Columbia Business School recently unveiled an enhanced core curriculum, introducing a streamlined set of foundational courses, newly built-in flexibility and a corporate governance module during orientation for first-year students. The incoming class of 2010 will be the first to study under the revised curriculum. Now organized into “required” and “flexible” components, the new core’s consolidation will permit students to more fully customize their course of study by taking an additional full-term elective course in the second term of the first year. “The innovative transformation of the core curriculum provides students with foundational expertise in preparation for electives, internships and Master Classes,” said Dean Glenn Hubbard. “The core is the first step in the journey to the MBA degree, essential to preparing our students to analyze, decide and lead in an increasingly complex and global business environment.”
The core’s required component, consisting of 6.5 courses, covers material deemed fundamental to an MBA, such as accounting, corporate finance, leadership, marketing, operations, statistics and strategy. The flexible component, consisting of 1.5 courses, allows students to select one half-term course from each of three broad categories: organizations, performance and markets. Students may take additional courses in these categories as electives.
New to the core curriculum is a noncredit corporate governance module designed to enhance students’ understanding of their duties and responsibilities as managers and directors of firms, as well as their appreciation of the role of corporate governance in their careers, the business entity, the economy and society at large. “Today,” said Hubbard, “every business leader must understand the potential economic benefit of good governance, as well as the interaction among directors, management, regulatory bodies, investors and other stakeholders.”
The revised core curriculum was developed by the Foundations Curriculum Committee (FCC), a group of tenured faculty members representing the School’s five academic divisions and convened by Hubbard in 2006.
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