UC San Diego Business School Will Get Technical
The tech sector is in a terrible slump. After a string of headline-grabbing scandals, the world of high finance has been reduced to fodder for late-night TV comedy monologues.
So what is UC San Diego doing?
It’s starting a business school to prepare students for management in a technology-based economy.
The timing may seem curious, but UC San Diego is on to something. Though tech companies are hurting now, the fields of bioscience and medicine, engineering and computers surely will remain the economic growth engines for the state -- and indeed the whole nation -- in the decades ahead.
It is thus essential that students with a background in those disciplines also learn how to be effective business executives.
“We want young people with a scientific and engineering bent,” says Robert Sullivan, who will become dean of the Graduate Management School at UC San Diego.
The institution isn’t slated to open its doors until 2004. It will start with a handful of working executives going back for their MBA degrees and gradually build up to a student body of 300.
Sullivan, who has headed business schools at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, is just starting to hire his faculty at UC San Diego.
But already he is reaching out to San Diego companies, including diagnostic products maker Biosite Inc. and telecommunications giant Qualcomm Inc., which are located near campus. His aim is to forge a symbiotic relationship whereby UC San Diego and the corporate community can collaborate on research projects, share personnel and spawn ventures.
“In the last 25 years San Diego has become a community known for innovation,” says professor Mary Walshok, who heads UC San Diego’s extension programs. “It is the perfect place for the development of a 21st century business school, one focused on global technology companies and entrepreneurship.”
The UC San Diego program is the latest entrant in the ever-expanding arena of business education.
The necessity for MBAs has grown “because managing business today is much more demanding of analytical skills” than it used to be, says Bruce Willison, dean of the Anderson business school at UCLA.
He cites, for instance, the need to parse reams of computer data on customers -- “data mining” as it’s called -- to put together a sophisticated marketing strategy. At the same time, mastering elaborate mathematical models is required to handle a corporation’s finances. On top of such arcane subjects, there also is the imperative to study ethics and leadership.
In the last decade, graduate-level business enrollment in the U.S. has risen 35% -- there are now 250,000 MBA candidates. Throw on top of that an additional 750,000 undergraduates taking business courses. Meanwhile, the numbers abroad are comparable -- and growing even faster.
In foreign countries, “business is seen as part of the American success story,” notes John Fernandes, president of the Assn. to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. The St. Louis-based nonprofit organization was founded in 1916 by 17 U.S. universities, including Harvard and UC Berkeley. Today, it has 432 members around the globe.
But not all of these schools take the same approach.
As UC San Diego is showing, California’s business programs often aim at producing entrepreneurs, not the wingtipped corporate managers churned out by Harvard -- the place where George W. Bush, the first MBA president, got his degree.
For example, the Marshall School of Business at USC teaches its students how to run a small company -- and, with some luck, turn it into a big company. USC graduate Paul Orfalea, the founder of Kinko’s, “thanked us for a strong finance course,” Marshall Dean Randolph Westerfield boasts.
The business school at USC also works closely with the university’s famed School of Cinema-Television to train managers for the entertainment industry.
In the same specialized vein, the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences was set up five years ago at the Claremont Colleges to train executives to work in the biotechnology and medical industries.
Now UC San Diego’s management school will add innovations of its own. Its MBA program, for example, will require only one year of study, in contrast to the standard two-year regimen at other graduate business schools.
“The heads of many firms, including Goldman Sachs and Charles Schwab, said make your course shorter,” Sullivan explains. Companies want to bring in “people capable of learning and then spend the first year training them in the company’s systems.”
The compressed schedule will impose other demands. Students should take basic classes such as business statistics “on their own time in the summer,” Sullivan says, “and then come prepared to learn.”
Being prepared to learn is precisely what will drive our economy ahead.
“The business of America is business,” President Calvin Coolidge said in 1925. Today, as UC San Diego is making clear, the business of America is knowledge.
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James Flanigan can be reached at jim.flanigan @latimes.com.
