A peer-to-peer discussion with Bruce W. Weber, the Willem Kooyker Dean, Zicklin School of Business.

🎙️ Bruce Weber, Willem Kooyker Dean of Baruch College's Zicklin School of Business in New York City is always innovating. Since having returned to his former stomping grounds at Zicklin, where years ago he cut his teeth setting up a very successful electronic learning lab, Weber has consistently employed new ideas to deliver on their mission to provide accessible, affordable excellence in business education. 

More than 60% of students at the school are Pell recipients and face financial stress and overall socio-economic hardship. Weber has quickly identified knowledge gaps and then created programs and resources that meet the whole student’s needs—and also provide them an astounding educational value without a high price tag. He has also doubled down on experiential learning opportunities, leveraging Baruch’s urban campus to expose Zicklin students to NYC’s vast array of professional industries and services and better equip them for their future careers.

 “There's a level of professional life skills that we are trying to impart here at Zicklin, says Weber, “beyond the textbook learning that's going on in the classroom and in and around the normal business school subjects… orienting [students] towards what's going to be happening in their work environments.”

Episode 59, is jam-packed with insights and practical takeaways for business education leaders serving diverse student populations, particularly in large cities and universities. From maximizing faculty lectures to serve more students while maintaining quality curricula to activating advisory boards around targeted tasks, this is a 35-minute must-listen.  #highereducation #leadership #podcast #DeansCounsel

Photos courtesy of Scheller College of Business

Read more about Dean Weber here

Transcript:

Welcome to Deans Counsel, a podcast aimed at supporting university leaders holding one of the more critical jobs on a university campus. Your panelists, Ken Kring, Jim Ellis and Dave Ikenberry, engage in conversation with highly accomplished deans and other academic leaders regarding the ever complex array of challenges that Deans face in one of the loneliest and most unique jobs in the academy.

Our guest today, Bruce Weber, is a two time Dean, after spending time at London Business School and NYU Stern School of Business, Bruce had a successful 12 year run as dean of the Lerner College of Business and Economics The University of Delaware in 2011 to 2023 It was then a homecoming of sorts In 2023 when he moved back to Baruch College's Zicklin School of Business in New York City to take on his second deanship. Zicklin is a familiar home for Bruce. He spent his early career there helping set up a very successful electronic learning lab. Now in his second year as dean, he seems quite at home and is a very rich agenda underway. Zicklin, as a business school, has an intriguing collection of circumstances and constraints, which we'll soon learn about. It is a large, incredibly diverse program where the majority of students receive Pell Grants. Resources always seem tight at our respective institutions, but today we learn from the precision with which budgeting is carried out at zicklin, just as that old marketing adage goes, know that customer, we'll hear today that Bruce Weber has a remarkably profound understanding of the students he serves by listening carefully to their needs, zicklin is able to obtain incredible placement and graduation results. There's something in this episode that each of us can learn from.

Ken Kring 2:07

We're here today with Bruce Weber, who was appointed as a new Willem Kooyker dean of the sickland School of Business at Baruch College in July of 2023 welcome, Bruce. Delighted to have you as our guest. Good to be here, Ken. So we've known Bruce for some time, and Bruce was a very successful Dean at the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics at the University of Delaware from 2011 until 2023 so you lead with experience. You're in a brand new situation now, not brand new any longer, but really welcome. Eager to hear about your overarching, successful career, and in particular, want to talk with you about your experience over the last I guess it's now approaching 18 months as the dean at zicklin.

Bruce Weber 3:06

Great. Thanks, Ken, yeah, I'm in my second year. Here is the Willem Kooyker Dean at the Zicklin school. And for me, it's a return, because I was on the faculty here for three years between 1999 and 2002 and in that time, I was the Faculty Director and opened up a educational trading floor for the students. So I've always been academically at the intersection of information technology and financial markets, so being a director of a trading floor here in the city was was terrific. My first permanent academic position was at the Stern School at NYU. So coming north 20 blocks and running a trading room was was a great opportunity at the time. What happened in 2002 though, is I was was offered a position at the London Business School in my field, and that was a great opportunity to live and work outside of the US and participate in some, some real interesting initiatives at the London Business School for those 10 years. And at some point, the the time to return to the US with with with family and school developments and college on the horizon for children, meant I was very excited to be offered the Dean job at the at the University of Delaware and serve under Pat Harker, who is the president of the University of Delaware at the time, and I'd had as a professor when I was a PhD student at Wharton. So it's an amazing chance to come back and work for somebody who I very much respected as an instructor and a scholar and and Pat's a great friend with his wife Emily, and me and my wife Terry, know them. Well,

