B School Confidential

RICE UNIVERSITY, HOUSTON

In the early nineties, faced with a small enrollment and no national ranking, Rice University officials decided they had a choice: They could either fix the Jones Graduate School of Management or close it down. Following an external audit that pronounced the MBA program not great but still pretty good, they opted for the former and put out the word that they were looking for Mr.--or Ms.--Fix It. Enter Gilbert Whitaker, a Rice alumnus who spent nearly a dozen years as the dean of the business school and later the provost at the University of Michigan. During Whitaker's tenure at Michigan, he helped propel its B school into the top tier of the nation's MBA programs. Now he hopes to do the same for his alma mater.

While the Jones School has long been a popular option for Texans who plan to work in the state or the region after graduation, it has had almost no profile nationally. One reason is that until 1998 it lacked accreditation, which kept it off the annual U.S. News rankings. (Business Week, however, has recognized the Jones School on its unranked listing of runner-up MBA programs.) "The Jones School has just been languishing in terms of attention," says Whitaker, who made accreditation his first priority when he arrived in 1997. Beyond that, he wanted to step up the quality and visibility of the program so that it could compete for students and recruiters with top-ranked schools.

Central to that bid for vaunted status is a new curriculum called Action Learning, the Jones School's version of real-world experience. First-year students now spend the last five weeks of their second semester at one of 21 Houston-based companies, including BMC Software and Compaq, where they work in small groups as unpaid consultants tackling real--as opposed to hypothetical--business problems. Students are also expected to master "soft skills" like communication, leadership, and teamwork. And there is a whole slate of new courses for them to enroll in, covering topics from effective negotiating and partnership building to communicating with hostile audiences.

Other changes are in store too: The average class size will increase to 180 from 132 in hopes of diversifying its student body and providing more job candidates for recruiters who come to campus, and the number of full-time faculty will go up to 45 from 32. Best of all, the university will break ground next summer on a new facility for the Jones School, roughly tripling its existing space. Such improvements will surely make a difference, but things take time, of course. Even in Whitaker's capable hands, it took nearly a decade before Michigan was recognized as a top-tier program. Rice MBAs should expect a similar timetable. "It's a building process," Whitaker says, "so it will take five to ten years."