Businessweek Daily Bonus: A Focus on Business Schools

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1:51Carol Massar:Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. This is Bloomberg Business Week Daily. Reporting from the magazine that helps global leaders stay ahead. With insight on the people, companies and trends shaping today's complex economy. Plus, global business, finance and tech news as it happens. The Bloomberg Business Week Daily Podcast. With Carol Masser and Tim Stenevek on Bloomberg Radio. We've said it before, Carol. I think it's fair to say it again. We're kind of all dealing with a lot right now, business leaders especially. I'm going to start doing a yoga class on there. Do you want me to go through the list?

2:32Carol Massar:Yes, please. I got a list. I know you have a list. So there's the ongoing war with Iran and rising energy costs and the volatility that it's brought. The quickly changing global landscape as countries increasingly look inward. Of course, grappling with the rapidly developing AI environment and the tech environment. And many say that calls into question the need for humans to just get the job done. It's a lot coming at us. And it's been amazing how the conversation has evolved just here in 2026. And we're only just starting off April, but there's so much has been coming at us. Jenny Chapman is the dean of Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, as well as the co-director of the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation Management of Organizations.

3:10Carol Massar:Also with us is Dimitra Cassanides. She's Bloomberg Business Week's senior editor who leads Business Week's coverage of business school. This is a really important part of the Business Week family. Welcome, welcome. Jenny, we want to start with you because there is a lot coming at leaders, the world at large. And we think about how you guys are thinking about your student population, coursework. Things are changing rapidly. Give us the macro view on all of this from your perspective. Well, yeah. I mean, even with AI, it's still the case that humans need to determine what matters. And for us to educate leaders who can help prioritize what really matters, I think, is vital.

3:54Carol Massar:So what we're seeing is maybe we were refreshing our curricula every five years. Maybe some of our faculty were in charge every 10 years. But right now, we're literally kind of month to month trying to figure out how we can provide our students with the knowledge and information and technology. That's a lot that they need. It is a lot. It's a lot. But we're finding sort of scrappier ways of doing it. We're not just offering long-term courses, although we just fast-tracked an AI certificate for our students. I know fast-track in university isn't things you usually put in the same sentence. But fast-track in AI makes sense to me.

4:32Carol Massar:Right, right. But we also have consultants coming in to help update all of us, including the faculty, on the latest technology and what would be applicable for their courses that would be useful for the students. Where do alumni come into this? Because you're in Silicon Valley. Oh, yeah. So, you know, there's a lot of alums from the school who've gone off and worked in tech and have sort of stayed in the area. Are they constantly in touch to be like, hey, we're not looking for the graduate of, you know, 2010. What we're looking for in 2026 and 2028 is this. This is what we need. Constantly in touch.

5:05Carol Massar:What are they telling you? Our alums are helping us define exactly the kind of leaders we need to produce and what skills, knowledge and abilities they need to have. And it's that judgment piece. It's that communication piece. It's looking at data and figuring out how to interpret it and what stories it tells. It's asking the right questions. It's leading with values. These things are vitally important. The kind of technical skills, that's going to be a little bit more generic. It's not really going to differentiate leaders. I was going to say that I think that resonates so much right now. Jenny is mentioning it.

5:39All the school leaders we're talking to and all the schools we're talking to. the importance of the alumni networks and the ones from the schools and the programs that have really been able to successfully put people out into the world in ways that they're able to adapt to this very quickly changing environment. This is something that, you know, Jenny, you were just in London, you said, you know, these are leaders on the go, touching base, meeting with their alums, hearing from them, drawing on them and their expertise and their experience. Very typical and very different from even just a few years ago when I first stepped into this role.

6:10and a much slower pace of evolution and change that we saw even four or five years ago. It's so much more sped up today and really trying to keep on top of things in a way that is going to benefit those students that are in those programs and ensure that they can wind up in the kinds of jobs that they want when they finish too. Yeah, Dean Chadman, coming back in here, because if we think about this from consulting, for example, it's a place where a lot of business school graduates typically want to go. technology, certainly in the case of Haas. But there have been, even in recent months, there have been these stories about Anthropics Claude being able to disrupt certain things that's like entry-level employees can do.

6:51I'm wondering how it's changed recruiting and how you're seeing that shift in terms of, okay, this is what companies are looking for, and this is how we're preparing our graduates to go and get jobs as soon as they graduate.

7:04Carol Massar:Well, the career space had been disrupted even before this. There's very little on-campus recruiting anymore. And career is really a self-initiated exploration. And that's how we support our students. Is this everywhere? What does that mean, though? That's crazy. I think it's happening in a lot of places. So what is recruitment, then what is it like? It used to be tables and they'd come in and they'd have representatives from the company. You'd see your students in suits, you'd know it was interview day. Pines would bring little pickles. Yeah, yeah. It's not so much that way anymore. It's really a self-initiated process.

