enrollment, but rising costs.

So we, with faculty and staff input, went to a year-long reimagining of the school management process. In January we invited Stanford d.school faculty to facilitate an all-day design workshop. It was an interesting workshop. It was an all-day workshop on January 23, and we gave everyone homework. So it was faculty, staff, students, some of the local NGO, and San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, or education unit of the mayor’s office, so local business people, government people were there.

And the homework was, imagine the School of Management closing the doors five years down the road. So if that ever happens, what would you think the main reasons are, why did we fail? And then everyone thought about it, came up with, “If we fail, these would be the reasons.” And then we came to that workshop and spent the first half of the day at each table like, “OK, what’s bubbling up? What seems to be the common theme? What seems to be common concern from all these different stakeholders?” And then we shared all with everyone.

And a few things bubbled up, such as, maybe we didn’t have good partnerships with industry, whether it’s the government or local businesses, what have you. Maybe our curriculum is not innovative or not agile, not flexible. Maybe the way we are doing things, we are also not agile enough ourselves, we need to be adapting to industry needs. And one final thing was that we need to be more student-centric. If we’re not student-centric, then students won’t come. So those were top things that bubbled up.

And then the second part of the day was, if these are kind of core reasons why we might fail, how do we fix it? What kind of small experiments or things we can do? And all sorts of people came up with ideas. So that started this reimagining the school process, and we had multiple meetings, surveys, all sorts of things. And then we said one way to address that, along with all the curricular work that we are doing, is we could experiment with a new structure.

And most universities have this structure that we’ve inherited from the 17th, 18th centuries — that every school has a department and it’s based on disciplines. And that kind of leads to silos and turf battles. And when we try to innovate curriculum, faculty will be like, “This is my department’s program or course.” And so these silos, we felt, were getting in the way of being more agile. So we floated different ideas. “What if we get rid of departments and completely organized around themes?” People were freaked out about that. People felt, “Well, we need still some sort of community and way to gather or identify around something.” And then we’ve talked about consolidating departments. We had seven, so what if we consolidated into three departments, two departments? Then the issues that were identified about silos and everything still kind of sticks, in a different scale maybe, but it’s the one we saw.

So we ended up deciding, “Okay, let’s eliminate departments.”

If you think of department chair roles, it’s a very faculty-centric role, it’s supporting other faculty, working on scheduling, mentoring younger faculty, hiring adjuncts. So it’s very faculty-centric, all the responsibilities. So we removed departments, that right away was a lot of cost-saving, like department chair compensation. Instead of having full-time people taking on these administrative roles and then having to hire temporary adjunct faculty to teach courses, now these department chairs go back to classrooms, so we have more full-time faculty teaching courses, less adjunct teaching, so we save money from the adjunct teaching as well.

But ultimately, more than money, it’s supposed to help us with this interdisciplinary collaboration, not just with your group, but with other faculty, whether it’s research or curriculum or service, all that stuff. And then we created these new roles called undergrad major faculty leads. So their job description, we made sure that there’s nothing administrative in there, nothing faculty-centric, it’s all student-facing responsibilities. You should be looking at your student experience or student success in your major, come up with metrics, track them, monitor them, find out ways to improve them. And also have kind of community-building events and activities with the students so that they feel that they know the faculty more, they feel supported, they feel connected with each other and with faculty. So those are new roles that we created, and this is basically year one of that experiment.

San Francisco School of Management has a satellite campus in the Folgers building in the city’s downtown. USF photo

Courtney Masterson: I wouldn’t be sitting here without restructuring because this was a new role where traditionally we would have an associate dean of undergrad, an associate dean of grad, an associate dean of academic affairs or faculty — just a very common model across business schools. And Otgo and the team last year, we updated the position so now I am AD of faculty research and social impact. And I think what I really appreciate about it is that it’s not just that impact is in the job title, it’s a very critical part of the portfolio I’m working on.

