Our Plan: Strategic Initiatives

Initiative IV: Match Our Programs to the Market

Follow our progress on this initiative.

Our program strategy is twofold: (1) maintain our critical small-school character, which enables intense relationships and highly productive learning, and (2) grow specific programs that address changes in the marketplace and generate additional revenue, taking advantage of the full resources of Cornell.

Our small-school character is determined largely by our Ithaca-based two-year MBA and PhD programs. In these, we will target admissions efforts to maintain current levels of enrollment, even as we seek to increase the quality of applicants through reputation building and targeted recruiting. To ensure that our core MBA program maintains the highest possible quality and keeps pace with the changing needs of the marketplace, we have initiated a thorough curriculum and program review. Faculty groups are charged with examining first-year content and course timing, the use of cases in class, number and scope of electives, pedagogical approaches, and course evaluations as parts of the process.

Opportunities to increase enrollments and generate additional revenue exist in three discrete programs:

The Accelerated MBA (formerly the Twelve-Month Option) program targets individuals with technical backgrounds and advanced degrees. Increasing enrollment from 35 to 60 will generate additional revenue without commensurate expense and, educationally, increase peer-learning opportunities.

The Executive MBA Program at Palisades is designed for individuals who already have significant business experience. Because of the structure of this program, we can double each class and continue to meet our high standards for quality and at the same time generate revenue growth for the school.

The greatest long-term opportunity to extend our educational reach is through a technology-based EMBA program. We recently launched and are rapidly expanding our technology-based Boardroom EMBA program in association with Queen's School of Business in Canada, a world leader in distance learning-based MBA education.

Other new program opportunities will come through aggressively marketing our custom executive education capabilities, building executive education offerings through our Centers, and converting existing executive education programs into distance learning courses distributed through eCornell.

We recognize that today's business is global. While we have intensified the global perspective in our existing programs, ultimately we must increase our direct reach to specific important markets, especially Asia. We are carefully examining how best to design an economically viable and sustainable model to reach Asian markets in a way that upholds our reputation as a world-class business school. We believe that technology is an important part of the answer.