The effects of curricular and institutional changes on student-faculty and student-student relations at the Sloan School of Management

Abstract

This study tests hypotheses posed in a 1983 article regarding the Sloan School of Management and the Harvard Business School (HBS). In this article, Van Maanen (1983) states that student-faculty and student-student relations in the two MBA programs differ due to their contrasting institutional and curricular characteristics. Subsequently, the Sloan School of Management adopted some of the same characteristics found at HBS. By adopting a cohort system, eliminating the master's thesis as a degree requirement, increasing its program size, and placing greater emphases on student in-class participation and faculty teaching quality relative to research production, the Sloan School has begun to resemble HBS structurally. Through interviews with MBA students, faculty members, and administrators as well as observations of classes and analysis of documents including course syllabi, this study attempts to determine whether the Sloan culture resembles that found in the literature on HBS. The results show that Sloan's culture looks more similar to that at HBS in some ways. Most importantly, the implementation of the cohort system has increased the sense of cohesiveness among students. In this manner, the Sloan culture has begun to resemble that at HBS. The more dramatic effects on student-faculty and student-student relations that are attributed to the HBS cohort, however, have not begun to appear at Sloan. Nor have the increased emphases on student in-class participation and faculty teaching quality had the same effects at Sloan as they have at HBS.