Ken Kring 4:53

yeah, that's That's great. So you now with, with a dozen or so you. Years of experience at Delaware, which was, we won't call that cutting your teeth. That was a that was a serious, serious run. Talk with us about sort of these this first year and a half at zicklin. And sort of, what did you find? What were the surprises? How did you how did you address what you found and the surprises therein,

Bruce Weber 5:25

yeah, yeah, yeah. I had those three years here, so I sort of knew the, you know, I knew the layout and the map of the buildings and where to go, but really didn't know what the you know, relationship between faculty and the dean's office was and really pleasantly surprised by how collaborative the faculty are here, both Delaware and City University of New York, which is what Baruch College is part of, have unionized faculty. So I became very familiar with collective bargaining agreements, and you know how faculty senates operate, and we've got an arrangement, I think, at Baruch that gives the dean, I think, a much easier pathway to create a strategy, generate initiatives and move things forward. And it's not to say things didn't happen effectively and quickly at University of Delaware, but there was always a sense that, you know, shared governance required me as the dean to, you know, be alongside, rather than sort of ahead of, you know, any important curricular initiatives and and it's, you know, been very apparent to me here that the faculty are eager for the dean's office to provide leadership and look for new ways to to grow the school and expand and deliver on our mission, which is accessible and affordable, excellence in in business education.

Dave Ikenberry 6:58

Bruce, thanks for spending time with us today. When I think about zechlin, I think about, you know, an interesting strategic environment, geographically and otherwise, you know, you're geographically, you're in one of the most competitive markets in the world, certainly in the United States, you have a remarkably diverse student body. You have a probably less affluent, from a socio economic point of view, student body. I'm sure there's distinctions along other dimensions. When you think about leading this institution, what's similar, what's the same, and then where what are, what's different, that that we ought to be plugged into

Bruce Weber 7:57

the zicklin is very different, I think, than sort of the typical us, you know, top 50 Business School. First of all, this is not a residential campus. So Baruch College does not have a campus, does not have dorms. You know, our buildings sit right on the street and sidewalk, and then the the traffic of New York is, is one step away. 26th street here is actually blocked off. They've we've got a sort of a pedestrian zone for one block on East 26th street, and that's nice. That gives students a place to gather, but it's very different than the environment you'd find at University of Delaware or University of Michigan, typical kind of campus, business school environment. So I think what it means is we have to think really hard about what happens when the students are within our four walls, because once they leave the building, chances are they're getting on a subway or a train or a bus to go back to their their apartment or, chances are, their home, many of our students are able to live at home or tuition level, at $7,000 a year for the undergraduates, is is astounding for the quality of the degrees that they're they're going to get. And I think it gives us sort of an orientation that we're going to be teaching a group of students who in their upbringing, in their high schools, we're not surrounded by as many, you know, parents, aunts and uncles or neighbors who are in professions, lawyers, doctors, business managers, senior executives, as you'd find at most US business schools. So there's, there's a level of sort of professional life skills that we are trying to impart here at zicklin, beyond you know, the textbook learning that's going to go on in the classroom and in and around the normal business school subjects, we're making it very clear to you know, our faculty and our staff members that our students need some of. The introductory basics about, you know, how these organizations work. What is, what is? What does it mean to have a boss? What does it mean to have a schedule? What's going to happen in a meeting? If you're invited to a meeting, you know your participation? You know you need to step up and be a part of that. So we work a lot with our students on the the area we call professional life skills, orienting them towards what's going to be happening in their work environments, whether they're taking a part time job while they're here, a summer internship, and then eventually they're they're permanent job. We have programs. We have a program here called tools for clear speech. So we have a very high percentage of our students whose language at home, their first language is not English, if they speak with an accent, we want to help them be as understandable and understood as possible, and we've got a whole program for those students to do that, and it's able to bring them along from sometimes a strong accent to one that's very, very slight, and gives them, you know, in our opinion, a better chance to make a good impression when they go out in the work World and can speak with their strongest possible voice. So some of these, you know, what I might call like, filling in the gaps is essential at zicklin and schools where the students, through their high schools, through their home life, through their families, had exposure to more white collar professionals. The gap is smaller. It's pretty big. Here at zicklin, we work hard through, you know, both our curricular activities and our faculty, but also in our career. You know, we've got a graduate and an undergraduate career center making sure the students avail themselves of all those ways to develop outside of their curricular activity to be making the best possible impression and be able to be seen as very strong contributors to any prospective employer. So are

