Coping

The consequences of the coronavirus epidemic for business schools and management faculties were felt almost cataclysmically in March 2020. The difficulties seemed to accumulate. Many Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) and Graduate Record Examination (GRE) test centers had closed in many parts of the world as of February and March, which made it practically impossible to obtain these important test scores for applications. International travel became problematic or even impossible, which posed a serious obstacle for organizing international seminars, learning expeditions, student exchanges, and so forth, as well as for the recruitment of international students. And very soon afterward, in the specific case of the United States, visa problems for foreign students added to the surrounding difficulties. Thus, the months of March and April showed themselves to be not just difficult in and of themselves with the closure of campuses, one after the other, but also the bearers of difficulties for the future.

The adaptability of the management education sector, when faced with these difficulties, has been remarkable. Most high-level schools extended their final rounds of admissions or added additional ones. They lowered, and in some cases even did away with, their requirements in terms of GMAT and GRE test scores. The effect on the number of applications for the following year was significant (Byrne, Reference Byrne2020c; GMAC, 2020) – and all the more so because it was coupled with another unexpected factor: the COVID-19 epidemic, by causing the volume of business and economic growth to decline, reduced the promotion possibilities for young managers, as well as the number of interesting jobs in the labor market.

The labor-market situation, coupled with the easing of admission conditions for business schools, has led to a sharp increase in the number of applications in master’s programs (Byrne, Reference Byrne2020a; Moules and Jack, Reference Moules and Jack2020), which has even greater significance because in the previous 3 years, business schools, and in particular MBAs, had been faced with a regular decline in the number of applications.

This increase in the number of candidates was marked on all continents; it has been particularly spectacular in the United States, where despite visa restrictions, some schools have seen an increase of more than 50 percent in the number of applications for their MBAs (Ethier, Reference Ethier2020c).

These elements indicate that management education institutions have, in many respects, remarkably adapted to the new constraints created by the coronavirus epidemic and have succeeded, for example (also taking advantage of socially favorable circumstances), in increasing the number of applicants and turning around the somber situation that had been looming in which they would have suffered a decrease in the number of applications for the fourth consecutive year.

This observation must, however, be supplemented by an examination of the way in which management education institutions have reacted to this increase in applications. In the preamble of the analysis of how the increase in applications was managed, it is useful to underscore that with a few exceptions, which we will examine, the reactions of management education institutions have been remarkably similar on the six continents. In general, these institutions have not resisted the temptation to maintain an equivalent number of enrolled students as the previous year or even to increase the number of admitted students.

However, we must distinguish the case of management faculties belonging to universities, in particular public ones, from the case of business schools, where a significant portion of the budget comes from very high tuition fees. As regards management faculties, faced with an influx of candidates, they have tended to fill their classes as much as possible, taking into account the limit that their supervisory authority almost always sets for them.

Some business schools have gone much further in the same direction by increasing the number of successful applicants and, in many cases, recruiting classes of new students for the 2020–21 academic year that were significantly larger than the previous year.

Internationally, it appears that many business schools have followed the same pattern in the admissions sequence of MBA students and, more generally, in business schools. As schools around the world became aware of the negative potential of the COVID-19 epidemic in March–April 2020, they were led to try to adapt their admission requirements, both in terms of deadlines and dates to present applications and, often, in terms of the content requirements of the applications themselves, be it by waiving or postponing test results or even academic requirements.

From the month of May, they became aware of the fact that, far from declining, the number of candidates was increasing. Therefore, in many cases, the cohorts starting at the end of August/September/October 2020 and in January 2021 are larger than in previous years. The reasons that led educational management institutions to accept more students than in previous years stem from the particular context of the COVID-19 epidemic, which has forced them to switch to distance education. Peter Johnson, assistant dean of the full-time MBA program and admissions at the Haas School in Berkeley, in an interview given to the Poets & Quants website, sums up perfectly the logic followed by many institutions: “In a normal year, if we were fully in-person, we wouldn’t be able to have a class this large” (Ethier, Reference Ethier2020b, para. 3).

Schools have therefore often freed themselves from referring to the physical and educational limits that they would have had to follow if they had not switched to distance learning. Peter Johnson’s statement implicitly means that schools have given up on the idea that they could go back to face-to-face learning if the situation improves on the coronavirus front in the months to come.

This observation necessitates two comments. First of all, it implies that a major shift in the teaching at business schools has taken place, even if this is not clearly stated and is not necessarily something schools have become explicitly aware of; schools are putting themselves in a situation of no return, at least in the short term, with regard to face-to-face education. This transition to virtual education will have enormous implications in terms of pedagogy, relationships with students, the use of premises, and school policies for investment in equipment, among other areas.

Second, the sphere of management education is faced with a major contradiction. Indeed, it seems that there is a consensus that distance education needs to make huge strides to be as good as face-to-face education. Thus, the numerous articles and declarations emphasizing the merits of hybrid education and calling for its rapid generalization constitute just as many positions according to which purely virtual education is not a panacea. However, to the extent that hybrid education includes a not-insignificant share of face-to-face teaching, the large number of students in this year’s classes would require huge investments and major decisions to be made in order for it to be possible. Thus, schools seem to have put themselves in a system of paradoxical injunctions where their actions are out of step with their real situations and their stated objectives. They spread the message that it would be desirable to return to at least a small amount of face-to-face education, all the while incurring situations where this option is no longer possible.

This type of behavior raises another question, especially for the more reputable schools. Indeed, by putting themselves in a position to take the risk of suffering degradation of teaching, schools expose themselves to having their contributions questioned, in particular, in relation to lessons offered for a lower cost at more recent and less prestigious institutions that, from their conception, had turned to the virtual. It seems that schools are counting on the fact that their names, their reputations, and their branding will continue to support the demand for their degrees. Although this reasoning is undoubtedly correct in the short term, the sustainability of this type of behavior in the long term is problematic. The many ambitious new projects mentioned in the introduction, which are at the same time marginal compared to traditional academic education and totally supported by teaching on the internet, expect to be able to create different but effective branding that will put classic business schools in a difficult position.

In addition, the need to maintain an excellent educational level, pedagogically speaking, is therefore emerging in a precise and urgent manner for schools. Technological solutions have been sought in the context of the various lockdowns to try to avoid prohibiting the normal reception of students on campuses, doing “the same thing, but via Zoom” and risking offering students a degraded MBA experience. As a result, schools have tried to find online techniques to fill this gap. For example, the MIP Politecnico di Milano in Italy adopted FLEXA, an e-learning platform developed in partnership with Microsoft. FLEXA’s machine-learning technology enables the creation of a personal online study program for each student based on data from online sources, which enables students to pursue effective learning. Another example is Prendo Simulations, which creates business simulations for schools like INSEAD, Wharton, and Kellogg. These simulations are specially developed for home students during quarantine (Novellis, Reference Novellis2020).

Although distance learning has undergone a huge acceleration as a result of the COVID-19 epidemic, school management is focusing on the acquisition of equipment, leaving educational innovation to the initiative of teachers in the field, who are now facing significant pressure. The need for pedagogical change is felt enormously in almost all institutions because they feel that distance teaching cannot be reduced to simply doing the same thing as face-to-face teaching, only mediated by a camera.

Thus, this need for change and the adjustment of pedagogy puts significant pressure on teachers, who are on the front lines when it comes to the adaptation of institutions to the constraints induced by COVID-19.

After two decades during which the centrality of questions of internationalization, accreditation, and so forth led to a focus on the deans of business schools, COVID-19 represents a return of the figure of the professor as a central element in the lives of business schools.

This also has consequences for the central approaches and concepts in the world of management education; where focusing on the figure of the dean had led us to focus on strategy, its concepts, and its rationality, the return of the professor’s visible centrality could, as a result of the modes of adaptation the professor bears, well cause a renewed interest in practical wisdom, iterative adjustments, and the importance given to experience.

The Work of Mourning

In the description of coping, we considered the case of institutions that believed the crisis caused by COVID-19 was not sustainable and that we had to live with it, to cope with it, for as long as it lasted, as best as possible, by not refraining from seeking the effects of opportunity.

Faced with a difficult situation or with a loss, the attitude of submitting to the work of mourning is seen as an alternative to coping. The work of mourning consists of admitting that the loss that has occurred, that the disastrous change that has taken place is irreversible, which determines both behavior and subsequent actions. Similarly, to face up to the coronavirus crisis, some management education establishments have reacted in a way that is close to the work of mourning by integrating the idea that the consequences of this crisis were destined to last into their decisions as well as their activities.

Therefore, in opposition to the behaviors induced by coping, which consist of seeking short-term benefits even at the cost of long-term risks, it is here a question of admitting and taking into account the lasting nature of the effects of COVID-19 on management education institutions, even if doing so entails short-term costs and constraints.

An excellent example of this attitude is represented by the decision of certain schools, such as INSEAD and the Harvard University School of Business, to decrease the number of students recruited in the fall of 2020. INSEAD decided to decrease the number of accepted students by more than a third, although the school had a record number of applicants. Likewise, Harvard recruited the smallest incoming class in decades, with 732 students, compared to 938 the previous year (Byrne, Reference Byrne2020b).

The management of both INSEAD and Harvard thus considered the fact that in order to develop hybrid education, it was necessary to account for the fact that any face-to-face education would occupy more space on their premises, which made it necessary to reduce the number of students. Maintaining the same number of students as in previous years was tantamount to choosing entirely distance education.

One of the reasons for the relatively small number of students studying in the fall 2020 cohort is that Harvard Business School has given all admitted students the option to defer their enrollment for 1 or 2 years without any penalty while not compensating for these postponements by admitting a greater number of wait-listed candidates. In making this choice, the Harvard Business School recognized that face-to-face studies better corresponded to the very high Harvard standard and that this was a right for accepted students. The leaders of the institution were faced with a particular challenge that consisted of preserving classroom teaching, which was necessary for the institution’s famous “case-study method.” However, COVID-19 restrictions prevented students from completely filling classrooms.

As well, Harvard Business School accepted that in order to maintain the constituent elements of its identity (the case-study method, the quality of teaching, etc.), it was necessary to mourn financial income.

It should also be noted that Harvard has also already indicated that if the world health situation returned to normal, it would recruit a record number of students at the start of the 2021 and 2022 school years. This is specific to a work of mourning that consists, above all, of recognizing and accepting a loss but that, at the same time, leads to the postulate that at some point, the situation will find a new normal. Finally, although it is easy to imagine that Harvard wants to return to its usual number of students when the health situation returns to normal, a sudden and sharp increase in its number of students would be a major challenge. It would seem that it will be achieved by capitalizing on the lessons learned from the COVID-19 epidemic and by maintaining a small amount of hybrid teaching.

Many other examples have emerged in which management education institutions recognized that the coronavirus crisis had led to situations it was necessary to face, even if responding to them was difficult and had a short-term cost, because the situations were going to persist in the long term, and schools had to be prepared to deal with them as best as possible.

Networking is an important asset of attending a business school. However, student separation from campus has greatly hampered networking possibilities, which are first realized face to face. We are seeing many efforts on the part of schools to make some of these activities happen online. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management, virtual student networking includes quiz nights, hackathons, and a coding boot camp (Bartleby, Reference Bartleby2020). Activities at the Haas School in Berkeley, California, also include distance yoga and mindfulness classes. At INSEAD, students meet in virtual meeting rooms for more in-depth discussions, with groups chosen at random to ensure interaction with a larger group of classmates (Bartleby, Reference Bartleby2020).

The investment in time, energy, and money that management education institutions devote to this development is indicative of the awareness that networking activities will be carried out after the coronavirus crisis in a different way from the way they were carried out before.

The primordial importance of approaches that stem from what we have called “mourning” in the sphere of management education as it faces up to COVID-19 is largely because the effects of the epidemic have caused a sharp increase in uncertainty. Indeed, many analysts have pointed out that the epidemic has led to a global economic and financial crisis that has had a strong impact on unemployment rates and that will durably affect small businesses in particular because they are often no longer able to function (Skok and Owen, Reference Skok and Owen2020). This general situation is causing a drastic increase in uncertainty, which blurs representations of what economies will look like when this crisis is behind us (Altig et al., Reference Altig, Baker, Barrero, Bloom, Bunn, Chen, Davis, Leather, Meyer, