Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, founded in 1900, is the birthplace of the modern MBA and the first business school in history. The question is how Tuck is adapting to what is becoming the buzzword of the financial world in this millennium -- globalization.
Although many top-ranked business schools including Harvard, Columbia and Wharton are creating new campuses in Asia and Europe, Tuck is staying put in Hanover.
Although Tuck School Dean Paul Danos did not mention any possibilities of Tuck having a campus abroad in the near future, he explained that Tuck has multiple programs for its students in foreign nations.
"The world of business is completely global, and our students have to understand how all these markets work," Danos said. "We are training business leaders who are going to run global businesses."
Tuck offers its students two major types of programs to provide for an international experience.
Tuck has exchange programs with about 25 universities worldwide, including the London Business School, IESE in Barcelona, WHU in Germany, and the International University of Japan.
The other program is called the International Consulting Project, in which students are contracted by various firms to go for one month to an emerging economy and work on problems and issues over there.
The International Consulting Project is a highly functional way of training future graduates of Tuck. Students have an opportunity to produce work that is of interest to firms, since the studies are requested by the companies themselves.
This year, approximately 90 of the 200 students at Tuck applied for the International Consulting Program, an increase from approximately 60 last year.
At the inception of the program, a few years ago, only around 35 students expressed a desire to participate.
Typically, students form groups of five, and work together on the same project. After they return, they write out reports and analyze what they observed, and the relevance of their observations to their project.
According to Danos, one of the more publicized and controversial projects was a study on whether Nike pays its Indonesian workers enough to survive without great hardship.
The students found that contrary to popular opinion, although the wages of the Nike workers were low by American standards, by Indonesian standards, the workers not only had enough to survive, but also had money left over for savings.
The study received much media attention, and several of the Tuck students involved were interviewed by members of national press organizations.
Lack of international experience is not a problem for Tuck. The average age of a Tuck student is 28, and by then, most people have spent a fair degree of time in countries other than the U.S.
In addition, approximately one third of the incoming class this year are international students. This simply means that Tuck students get an international experience even if they never participate in any of these programs, due to class interaction itself.
However, as Danos said, "their opportunities are global, and so their education must be as well."
"In the future, most businesses won't have a national focus, and will purely be working off a global perspective," Danos said. "Firms will be thinking worldwide."
Danos said that business schools must work to reflect this pivotal change from national to international. "The companies are looking at everything in a global way, and the students must have that mindset," he said.