Dave Ikenberry 12:11

you doing this through the classroom or extracurricular outside the classroom, or is it both?

Bruce Weber 12:17

Both Dave, so we've got quite a few of the programs I was mentioning, tools for clear speech comes through our, what's called Star Career Center, and the faculty themselves, though, will find within their coursework, within the SEC you know, the class that they're teaching, a way to give their students some exposure, you know, maybe, you know, making a presentation, maybe doing a simulation that involves them playing a professional role that they might not have realized was was important to do conflict resolution, working in a team, some of the things that you might be able to take for granted at A school where the students high school backgrounds and home backgrounds are different than than what they are at Baruch, we we bring in a high number of, you know, outside guest lecturers and executives into our classroom. Source our students. I know, next week, we've got Tom Barkin, who's the president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, you know, here to speak to a couple of the finance classes and hear from somebody who sits on the Federal Open Markets Committee setting interest rates is going to be talking to our students, and they're going to get a chance to be elbow to elbow, you know, with somebody who's, you know, plays a critical role in the global financial market. So we really try to double down on those kind of experiential opportunities, to make sure that we take advantage of our New York City location, but also, as I mentioned, fill that gap so the students who you know aren't coming from an environment where meeting a Federal Reserve Bank president is is something that might be happening every so often that for our students, that wouldn't be the case. So this really is a golden opportunity, and we try to maximize those, those collisions, if you will, between, you know, our students and the senior executives that they you know, eventually want to model their own career after

Ken Kring 14:21

that's great. Talk with us some about some of the initiatives that have been taken. I mean, we know that, for instance, the New York jobs CEO council sounds like a wonderful resource and engagement, and frankly, with the kind of employer network in New York, with everything from the big fours to Google to IBM, there must be a lot of opportunity and a lot of challenge for you as dean to be able to be actualizing some of the. Those opportunities.

Bruce Weber 15:04

Yeah, thanks for mentioning New York City, New York City CEO Jobs Council, because that's a terrific commitment of large group of CEOs of New York based companies, Jamie diamond from JP, Morgan, Chase is on and a number of others. And we've hosted events for that group here at Baruch and zicklin, and given the students a chance to hear and what that CEO Jobs Council has done is they've made a commitment to hiring over some period of time. I can't remember the exact number of years, but 100,000 graduates of City University of New York campuses. So there's, there's 26 of these CUNY campuses. Baruch is one of four senior colleges, so we're probably getting a little bit more attention, but they're making this commitment to bringing in to career path jobs, 100,000 New York residents graduating from public institutions in the city into their organizations, and they have recognized, over time that while in their senior ranks, there are some representatives of city university campuses, they would like it to be even higher. They would like to create opportunities for this homegrown talent, if you will. So we're working with them and ensuring that the kind of job skills that they need in their entry level employees is exactly what we're delivering in our curriculum. So we work, we work closely with that group. I'll give you another example, Ken and this has been recognized. We got a grant from the American talent initiative, which you might know is the Michael Bloomberg Philanthropy. And what he what the ATI is targeting is schools with high graduation rates, and zicklin's graduation rate is just over 80% which is phenomenal for the socio economic level of the students we bring in Baruch is just slightly below that in the 70s, but that's a very high graduation rate for is that a