It’s baked into the DNA being a Jesuit school, we know we’re doing it, but when it’s actually formally a part of the dean’s team portfolio, we take it very seriously. It’s like, “How could we be more intentional about it? How can we,” as Otgo was saying, “allocate resources that needed to that role?”

And so one of the first things I was able to do in the role because of the restructuring is help launch what’s called our three impact areas. So we put out a call to faculty in August and said, “It’s up to you. If you could lead an impact area, which means that these are the themes that maybe we’re all going to eventually merge around or converge around — these areas where we would generate research, we could help inspire curriculum development, we could strengthen our industry partnerships, be more of a thought leader — what would they be?”

We know that we can’t just tell faculty, “These are the areas,” it’s like, “Where are your passions and expertise?” And so we had three launch this year, which was great. We have Sustainable Management Education, we have Racial and Social Justice in the Business Community, and we have Digital Transformation. And it was not planned this way, but they so nicely fit with (the Jesuit pursuit of) cura personalis where it’s, say, care for the planet with the Sustainability one, care for the people with Racial and Social Justice, and then care with technology is sort of an extension of that.

And they’ve been doing great work throughout the year. It’s our first year, but they really just are the seeds that we’re planting right now to see how they might continue to develop, how might we get more faculty aligning themselves with these impact areas or students? Maybe they’ll turn into centers or our new versions of centers, things like that.

As you say, 2023-2024 was the first year. What encourages you about how the year has gone?

Otgo: So I think what’s encouraging is the impact areas, faculty are getting together from different disciplines. They’re working even with faculty from College of Arts and Sciences.

Very interdisciplinary. And we’re seeing closer connection between curricular development, research, and service areas. So for example, one of the impact area Courtney mentioned, sustainable management education, the faculty lead is Marco Tavanti, he’s an expert in sustainability and sustainable business, in general. And it used to be that he was doing that work for his research. His teaching was public administration, non-profit management. But now because he’s leading this impact area, he’s working with other faculty and students on this, so his impact has broadened within the school. And this new program Richard must have mentioned, master’s in management in social impact, was largely designed by Marco as well. So it’s bringing together and leveraging these talents or resources that we had, and expanding the impact of it.

The flip side of that is the challenges are still there. What’s been more difficult than you anticipated?

Courtney Masterson: “The narrative is, how can we leverage AI to help students?”

Otgo: So I would say the impact area, since it’s kind of a new thing and then we are giving resources around it, there’s, I think, more upsides than challenges with the impact areas. The undergrad faculty leads part is, relatively speaking, more challenging because faculty are still comparing it with department chairs, and they’re still somewhat reminiscent of the former department walls.

So I think it will take time to really embrace the opportunities and possibilities with the new structure. Faculty are starting. Some get it completely, some are kind of confused.

Courtney Masterson:Yeah, I think one of the higher eds to… well, it’s very slow to change, that’s why we’re many of us are in predicament that we might be in. So there’s always going to be a challenge of just any change, no matter what the change is. There will be resistance in having to build buy-in and people along. But what’s really exciting is we had five new hires last year, and they are the ones too raising their hand to lead these areas. And they are here because they want to be in a place where their expertise and passions are being leveraged right from the get-go. It’s not the kind of place around here, which I’ve always appreciated, where you have to wait your turn to lead an area, or lead a program, or be a major lead.

Yeah, no, this is very different. It’s like if you have the passion and expertise, which we do at all levels, assistant to full professor and all staff titles, you can raise your hand and experiment. And I think that’s what is very exciting to be here too, is that it’s a time where all ideas are on the table to try things.

How are you gauging student response or student adaptation to all these changes? Surveys?

Otgo: I think down the road we’ll have to do a pre, post kind of thing. And since we didn’t really do a pre, “Okay, what’s happening?” kind of thing, we’ll have to be clever about how we do that. But I think survey will have to be part of it to get student input. But so far it’s been based on what we’re hearing from the undergrad faculty leads, and they’re doing a report out at the end of the year outlining what they’ve done, what they’ve accomplished, and what the challenges were so that we can course-correct, and improve things, and adjust things for next year.

