Good Business
Students don’t just want an advanced degree. They also want to
make a difference.
Like a lot of prospective MBA students, Andrew Wilkinson figured that snagging an advanced business degree could do a lot for his career. After graduating from Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, Mich., Wilkinson explored several career options — working in health care, city government, hospitality, and even leading student trips in Central America — and he decided that an MBA would give him skills that would qualify him for whatever field he eventually settled on. “It opens a lot of options,” he says.
When it came time to select a school, though, Wilkinson wasn’t interested in simply finding the program that would boost his earnings the most. He wanted to earn a degree that could help him make a genuine difference in the world. “I was looking for ways in which the community could benefit from my work,” he says. Ultimately, Wilkinson settled on San Francisco State University, in large part because the school offers an MBA that allows students to focus their studies on sustainable business — a blanket term that essentially covers enterprises demonstrating environmental, social, and ethical responsibility. “It was a huge factor,” says Wilkinson.
Over the past half decade or so, the number of business schools offering a concentration, or at least some coursework, in sustainable business has blossomed. According to Rich Leimsider, director of the Aspen Institute Center for Business Education, only 34 percent of business schools in 2001 required students to take a course related to sustainability. That number had spiked to 63 percent by 2007. “This is lightning-fast change for the business school industry,” Leimsider says.
Sustaining Young Minds
Obviously, this new emphasis on sustainability by businesses and schools comes in tandem with an overall cultural tilt toward green living, as the perils of global warming, species extinction, and collapsing ecosystems have become impossible to ignore. But like any good business, MBA programs also recognize growing demand on the part of students like Wilkinson who believe that fundamentally changing the for-profit arena is an essential step in addressing many of the world’s most pressing problems.
“Students come to us wanting an MBA that will help them go out and transform the private sector,” says Jody Hoffer Gittell, an associate professor and director of the Heller MBA program at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., which prepares students to manage organizations that have a social mission. “They actually want to go in and transform the private sector to these standards of sustainability.”
As evidence of that trend, sustainable business as a focus of study has gone beyond mere course offerings and degree programs — there are now schools whose express mission is producing MBA graduates who are capable of either launching their own environmentally friendly and socially responsible business or improving sustainable practices at existing companies.
The Bainbridge Graduate Institute, located outside Seattle, was launched in 2002 with just that goal. “We are interested in seeing the entire economic system transformed in a direction that is more sustainable,” says Jill Bamburg, the school’s dean and one of its founders. “If we get serious about sustainability, we need to change the way we think about everything we do.”
Unlike some schools that offer individual courses devoted to green business interspersed with core MBA classes like finance and accounting, Bainbridge incorporates concepts around sustainability into the entire curriculum. This mission takes form in classes like Neoclassical and Ecological Economics, Sustainable Operations, and Finance, Accounting, and the Triple Bottom Line. Bamburg also points out that a significant portion of the school’s curriculum involves “action learning projects,” which require students to help a company or industry association become more sustainable and also to develop a business plan for a sustainable start-up company. “A number of businesses have been started as a result of the work done in class,” she says.
Making the Green
Naturally, professors, administrators, and — most of all — students are keenly interested in the job prospects for graduates of green MBA programs. Bamburg says the job board at Bainbridge is extremely active, with about three new positions posted daily. But Leimsider says that is more the exception than the rule. He believes there is still a disconnect between what senior leaders in corporate America are saying and what human resources professionals and recruiters in those same companies are doing.
“In our experience it hasn’t reached down to the recruiters all that often,” he says. “What happens is we have recruiters on campus who aren’t asking about sustainability issues. At the same time, the CEO is giving major speeches about how important these things are.”
It’s still an open question whether the demand will grow for MBA graduates who know how to do triple-bottom-line accounting or can find ways to profit by tackling deforestation and global warming. Murray Silverman, a professor at San Francisco State’s business school who helped develop the MBA program’s sustainability concentration, can see where having the skills to help a company become greener and more socially responsible could give a graduate an important competitive advantage in the job market. “If someone at a company asks how much CO2 we produce, nobody has any idea. But they can tell you how much every widget costs and how much iron and platinum is in each one,” says Silverman. “People who are in information systems and pursue our MBA are going to come out prepared to help these organizations develop those kinds of information systems.”
But there’s a big “if” implicit in that scenario. Right now, there’s a tremendous focus on all things green and sustainable, and companies are falling over themselves to be perceived as environmentally and socially responsible. The question is whether that interest will continue to build over the next few years. “It depends on how much businesses really embrace [sustainability],” says Silverman. “There’s a lot of embracing going on now. Some people think it’s a honeymoon. We’ll see.”
— Chris Warren
The Aspen Institute’s Alternative Business School Rankings
- Stanford University
- University of Michigan
- York University (Canada)
- University of California, Berkeley
- University of Notre Dame
- Columbia University
- Cornell University
- Duquesne University
- Yale University
- Instituo de Empresa (Spain)
— C.W.