Dave Ikenberry 17:11

force? Is that a four six year number, Bruce, that's the six

Bruce Weber 17:15

year day. It's the six year graduation. And I think the four year I've seen is about 10% lower than that. So Right? We still have a good four year rate. But I think the six year for us is something we focus on, and I'll tell you why we focus on six year a little bit more. But in any case, the ATI has funded us to develop deep collaboration community colleges. So of those 26 CUNY campuses I mentioned, about 60% of them are community colleges, two year institutions, and one of the kind of UN tapped sources of talent, I believe, is the community college talent pipeline into four year institutions. Community colleges are a terrific gateway for students that might not have reached their academic full potential in high school. Community colleges give them, you know, a chance, you know, in their later teens or early 20s, to maybe find their academic inspiration, but the record from community colleges that American talent initiatives point to is even though 80% of community college students their first year report an intention to complete a bachelor's degree, only 33% of them wind up transferring to a four year institution, and then only 16% complete a bachelor's degree within six years of the start of their community college. So 16% you know, following through on the four year opportunity is quite low. What we do here at zicklin is we work with the community colleges to to have a pathway to transfer into zicklin, but work with them on what happens in those first two years, so that when they show up here as zicklin students, they're ready for junior level. Junior year level work traditionally, the community colleges and the CUNY senior colleges had gaps in how well we coordinated on on transfers. So we've created a program with support funding from American talent initiative called the Baruch Business Academy. So this gives the community colleges a clear road map and syllabi and curriculum, so that in those first two years, if they teach the economics and the math courses and the intro accounting courses to the zicklin standard, those students transfer in as zicklin students with full junior standing, but that community college student has to make that commitment their first year. They have to. Sign on to the Baruch Business Academy program to ensure they're taking the right courses at the right level to have that ability to transfer in, and we're getting great results. We've got about 1000 students now across three different community colleges in the program joining us as juniors and finishing up being retained at the same rate as the zicklin students do, so it's exactly what you know Michael Bloomberg wanted to see, was that we bring in more students from lower socioeconomic households into four year institutions that have a tradition and have a track record of very high graduation rates. And those high graduation rates translate into good job placement, good in, good initial entry level salaries. And, you know, we've been kind of recognized as as a terrific social mobility engine in what we do here at the zicklin school, and we do it in partnership with the community college now at a much greater level than we used to. We we bring in through we graduate through the transfer process, and therefore graduate almost 40% of our students having started somewhere else and joining us as a transfer along the way.

Ken Kring 21:28

I mean, those are exciting deltas on demand and enrollment, but imagine there are some, if not unintended consequences, some consequences around managing your numbers, and also know that you've been very involved in AACSB over the years, and you understand the portfolio management of DNA. Talk some about sort of what that has looked like and how you've adjusted to make demand a positive

