After nearly two years of planning, the Binghamton University School of Management has announced a series of core curriculum changes intended to keep the college ahead of national trends in business education and real world employment.
The new structure ‘ set to be implemented for fall 2007 ‘ was laid out to students in an e-mail sent last week.
The new curriculum establishes a set chronology to how students schedule their courses through their four years. Instead of the suggested sequence of classes, the system introduces core classes organized specifically by year, and uses labs to connect classes.
‘The changes are designed to bring more integration into the curriculum by scheduling blocks of courses together and providing linkages between them through common labs of integrative courses,’ the e-mail said.
According to Upinder Dhillon, the dean of SOM, the curriculum was changed in order to keep up with other competitive business schools. ‘We are an elite school within Binghamton University in terms of the quality of students we attract,’ he said. The new course structure was created in order to ‘go beyond the ordinary’ and create a more demanding curriculum.
In the interest of keeping ahead of the curve, SOM did a ‘benchmarking’ survey of programs at other schools and the experiences of alumni and executives. The results pointed to issues of early integration of incoming students, a trend towards ‘learning across disciplines’ at other universities, and developing what Dhillon referred to as ‘soft skills’ like communication and leadership early in a student’s academic career.
First year students, Dhillon said, were not feeling engaged enough in the college, and may not have taken a single SOM course their entire freshman year. They use the year to take General Education courses, typically in the liberal arts, but come into their sophomore year with no specific concentration in mind.
‘They feel lost, they feel that the school is not exposing them to any field of business,’ Dhillon said. ‘Essentially, they felt no connection with the school at all.’
To temper the lack of interaction, the new curriculum will have freshmen take ‘advanced computer tools combined with an intro to business and to SOM’, according to the e-mail.
Despite concerns over the freshman SOM experience, Dhillon said that the college has one of the highest retention rates at BU. But his approach, however, was ‘not reactive, but proactive’ and sought to remedy the problem before it became apparent in numbers.
Students will have to take the new requirements into consideration when registering for fall classes. According to Dhillon, additional resources will be established if the current group of peer advisers and academic adviser Brian Perry prove not to be enough to address student questions.