Purdue University Board of Trustees Chairman Mike Berghoff will speak about the new Purdue Business School at the Purdue President’s Council dinner in September. Berghoff is an undergraduate in the business school, and four of Purdue’s 10 trustees graduated from the business school. Courtesy photo
To put Purdue University’s big plans to expand and revamp its business education into context, think about it in four big buckets: David Hamels, dean of the Krannert School of Management.
The first is Purdue’s long-standing philosophy of “excellence,” the idea that to have a real impact on the world, you need to get enough people to implement it. In this regard, the business school plans to further increase student enrollment (up 33 percent at the undergraduate level since 2019), hire more faculty and staff (up 50 percent over the past decade), and double the size of its facilities. About four years.
The second bucket is to continue the focus on STEM-oriented degrees, which is based on its success Integrated Business and Engineering (IBE) degree started in the fall of 2021. The third is the center of the Purdue Cornerstone Program as a way of thinking about the classical liberal approach to business problems.
Finally, Purdue’s new business school, as it’s now called, greatly expands its experiential and project-based learning, something all students can deeply engage with, beyond the top 10 percent of stars. Consider undergraduate research opportunities, corporate consulting, and more.
“We want these to be things that all of our students experience,” Hummels says Poets&Quants.
The business school is back
David Hummels
On September 23, Purdue He announced his next big move. A reimagined, revamped business program with a new name: the Purdue School of Business. The announcement was the last major initiative of university president Mitch Daniels’ decade-long tenure, though discussions have been going on for several years. Mung Chiang, Purdue University’s president-elect, dean of engineering and executive vice president for strategic initiatives, will take over at Purdue University effective January 1, 2023.
The rebranding comes with a major university investment along with a major fundraising effort that will likely lead to a rebranding of the program as a whole in the coming months. Graduate programs will continue to use the Krannert moniker, Hamels said.
The new school will continue to build on the success of the Capital Feathers series, a Advanced business analysis programthe new Dean V. White Real Estate Finance Programm, and a 10-million dollar gift from Marshall and Susan Larson for the creation Larsen Leaders Academy.
The analogy I’m using, and one that I like very much, is if you look at the Fortune 500 when Krannert was founded in 1962, which consisted of steel firms, oil firms, plastics and automobiles, and industrial companies. conglomerates. Very few of the firms in the top ranks of the Fortune 500 today even existed in 1962,” says Hummels.
“So when we think about preparing students, the challenge is that we don’t know what the most important organizations will look like 20 or 30 or 40 years from now. We’re preparing students for industries that don’t even exist. The answer to doing that is preparing students to be problem solvers who can work between STEM and business fields.”
Poets&Quants Talk to Dean Hummels to learn more about the major changes coming to business education at Purdue University. Our conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.
Purdue University Krannert School of Management
What is the timeline for this planned release? Has the name been officially changed or is this the start of a longer release?
The Krannert name we used was originally associated with an endowment in 1962 to the Graduate School of Industrial Management, and never covered the undergraduate programs or the major endowment. In the mid-80s, the dean at the time decided, for simplicity’s sake, to call everything Krannert. So, although technically speaking, our undergraduates don’t have Krannert management degrees, we now use them.
The way this works is that Kranert’s graduate programs and then the undergraduate programs will be housed in a comprehensive business school. There may be some additional designations for both general school and undergraduate programs, and I suspect it will be resolved sometime around the February deadline.
So will the graduate programs still be under the Krannert School of Management?
yes. 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. Tell us more about this.
The first part of this is that we have been able to grow significantly in our enrollment and our staff and faculty. Faculty headcount has increased by 50% over the past ten years, and our undergraduate enrollment has grown from 2,400 to 3,100 over the past few years. Moving forward, we will take undergraduate enrollments up to 4,000 majors, and our goal is to have one in five Purdue students from outside the business school graduate with a minor with us. This is on the order of 2,000 other students.
Implementation of expansion and renovation plans for the new Purdue Business School. (Example by Airs Saint-Gross)
As for graduate programs, when they were fully residential, they were something on the order of 400 students per year. Now that we offer online programs, we have about 1,100 to 1,200 graduate students. Our goal is to take that north of 2,000 students.
So if you think about all that enrollment growth, we’re going to add a tremendous amount of staff and faculty. What we love to talk about at Purdue is excellence in scale: If you have a great program that serves 10 people, you have no impact on the world.
The facility will retain much of that activity, but will focus on modern active learning classrooms, innovative labs, many unique spaces that allow interaction – student-to-student and student-to-faculty, as well as communication with external partners. Other departments on campus or corporate partners.
And what is the timeline for this facility expansion?
In last month’s announcement, we mentioned that during Mitch Daniels’ 10 years as Purdue’s president, we initiated several major initiatives that we call Purdue’s Big Moves. These have been impressive expansions around things like data science and engineering, plant science, transformative learning and so on. In some ways, this is the last major step President Daniels will take in his ten-year tenure.
In the timeline, we hope to have the new facility online by the end of 2026. So some faculty and staff growth enrollments will have to be a little tied to the new location. But, I’m telling you, if we have the same amount of growth in student enrollments that we’ve had in the last few years, we’ll probably hit those numbers in four to five years.
Next page: How Purdue’s School of Business Fareed National Enrollment Trends