7:41Carol Massar:And our students at Berkeley do particularly well in this context because 20 to 30 % of them, I'd say for the last decade, have been entrepreneurially focused. And in some sense, that is serving them very well right now. because as we see the kind of anxiety over AI, as we see the geopolitical unrest, as we see the layoffs in the tech sector, our students are looking for new opportunities and new problems that they can pursue and really found new initiatives. So if I can humble brag a little bit, well, probably without the humble, to be honest. UC Berkeley as a whole, Haas is a school within UC Berkeley, is the number one university for venture-backed startups.

8:27Carol Massar:as rated by PitchBook for the last three years. And that is not a coincidence. We have invested heavily in helping our students figure out how to generate ideas and drive the founding of actual enterprises. You're doing that because of the environment you're in or because what students are demanding? Why? Like what made you, you know, you're in a unique geographic area that probably plays into it. But I'm just curious. I think all of those reasons were a region that's known for innovation. Yeah. The public mission of the University of California is around access and diverse perspectives. And I think anytime you expose a wide range of people to excellent education, you're going to come up with innovation and great ideas.

9:13They're very fortunate, I think, because of that combination of factors. Because, again, just speaking, stepping back and thinking about what we're seeing with other schools, it's an enviable position. And I think that it's something that more driven by some student interest to you do see other schools now similar, not not recruiting the way we saw it, more self-driven, self-directed push towards entrepreneurship. You know, we've written a lot about this. We've written about if it's not entrepreneurship, it's entrepreneurship by acquisition. We've seen those numbers going up a lot where it's like, I'm going to buy a company by the time I'm done with this MBA program and I'm going to be running that company because of my values, because of my interests, because of the potential of this idea that's for me to change something in the world.

9:53But Demetri, isn't there inherently a tension between education and entrepreneurship in the sense of like you have these examples of great entrepreneurs who never even finished undergraduate? So they come out and say, or even the Peter Thiels now who are like, you don't even need to go to college to be an entrepreneur. We're going to pay you to be a Thiel fellow. So come here, build the business here, get the money, don't waste your time. I mean, you know, there is some tension there, but I think that there's a lot of room for education still, even in that type of situation. The world is very different.

10:21Look at the geopolitical challenges that people, whether they're running their own business or stepping into another business are going to face. There's a lot around how you navigate your way through all of that, that you can use to gain something from, from a program at a business school. Not everybody is like Peter Thiel. And not everybody is able to just go out into the world and say, I don't need that. Your networks are going to be smaller. We have a generation now, the Generation Zs. And what is the newer generation? Jenny, right? They're craving more networking, more groups, more being able to combine with people and come together focused on a problem, an issue, an ideal.

10:58You're excluding a lot of that when you're saying, I don't need school and I don't need to do that. I mean, you know, selfishly, I think that from where I sit and also from my own experience, I feel like I wouldn't say that there's no benefit and there's such a conflict there that we're going to see a world in which we don't need these programs anymore. I don't see that.

11:16Carol Massar:Well, but Jenny, let's go. We've got about two minutes left here. And I just think about the cost of these educations and what students are demanding that, you know, after they pay X amount of dollars, they want to make sure they're going to get X coming out of it or Y coming out of it. So how are you guys maybe shifting in that regard or justifying what the cost is? I mean, the opportunity. And why is it so expensive? The opportunity costs are for real. All the costs are going up, particularly around faculty costs. Faculty are like professional sports. The packages are. Every time they come in, I need to kind of sit down and take a breath.

11:53Carol Massar:Seriously? Like everybody or most? Well, if you have a superstar school, you have superstar faculty. They may be a whole superstar research team that's got to come along with the superstar faculty, right? Yeah, that makes sense. Right. But in terms of what students get back, my personal goal for each of our students is that they have literally a transformational experience when they come to business school, that there's something fundamentally different about them when they leave our doors, which they don't leave all the way because they stay connected as alums. So we were number three for lifetime earnings after MBA.

12:34Carol Massar:Our students on average earn 115 % of what they earned when they entered within three years of graduating. And something like 95 % of our students have the employment that they were seeking within six months of graduation. So, right, it could be a slightly, I think the big effect that we're seeing of some of the AI reductions is that the jobs take a little bit longer to find, but they're still there. Okay. Interesting. Come back soon. Thank you. Please. Dean Jenny Chapman of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. Also, Demetra Kessinidis, Bloomberg Businessweek senior editor who leads Businessweek's coverage of business schools.

13:15Check out her entire team's coverage on Bloomberg Terminal and at Bloomberg.com.

13:19Carol Massar:Yes, and Bloomberg Businessweek known for a lot of things, but especially its coverage of business goals. Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Businessweek Daily coming up after this.

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14:53Carol Massar:You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week daily podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from two to five Eastern. Listen on Apple CarPlay and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business app or watch us live on YouTube. We talk a lot about the challenging climate for business leaders right now, higher energy prices, geopolitical uncertainty, the effect of AI on productivity, and the labor force. The list just goes on. It's a lot that is coming at certainly business leaders, anybody who's running an organization. Having said that, it's also a challenging time to lead a business school right now because you're dealing with all of the same stuff.