Bruce Weber 22:01

Well, I have an email a couple days ago about our most recent maintenance of accreditation visit that was carried out, and we have to wait a couple more days for the full final ratification. But you can see I'm smiling today, so it actually, it actually looks good. So the the standards that the AACSB set sets and promulgates and holds us to actually work extremely well for us at the at the zicklin school, because it gives us, in effect, the the benchmarks to shoot for as we we plan out how we're going to deliver our programs. So for us to keep, be able to keep our participating faculty, we, you know, we use a large number of adjuncts, and we have, we have lecturers, fact, permanent faculty that have an instructional role. And so we have to look at the AACSB standards, as you know, effectively, constraints on how we we staff our sections. So the the trade off, we have to make it Baruch with the tuition that we charge, you know, being 7000 on the undergrad side and slightly more on the graduate side, but still extremely good value using, you know, limited resource budget. What we do is we put our participating faculty, faculty that are, you know, in in, you know, permanent roles in the school and deeply involved in the governance of the school, into larger sections on average than we teach. So we tend to use the adjuncts more to fill in gaps and generally smaller classes. So our average section size here is close to 50, which is which is pretty high, but we provide. We've got a Center for Teaching and Learning. We help our faculty understand how to deliver just as good a learning experience to a group of 7080, 100 students as they might with with 20 or 25 that you might see it you know, a smaller or a private business school that you know has more resources and charges of higher tuition. So I think we're able to use the AACSB guidelines to give ourselves sort of a focus on making sure we fully utilize the participating faculty and have them in front of as many of our students as we can, using fairly large section sizes and large lecture halls that we have here in our in our building, so I think we we come out, you know, looking good on AACSB metrics, but it does require a faculty to recognize that a class of of less than 45 or 50 is actually a luxury. Three here at the zicklin school, I work out like our budget per student, the last time we did the analysis is just over $4,000 per student per year coming in to our budget. So for us to to pay our faculty, to retain scholarly academic, research, active research, productive faculty. It really requires careful planning, you know, utilizing the adjuncts in a way that doesn't prevent us from meeting the AACSB standards. Another thing that that I'll point out Ken and Dave, that's that's useful for people to understand about zicklin school, is we get about a quarter of our budget from what we call non tax levy sources. So the way a City University of New York Campus operates is we get an allocation from CUNY central based on our enrollments and credit hours, and that comes from both the tuition dollars that come in, as well as the state appropriation and city city tax dollars. That's why it's called the tax levy budget. But on top of that, we can add on an additional 24% from self supporting programs, which is teaching executive education, teaching executive degree programs, students and philanthropy from our alumni. So we get an incremental out of the $4,000 per student, 1000 of that is coming from non tax levy sources, essentially, you know, I've got an important fundraising hat that I need to wear, and the fact that we do programs that funnel us directly, executive education, executive degree program dollars that we get to redeploy, we call those self supporting programs. So we're much farther along resource wise because of those two additional sources. And you know, if we didn't have those, it would, it would be a real struggle, both to meet AACSB standards, but also to maintain our research profile, being able to retain the top faculty in their field is expensive, and we need to pay market rates to keep our best faculty, and that that philanthropy and self supporting program helps us get there.

Dave Ikenberry 27:37

Bruce you, you mentioned philanthropy just a moment ago. Tell us a little bit about your approach to philanthropy, and does your demographic, your your strategic environment, the austerity of your programs. How does that shape your approach to philanthropy? I would imagine scholarship may be a big plank in terms of, not so much the source of it, but the use of it, yeah, well,

Bruce Weber 28:03

it's it's a good fundraising environment. Here, we've got 165,000 living alumni of Baruch, and about 70% of those are zicklin graduates. Larry zicklin, our namesake, is alive and kicking and doing great stuff for these teaches a course for us. We have something called the Baruch College Fund that brings the major donors together to help us manage the endowment and make decisions on the allocation of the payout from the endowment. I think what's different, Dave though, is I mentioned our tuition are very low. 60 more than 60% of our students receive Pell funding from the federal government. So what Larry zicklin and our donors have typically done is funded our research, funded our centers, funded our faculty, the students are able to get additional financial aid, and the tuition being fairly low means a scholarship donation is less important here than faculty support, support for our research centers. And you know what the approach I've taken in and I recall very fondly listening to Sanjay Gupta talk about his approach at the at the Broad school at Michigan State, and how he energized the advisory board there. Very similar here. I got an advisory board about 38 very active alums coming back for in person meetings, and we've just created a set of subcommittees. We didn't want to just do dog and pony shows, and what we want to do is get the alumni to become active in their advising to us, and we've given them three different subcommittees to join. One is on the mission of zicklin and our our. Sources of philanthropy. We have another one around doors of opportunity, helping our students get into more blue chip organizations in the New York area. So many of our working graduates want to hire our current students, and we want to give them as many ways to find our students as possible. And then the third and final is input into our curriculum by letting us know, as an advisory board, what do they see as the future of work? What are their organizations finding in the workplace that they need new skill sets coming in that we can adjust our curriculum to provide? And it seems like these subcommittees have really lit a fire under the advisory board members, and they want to give us feedback on those three subcommittee topics. And I'm really happy that we've kind of moved them forward in a very similar way to what I heard Sanjay saying. And to me, the approach was in person, getting people talking, but then giving them a task, right, getting the advisory board to actually work for you, so that they don't just, you know, hear how you're doing, they help you do better.