You’ve talked about declining enrollment. How are you going to turn that around? Or is it turning around? Or is it partly a result of the pandemic, and maybe now that we’re mostly past that things are going to turn around?

Otgo: Yeah, I think in terms of the macro environment, the demographic growth is going to be here for a while. Different people have done different forecasts and studies and they think it’s going to be here through maybe the late 2030s, almost. So the challenges in the undergrad space will continue to be there, and then challenge in the international students space will also continue to be there because China used to be the number one sending country, now they have more universities in the top rankings, they’re staying home, they’re going to Hong Kong, they’re going to Singapore, they’re going to Japan and Taiwan instead of the U.S., Canada and the UK. So those challenges will remain, but we see more upside on the grad side where the student target population is not necessarily the shrinking undergrad student population, it’s more of these working adults, people re-skilling, up-skilling. There’s close to 40 million people with some credential but no degree, some courses, many adults who have two, three courses left but couldn’t graduate and had to work and all that. We need to go after that population. And for that population, online modality seems to be a better way to reach them because they’re busy and working and everything.

So these three new programs we’re launching are all online. We are partnering with Anderson, that’s an online program. So I think next year, because of these three new online programs we are predicting, we’re hoping, to have a hundred new enrollment because of those three. So I think on grad side, I think we can turn around more quickly. On the grad side, it should be more about long-term play like, how do we not continue to decline? How do we keep that at bay, and try to stay differentiated and unique so that we don’t lose our market positioning?

What’s lost in Chinese enrollment could be gained from other international corners, India maybe?

Otgo: Yeah.

Courtney Masterson: Yeah, on the undergrad side too, talking about our admissions system, we are spending quite a bit of time in Africa as well, so absolutely. And I think on the undergrad side, one thing that I know is, the reputation is like a roller coaster. And so being the University of San Francisco, we’ve proudly leveraged our location, and we’re still incredibly committed to the city.

So that will take time, and so we are investing in partnerships with the Chamber of Commerce and other places in the city because we do want that to be a selling point for students. We are here because we think it is an amazing place for an education, and we’re not walking away from that. But it will take just a little bit of time on the macro side.

Business schools have been talking for a long time now about business as a force for good, but the Jesuit schools were way ahead on that. I wonder what’s the next step for business as a force for good. How does that evolve now that it’s basically embraced by all the top schools? Where are you guys going to lead next?

Otgo: I think that’s where our impact areas come in. I think we need to double down and focus on the actual partnerships with the community so that it’s not just curriculum, it’s not just research, it’s really community-centered. And so that’s something we have to do more. Not that we haven’t been doing it, we have been, but leverage it, expand it, and say our story. It’s almost, I feel like we’re kind of a hidden gem, if you will. Coming from the East Coast, not many people on the East Coast know about USF.

AI is what everybody’s talking about — how it’s going to change the curriculum, and how it’s going to change teaching. We’ve written a lot of stories about that. What are your thoughts about AI? Between now and when the students come back in the fall could be a completely different world, that’s how rapidly things are changing. How is your school going to approach it?

Otgo: I’ll get it started, and I’ll hand off to Courtney to talk about how the impact area and digital transformation is already doing a lot of stuff in AI. So she can touch on that. But where I would start is, partly it’s leveraging our locational advantage. So San Francisco is the AI capital, basically, of the world, and the locational advantage shows already. So before even we go to AI, I think recently Financial Times put a ranking for undergrad business schools about salaries of the students and the debt. So if you have high salary but low debt, then you get ranked highest. So USF was top 20 among undergrad business schools, according to Financial Times.

So that’s partly in a way showing our locational advantage. We attract very low-income, very diverse student body, yet we are giving them these job opportunities because of our locational advantage. Same thing will happen in AI because of this locational advantage, it’s our job to make sure our curriculum and extracurricular activities mirror the AI needs of the students so that they can leverage it when they graduate. So we are starting with these impact areas, and lots of things are happening.

