Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/56539
Headlines Participating schools will work with Ashoka to create working blueprints and inspiration for future Changemaker Campuses. For instance, the University of Maryland will assemble a multidisciplinary team of undergraduate and gradu- ate students to create a campaign to generate campuswide enthusiasm for social entrepreneurship. Business students and faculty "care about the world's big prob- lems," says G. Anandalingam, dean of the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business. "We have the intellectual capital, creativity, and entrepreneurial vision to contribute to big solutions." Eventually, Ashoka will share case studies and practices across its global network of more than 100 universities. "Our aim is to cultivate a generation of students ready to develop new approaches to difficult A Way to Measure the Connection to Business The Mason School of Business at The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, has revamped its curriculum to focus on real-world business experience, and now it's launching a specialized system to help measure its progress. Last fall, the Mason School calculated its inau- gural Business to Business School (B2B) Measures for its full-time MBA program, assessing three key factors: executive-to-student ratio, real time in business, and face time with executives. For instance, the executive-to- student ratio measures the number of business executives actively involved in the program 12 BizEd MARCH/APRIL 2009 global problems while serving as a catalyst for new ideas and innova- tions," says Marina Kim, Ashoka's university program director. For compared to the number of full- time MBA students. More than 100 active or retired executives provide one-on-one coaching to Mason students, making this ratio 1-to-1. The B2B calculation for real time in business, which measures the time students spend doing real work for actual companies during regu- lar course work, came out at 120 hours. And Mason students enjoyed approximately 72 hours of face time with executives during the school's field consultancy program, career acceleration modules, and sessions with executive part- ner coaches. more information, visit www.asho- ka.org/changemakercampus. MBA students at Clark Univer- sity's Graduate School of Manage- The B2B Measures are based on curriculum revisions that the Mason School has implemented in recent years to better prepare its students for the workforce. "While media rankings reflect many important aspects of the business school experi- ence, they do not currently account for a business school's efforts to provide students with real-world business experience," says dean Larry Pulley. "We think the B2B is a way of measuring the greatest benefit of an MBA—opportunity." The Mason School has published the 2008 data on its Web site and plans to update the results each year. The school also plans to hold a deans' summit in 2009 to discuss the busi- ness school rankings.