Ken Kring 31:09

So Bruce, we're gonna, we're gonna run short on time. Now this has been really a terrific conversation. Maybe we'll just put one more question in front of you as a request for a summary, sort of looking into the crystal ball, sort of where, where do you see, and what do you see, some of the future looking like, and what will will convince you and others that you know, we've, we've advanced A proposition, and we'll offer to come back and interview again and talk about those achievements. Yeah,

Bruce Weber 31:46

great. Well, I mean, for me, the crystal ball for anybody at a business school, and either in a dean role or faculty role, is just preparing our students for a very complex and volatile world. You know, it's very clear artificial intelligence is going to alter the way professional work gets done. We, we know very well how physical manual labor has been automated over time, but now we're actually automating knowledge work, and that's that's a totally new frontier, and we're going to have to make adjustments in how we teach AI as a complimentary tool to what the faculty member is doing, not a not a substitute, not a competitor, but actually it's got to be a partnership helping the students learn more, learn better using AI. We've got to prepare our students for what AI does not do well, and we know some of the things AI is not going to be able to do well, and we need to double down on that education. And we need to do some. We need to do less of the education that's going to be carried out by AI better and faster than you know we can do. You know what? What happens in doing, in a in a credit approval on a manual basis that's outdated now, you know there's, there's a lot of job tasks out there that are going to become handled by large language models and and artificial intelligence based tools we've got to prepare our students for what's left who's going to be making the determinations of how to deploy AI, how to make the organizational and managerial innovations that allow you to fully leverage what AI can do. I remember, you know, covering the sort of productivity paradox that was so evident with it in the early 90s and finding a couple organizations like Walmart and Dell, where AI had been used to create, you know, a far more productive organization than the average in their industry. And it wasn't simply the the technology tool that created the value it was how the management applied the tool to the work of the organization, you know, optimize the supply chain and and created a much lower cost delivery to the end customer with with higher or or higher satisfaction than they were getting before. So I think that's sort of where business schools are going to be going is figuring out what the the beneficial ways of using it and learn using AI and learning are going to be, and what the organizational transformations will be as AI rolls out further.

Ken Kring 34:38

Well, you've done a wonderful job convincing us that you are anticipating those changes, and we have every confidence that as the changes occur, you'll adapt. You'll adapt to them. Good. Thank you so much. Really great talking with you today. Thanks.

Bruce Weber 34:53

I enjoyed it as well. Really good to share thoughts and ideas with you today. Thank you, Bruce.

Dave Ikenberry 34:59

I. Great.

Ken Kring 35:08

Dave, that was a really interesting discussion. What were your takeaways?

Dave Ikenberry 35:13

I learned so much during that discussion. I have not spent that much time in what is otherwise really crucial demographic segment of the Higher Education marketplace, large, urban, public, socio economically stressed at times, student population being strong in multiple directions. The closest I ever got to that was executive education, where you had people stretched in different directions, but it didn't have this need based component to it. I was really impressed with Bruce's appreciation for that strategic dynamic, and his thoughtfulness in almost thinking about the whole student, if you will. A lot of us talk about supporting the whole student, but how he was intentional in shaping what that package would look like for his demographic. And I, just as I said, I learned a lot, but I'm I gained a lot of respect for how he approaches his work. How did you take it fascinating?

Ken Kring 36:21

How many different types of environments he's been in, and yet how adaptable, compelling in his arguments, you know, in his discussion, and yet very humble and really there to serve the population and the institution that he's that he's su pporting, very inspiring, I thought.

Dave Ikenberry 36:44

What a great conversation.

Ken Kring 36:49

I have very positive thoughts about what comes next at zicklin with his with his very established leadership, yep.

Dave Ikenberry 36:59

Thank you for listening to this episode of Deans Counsel. This show is supported in part by Korn Ferry leaders in executive search. Dean's Council was produced in Boulder, Colorado by Joel Davis of analog digital arts for a catalog of previous shows. Please visit our website at Deans council.com if you have any feedback for us, please let us know by sending an email to feedback@deanscouncil.com and finally, please hit follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast player so you can automatically receive our latest show.