I’m thinking today about differentiators in the MBA program. Essentially we have two at the Mason School of Business. Insofar as differentiators are what students identify as the reasons for picking W&M ‘s Mason School over others, our differentiators are the CAMS and the EPs. These two program features are identified by more incoming students as reasons for coming to the school than any others.
I think we are all proud of these two signal features of our MBA, but I think we have another one, our teaching. I am not afraid to claim that our teaching, overall, is better than the teaching one could get anywhere else. I know that there are some great teachers in many other MBA programs, some more highly ranked than ours, and some not. But I would lay the claim for us based on two factors.
First of all, good teaching is a requirement at William & Mary. You cannot remain a professor here if you are not a good teacher. At the same time, William & Mary is a research oriented institution. That means that William & Mary seeks out those more highly paid academicians who are known for their contributions to the discipline, who work at the leading edge of the discipline, and who are paid a great deal more because of these things.
Many research-oriented institutions, including the very highly ranked institutions, pay lip service to, but are not nearly as focused on demanding good teaching as well. Professors who are prolific publishers in these institutions often negotiate minimal instructional and classroom contact with students.
At William & Mary, on the other hand, prospective faculty know that both research and teaching are part of the institutional demand. In a sense, then, the faculty is self selected. A person who is primarily interested in research and sees teaching as an interfering nuisance would not want to be a faculty member at William & Mary. Neither would people who just want to teach, because William & Mary pays the higher salaries and demands research productivity of their tenure line faculty.
I do know that several of our new faculty this year were advised by professors at their doctoral institutions not to interview here because of the teaching demand which, they were told, would interfere with the development of their research careers. I don’t know if we are unique in this regard, but I do know that we are very rare.
And the byproduct of all of this is that we move students so far. We have small classes. We pay a lot of attention to the individual students. Virtually every student at William & Mary’s Mason School of Business will tell you that the professors were wonderful teachers, that they cared, and that thy would work with them individually to help them succeed in mastering the subject matter.
And, after their first year, going up against the best that the very top ranked schools have to offer in internships, our students routinely come back and tell us that they believe that they were at least as well prepared, an usually better prepared, than the other interns whom they worked with.
But all of this gets to be a differentiator only if it is so known and apprediated. I’ve got to believe that it would be appreciated. How do we get it to be known?
