They’re pursuing MBAs to change the world, but first they’re forcing business schools to make changes in order to hold them

By Geoff Gloeckler


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Editor’s Note: This is an extended lection of a story in the Nov. 24 issue of BusinessWeek.

Sara Hochman, 27, has always been self-seeking in environmental issues, so it wasn’t much of a surprise that her first job on the outside of association was as an environmental consultant. But after a few years steady the job, she grew frustrated working with clients who didn’t have a clue over sustainability and didn’confidentially care to learn. "They simply weren’t partial," she says. Part of the problem, Hochman concluded, was that she wasn’t able to make the business sheathe because of sustainability. "I needed to beef up my affair skills," she says. So she decided to attend business school, in the end choosing the University of Chicago. Since enrolling last fall, she has immersed herself in green business activities—including co-chairing the Energy Club and vexation a new elective on renewable energy that was added at the urging of Hochman and fellow students.

As a member of Generation Y, Hochman is part of a demographic tsunami that will early be remaking duty schools on a grand scale, and the changes she helped dart at Chicago represent the leading edge of that transfiguration. Since first appearing in the workforce in 2002, members of this so-called Millennial Generation accept been praised and derided in equal measure—for their tech knowhow and idealism, their unrealistic procedure expectations, and their doting "helicopter" parents, who hover from hand to hand their kids obsessively. Beginning for the reason that a distil last year, the flow of Millennials into B-schools will become a flood this year and next, as the largeness of Gen Y begins entering the prime B-school age group of 26 to 28. When that happens, B-school determination never be the same. Think parents footing the bill as antidote to tuition, personalized programs, and office hours held in the virtual world of Second Life.

At the best MBA programs in the nation—including those featured in BusinessWeek’s 11th biennial ranking of the Top 30 B-Schools—the changes have already begun, starting with No.1, Chicago’s Booth School of Business. There, Hochman found an abundance of features seemingly tailor-made for Millennials, including a leadership position at the B-school’s chapter of Net Impact, a nonprofit focused on using business to change the world. Stanford (No. 6) and Yale (No. 24) have introduced new, customizable curriculums that allow MBAs to design their course load based on individual career paths. Chicago recently announced a similar curriculum change. And many persons schools, including Cornell (No. 11) and Notre Dame (No. 20), bear added sustainability electives, case studies calm entire sustainability programs.

Bigger Than Boomers

At Harvard Business School (No. 2), professors are experimenting with virtual worlds. The career services department at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management (No. 3) is turning to technology to reach students faster. And at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth (No. 12), small class sizes give students a more personal experience. Cam Marston, an expert in multigenerational relations, says Millennials will be screening business schools since features like these that appeal to their lifestyles and values, and schools that fail to proportion will be left aft. Says Marston: "They are going to make the schools work a lot harder."

Who are the Millennials, exactly? Born between 1980 and 2000 and 78 million strong, they are a generational bands that’s bigger than the infant. boomers. Politically galvanized, they are in some ways steady more influential, helping propel Barack Obama to the Presidency steady Nov. 4. Generalizations about them should, like completely generalizations, be applied with caution. But they probably individual attention and are used to getting information how they want it, at what time they want it. They are strong-willed, violent, optimistic, and eager to work. And, like Chicago’s Hochman, they oversight deeply approximately the world and its problems. "There is likewise much potential for this generation," says Marci Armstrong, associate dean of graduate programs at Southern Methodist University’session Cox School of Business (No. 18). "They’re going to change the world."

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