15:28Carol Massar:And we'll hear more about that in just a moment. Plus, helping those students who, in many cases, paid a lot of money for the education get good jobs. And I think you have to do that against, yes, what's happening geopolitically, but also against disruptive technology. I'm thinking about artificial intelligence. Elouique Payrash is one of those leaders. He's been a professor of economics at HEC Paris for nearly 25 years, dean and director general of HEC Paris since 2020. He joins us here in the Bloomberg Interactive Brokers studios along with Demetra Kessinidis, senior editor of Bloomberg Businessweek.

15:57She leads business school coverage for the magazine. It's good to have you both with us. Thank you. It's good to be here. Thank you. Welcome, welcome. Dean Parash, we're going to get to why you're here in New York and sort of what it takes to actually run a business school, a global business school. But you have a background in economics. I want to just talk to you about this environment that we were, that really is the backdrop for everything that we do three hours a day on Bloomberg Business Week daily. Tariff uncertainty, COVID, you led the school through those things. Now, wars in the Middle East, Ukraine, all the things we talked about up at the top.

16:30What's it like? complicated as you say in a word you know i mean you know leaders need to navigate uncertainty so uh that's what we're trying to do right so uh but what about the jobs part of this and and that's the thing that i think has a lot of people not just in business school but also in any part of the workforce right now we're trying to figure out like meta platforms today cutting 10 percent of staff because they want to be more efficient the subtext there is we're going to invest a lot in AI. We're going to use these AI tools internally. How is that part of the conversation? You know, AI in future work is a hot topic in Europe as it is in the US.

17:08I think it's more extreme in the US, like always. You know, I read the news, you know, jobs for the young graduates. It's complicated in the US. It's not as complicated in Europe so far. So when we look at our students, they have several proposals and they still get jobs. So the U.S. is always a couple of years ahead of what's happening in Europe, but it's not as extreme in Europe today. But I'm curious, you were here this week meeting with folks from alums. And what do you hear from your alums just broadly? I mean, you don't have to reveal anything specific, but do you get a sense from them? If they're alums and they're here in the U.S., presumably they're working here in the U.S., I mean, is there a sense of things sort of scaling back or scaling down or hiring, slowing, whether it's for MBAs or otherwise?

18:05I feel like that's probably something that you are getting some sense of. Yeah, it's not all what I'm hearing from them. I mean, they all talk about the dynamism and the level of ambition here is really high. I mean, you know, compared to Europe sometime, you know, they're very excited about being here. So we had a fundraising dinner yesterday. And that's why you're in town, right?

18:31Carol Massar:To do some fundraising? I mean, part of it, right? I mean, at Ash-O-C, we have, you know, 130 different nationalities, U.S. students represent. I mean, the six largest community on campus. Yeah. So, you know, when you are in the top 10 nationality on campus, it's normal that the dean comes and just come and meet. Go ahead, Dimitri. Oh, sorry. I'm sorry. The U.S. students represent the sixth largest group of – oh, I'm actually surprised. Yeah, we have 10 % of our faculty are from the U.S. So, yeah, I mean, it might be – and it's growing. It's going up. So it looks like we're an interesting option for you.

19:11Carol Massar:That doesn't surprise me. You know, I have a daughter who did a year over in London for just her undergrad, but is thinking about for her master's going overseas again. And I think increasingly we have conversations with folks who have kids who are coming out of high school that are looking overseas for schools and the same thing for master's programs. I have an anecdote to throw at both of you, and I'm curious about your response here. Just an anecdote again, but I was having dinner with a classmate from business school last week who is working again, but he spent a few months having a really tough time finding work.

19:43He described the job market to me as icy. He mentioned a classmate of ours who's been out of work for 18 months at this point, which was pretty shocking to me. But he said it's all about low hire, low fire. He used that term that we have all the time. You talk about that a lot, right? You know, that economists use with us, that observers of the job market use with us. Is that something that you're seeing? So we're not seeing it, again, in Europe so far. What about for loans here in the U.S. or people who leave Paris to come to the U.S. to try to get a job? So I think there are few students who leave the campus, I should say, and come to the U.S.

20:18to look for a job. I mean, they'll be sponsored by their company to come. So they have that guarantee. They have that guarantee, and they might leave the job and set up a company at some point. But otherwise, I mean, they will come less.

20:35So I think it's a different environment somehow. how, but everybody, uh, everybody's talking about agents here, you know, all the time, you know, I'm managing, I don't know, five, 10 different agents. It's, um, it's, it's a slightly different story still in Europe. I will say one thing also, um, Eloik, I don't know, but my sense of HEC is among the schools in Europe that there is a lot more, um, you know, like we don't actually rank your school, but we write about your school. And we've typically written about entrepreneurs that have emerged from the school right away, like graduating, starting the business.

21:10And that's a trend we're seeing more and more at schools here, but it's been a pretty consistent trend there. As to your question, though, what we're seeing, I mean, I think that we've been in the midst of a lot of much more U.S.-based reporting on the finances recently. Now we're getting into job stories that we're working on. And it does feel like it's just a very challenging moment right now. And we had a dean on a couple weeks ago, right? Jenny Chapman, who is here from Haas. And we talked about how the recruiting has also changed. And there are all these different factors that at least in the U.S.