Courtney Masterson:The narrative is, how can we leverage this to help students? So we just had our startup summit in McLaren here that was organized by our startup club, which involves mainly graduate school of management students, but I believe some undergrads, and then Professor John Cromwell, who’s an innovation professor here, and they put on what is basically a pitch competition. The vast majority were AI-based pitches. And they were given seed money to launch these things. And so that’s just one example.

We are here for it. We want to use it to give our students the opportunity to launch products, services, things like that. We also, of course, have had student AI week, faculty AI week, and we have a new AI club that’s setting up a great week. I’m learning from them. They’re sending out a great “what are we reading each week” newsletter, AI in the news, and whatnot. So I’m really optimistic because I think here it’s like, “All right, what can we do with it?” We’re trying to leverage it, not suppress it at all.

You’ve talked a lot about making the school less faculty-centric and more student-centric. In a letter to P&Q last December you wrote, “We’re striving to become an agile organization where walls and lines are less important, and quick changes, flexible resources, and the innovative actions are more important.” I know it’s only been a little over half a year since you wrote that, but how happy are you with where you’re at since you wrote those words?

Otgo: I will say I’m both happy and also realizing more and more how difficult it is. It’s not easy to change the paradigm, as you said it. The faculty members, academics, if you will, there are certain kinds of people who self-select academia, there is a reason why they chose academia and not industry. And all their life when they grew up as students, grad students, assistant professors, full professors, basically all their adult life, they’ve known one structure. So for us to upend that structure and try something new, it has required a lot of courage, and it is hard, it’s very hard.

I admit, it’s harder than I thought. But we are proud of the work we are doing. We are pushing ahead. Ultimately, if we succeed with this experiment, and find a nice way of settling somewhere and not revert, I think it would be a nice example for the rest of higher ed to follow, so I’m really optimistic for that. But I’m not going to lie, it’s not easy.

Courtney Masterson: But to your credit, we’re in it live with the students right now. Last year you surveyed students and said, “What do you want? What are the types of classes you are expecting? What are your interests and passions around the sustainable development goals?” The demand is there, so we have to meet it. This is why we’re in business. We are not an R1 institution, we are in business to serve our students. We are a teaching institution. We want to be here.

And so we need to meet their needs. They deserve that. If the amount of money that they spend to invest in this education, we have to innovate classes, we have to innovate. Getting a finance major, or an accounting major, or a management major shouldn’t look the same today as it did 50 years ago or 100 years ago. So to Otgo’s credit, she’s pushing us to advocate for the students, even if it’s painful at times.

Otgo: It’s painful at times. And if you look at all business schools’ core curriculum, they tend to look very similar to each other. All of them will have a course in marketing, a course in accounting, a course in finance because you’re introducing to the disciplines first, and then you go to your major. But it almost looks like a checkbox, if you will, “Okay, I took these courses, I took 10 courses, now I’m a business student.” But then we are not letting them intentionally connect the dots on how each of these things contribute to solving these complex problems.

So our goal with this undergrad core revision is, how can we be more intentional, not just hope that students connect the dots at some point? We need to make sure that the instructional design have to connect the dots for the students, so that students can do that more easily, and they can do that from smaller scale from the beginning, and then as they progress toward junior, senior year, they can actually solve more complex problem and see perspectives from different disciplines. Otherwise, what we are doing is higher ed is, okay, make them take a bunch of courses, throw them into the world, and just hope that they’ll somehow connect the dots.

DON’T MISS THE P&Q INTERVIEW: NEW DEAN OF GBSB GLOBAL ON PREPARING STUDENTS FOR THE DIGITAL FUTURE and NEARLY HALF OF BUSINESS MASTER’S CANDIDATES WANT DEI CONTENT IN THEIR PROGRAMS: POLL

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