Direct from the Dean: LeBow’s Frank Linnehan
Stats and rankings have their place, but when you really want to know what makes a school tick, it helps to hear it in the dean’s own words. In this new series we’re sitting down with deans and other top officials at schools throughout the MetroMBA network and asking them to tell us what makes their school stand out.
To start things off, we spoke this week with Frank Linnehan, who currently holds the reigns at Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business in Philadelphia. Serving as interim dean for the past year and half, Linnehan first arrived at Drexel in 1997 straight from Temple, where he’d just finished his PhD. About seven years ago, LeBow convinced him to join the administration, where he’s been ever since.
Before his shift into academia, Linnehan put in some solid time on the industry side. He logged 11 years with GE Capital, followed by another six in banking. It’s a mix of business know-how and administrative expertise that makes him a perfect interim dean while LeBow conducts its search for a permanent one over the next year.
Whether you want to take just a couple of courses at a time or knock out the entire MBA as part of a new 15-month accelerated program, LeBow touts that it has options for every student. In the interview that follows, Linnehan lays them all out for you. He also talks up Drexel’s focus on experiential learning and what that looks like at the MBA level. And he shares his excitement about the school’s new digs, which open to students this fall. Check it out.
MetroMBA: What’s the one area of your MBA program that you wish prospective applicants knew more about?
Frank Linnehan: It is actually the diversity of the programs we offer. We have an executive MBA, which is part time and meets on the weekends. That’s for our more experienced students, who are generally sponsored by their employers. Then we also have our MBA program that meets in a cohorted fashion, which is to say the students go through the entire two years together. And then we have a part-time MBA program that is self-paced. So students can go in and out, take one course a term, two courses a term—it’s really up to you about how fast you complete the program. And now there is also a new full-time 15-month program with a three-month work component.
I should also note that for our full-time programs our landing rate in terms of jobs is 92 percent within three months of graduation, thanks in great part to the efforts of our Career Services Center. Obviously, that is very important these days. Prospective applicants should know that the Career Services Center is not a placement center that “places” you in a job. Rather, it is a center in which you develop job search skills and learn how to position yourself so you will be desirable in the marketplace. Because that is what the job market is all about. It really is about developing the skills to find the right types of positions and uncovering those positions.
MetroMBA: In the Philadelphia Metro area, what sets Drexel University’s graduate management education offerings apart from those of other schools? Basically, if someone is looking to go to business school in Philadelphia, why should they look here?
FL: It is really our emphasis on experiential education. Drexel is known for this, and we have taken it into our grad program. We have built-in consulting courses, study abroad opportunities as part of the MBA. We are also starting a brand new program in the fall called our “C-Suite Co-op Program.”
Before, our full-time offerings were a one-year and a two-year program. We have now combined those into a 15-month program with a three-month executive level co-op built in. Among the companies that we have commitments from are SAP, Urban Outfitters, World Trade Center, Apple, eBay, Cisco, and Jack In the Box (where one of our alums is the president). We will bring 30 students into the C-Suite Co-op Program, and we already have 14 of these jobs lined up. Students will compete for a chance to interview with these companies, the companies will select their candidate and that person will work for three months full time and interact at the executive level.
This isn’t to teach them how to be CEOs when they graduate but to give them an opportunity to see problems from the executive suite. CEOs, CFOs, chief marketing officers have different constituents they have to consider in their decision making. So at eBay and Cisco, students will work with chief marketing officers, at Apple they will be with the person in charge of all retail. The participating companies will be giving us job descriptions in the fall – some will look for tech skills, some for finance. We will identify top students in each of those areas through business competitions, faculty recommendations and other means and then provide two to three candidates for each company to interview. We have been working on this project for two years and are really very excited about it. Right now we have 13 signed commitments and we received two more just last week that are still in the process of being finalized.
MetroMBA: What is the greatest single advantage to going to business school in Philadelphia? How does LeBow prepare students specifically for careers in Philadelphia?
FL: The greatest advantage is that this [Philadelphia] is a highly competitive MBA market. In order for us to attract high quality students we have to have high quality programs. Given the city competition, we are constantly having to revise our offerings to make our program the right fit for students we think will flourish at Drexel.
Obviously, we also have a wonderful business community here in Philadelphia. We work with them closely. They help up identify consulting opportunities for students, advise us on the curriculum.
But it really does come back to the competition. If you are the only game in town the motivation isn’t that strong to make your program high quality, but in this market, you can’t afford not to.
MetroMBA: The Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) movement seems to be gaining momentum at many business schools. What role does online education play in today’s MBA offerings at LeBow? How do you see that changing over the next five years?
FL: We have had an online MBA for more than 10 years. We were one of the first to offer one. We begin that program with a week-long campus experience to build the student community, so they know each other when they go back and take courses online. After this initial interaction, students can elect to work together on an online consulting project or go on an international trip together. This year, as part of our online MBA, we worked with a local theater company to build and redesign its brand and marketing strategy.
We also offer online courses in all our face-to-face programs. So if a student wants to take a course online, he or she can do that. Our goal is really ensuring the quality of the online experience. We have learned a lot over the past 10 years, so our offering is really the state of the art at this point. Some students want just the online experience because of the convenience, job demands. I think it is important to have that online learning experience because that is the way to learn at work, too.
MetroMBA: When you became dean, what was LeBow best known for? At the conclusion of your tenure, what would you like it to be best known for?
FL: I don’t think being a dean is about leaving a legacy. The dean’s job is really to make sure that the college continues to upgrade and offer as high quality an academic experience for its students as it can and that we offer programs that will help students’ careers. We could offer a program for which the job market isn’t very strong, but our focus really needs to be on identifying areas where there is going to be strong job market growth and preparing students for those job areas.
Drexel has always been known for its experiential education. It’s what we do best and what I would like us to continue to be known for. Along the way, we have introduced three new concentrations in the MBA. We just introduced a business analytics concentration, because analytics is so important today. We have a healthcare concentration, because the employment opportunities in healthcare in Philadelphia are strong. And, of course, we have an entrepreneurship concentration because of the continued job growth opportunities there.
MetroMBA: What is the one upcoming development or change at LeBow that you are most excited about and why?
FL: At Drexel it’s our new College of Business building. It opens in the fall – in September. It has 12 stories, 177,000 square feet of space and state-of-the-art technology. Most classrooms will have video conferencing. We now do courses that are video-conferenced to places ranging from India, to Sacramento, CA, to expose our students to students and industry elsewhere.
We have been in temporary space for about five years, so the move to the new building has been eagerly anticipated. It will be the first time that all of our faculty are together under the same roof. It’s all a part of Drexel’s overall transformation.
The new building will be named after our benefactor’s wife, Gerri C. LeBow, who passed away about a year and a half ago. We actually created a contest last year for students and faculty to develop proposals for using the technology in the new building in innovative ways. Students could download the actual building plans and submit plans for teaching using technology. One of the winning ideas was in finance, and another in marketing. One student, David Hunt, working with two professors submitted a proposal that will allow students in our undergraduate Dragon Fund investment project (they decide on investments for $1 million of our endowment funds) to present their findings to analysts via video-conferencing at the same time that they present to their professors in the classroom. We really had some great ideas that came through this competition, and the top team won $25,000.
Another top idea involves learning how to do focus groups in our behavioral lab in the building. So we will have market research companies do their focus groups here in our labs, and students will observe and analyze and write reports.
MetroMBA: Any closing thoughts or things to add?
FL: Our success really is about individual attention to the students, meeting their needs from a scheduling standpoint and maintaining high quality across all of our programs, with real-world applications.
