Purdue University Board of Regents Chairman Mike Berghoff spoke about the new Purdue School of Business at the Purdue University Presidents Committee Dinner in September. Berghoff is an undergraduate in the School of Business, and 4 of Purdue’s 10 trustees are graduates of the School of Business.courtesy photo
To put Purdue University’s ambitious plans to expand and reshape its business education into context, consider the big four, say David Hummels, dean of the Krannert School of Management.
The first is Purdue’s longstanding philosophy of “excellence at scale” that to have a real impact on the world, you need to reach enough people to implement it. In this regard, the business school plans to further increase its student enrollment (which has grown by 33% at the undergraduate level since 2019), hire more faculty (up 50% over the past decade), and scale up its facilities Doubled in about four years.
The second goal is to continue to focus on STEM-oriented degrees and build on that Integrated Business and Engineering (IBE) The school will launch in fall 2021. The third is centered on a classical liberal approach as a way of thinking about business problems in Purdue’s Cornerstone Project.
Finally, the new Purdue School of Business, as it is now called, will greatly expand its experiential and project-based learning so that all students can participate deeply, not just the top 10 percent of superstars. Think undergraduate research opportunities, corporate consulting, and more.
“We want these to be things that all of our students go through,” Hummels told Polish & Quant.
Reimagined business school
David Hummels
Wednesday, September 23, Purdue University Announcing its “next big move” A reimagined, redesigned business program with a new name: Purdue Business School. The announcement is the last major move to be made during the decade-long tenure of the university’s president, Mitch Daniels, although the conversation has been going on for several years. Effective January 1, 2023, Mung Chiang, Purdue’s president-elect, dean of the School of Engineering and executive vice president of strategic initiatives, will take over at Purdue.
The reimagining will be accompanied by substantial university investment as well as a major fundraising drive that will bring new rebranding possibilities to the entire project in the coming months. Graduate courses will continue to use the Krannert moniker, Hummels said.
The new school will build on a string of recent successes, including Top Ranked Business Analytics Programsits new Dean V. White Real Estate Finance Projectm, and a $10 million gift from Marshall and Susan Larsen for their innovation Larson Leadership Academy.
“The analogy I’ve been using, and I probably liked it too much, if you look at the Fortune 500 when Krannert was founded in 1962, it was steel companies, oil companies, plastics and automobiles, and industrial conglomerates. Today in Fortune Few of the top 500 companies were in existence in 1962,” Hummels said.
“So if we think about preparing students, the challenge is that we don’t know what the most important companies will look like in 20, 30 or 40 years. We’re preparing students for industries that don’t even exist. The answer to that It’s about preparing students to be problem solvers who can operate between STEM and business disciplines.”
Polish & Quant Talk to Dean Hummels to learn more about the big changes coming to Purdue’s business education. Our conversation is shown below, edited for length and clarity.
Purdue University Krannert School of Management
What is the timeline for this launch? Has the name officially changed, or is this the start of a longer deployment?
The Krannert name we’ve been using was originally associated with a 1962 gift to the Graduate School of Industrial Management, which never encompassed undergraduate programs or larger endeavors. Sometime in the mid-’80s, the dean at the time decided, for simplicity’s sake, to call everything Krannert. So, we just used it, even though technically our undergraduates are not Kranert management graduates.
The way this is done is that there will be a named overall business school under which there will be Krannert graduate programs and then undergraduate programs. There may be some additional naming across the school and undergraduate courses, which I expect may be resolved sometime in the February time frame.
So the graduate program will still belong to the Krannert School of Management?
Yes. The Krannert School of Management within the larger Purdue School of Business.
I read that you also want to double the size of the business school facility itself. Tell us more about this.
First, we have seen significant growth in both our enrollment and faculty. Over the past decade, our faculty and staff has increased by approximately 50%, and our undergraduate enrollment has grown from 2,400 to 3,100 over the past few years. Going forward, we will increase our undergraduate enrollment to approximately 4,000 majors, and we aim to have one in five Purdue students from outside the business school graduate with a minor with us. This is an order for another 2,000 students.
Rendering of plans for the expansion and renovation of the new Purdue School of Business. (Illustration by Ayers Saint Gross)
As for postgraduate programmes, when they are entirely residential, they have around 400 students per year. We now offer online courses with about 1,100 to 1,200 graduate students. Our goal is to attract over 2,000 students.
So if you consider all of this enrollment growth, we’re going to be adding a lot of faculty. At Purdue, we like to talk about excellence at scale: if you have a great program serving 10 people, you don’t make any difference in the world.
The facility will accommodate a large number of these activities, but will also be very focused on modern active learning pedagogy, innovative labs, many unique spaces for creative interaction – student-to-student, student-to-faculty, and external partners, whatever Whether it is another unit on campus or a corporate partner.
What is the timeline for this facility expansion?
In our announcement last month, we alluded to the fact that during Mitch Daniels’ 10 years as president of Purdue, we’ve launched a number of major initiatives that we call Purdue’s major initiatives. These are huge expansion moves around data science and engineering, plant science, transformative education, and more. In a sense, this is the last major move President Daniels will take during his decade-long term.
As far as the timeline is concerned, we hope that the new facility may come online in the fall of 2026. So some of the faculty growth has to be linked a little bit with the new space. But, I’ll tell you, if our student population growth is the same as in the past few years, we’ll probably hit those numbers in four to five years.
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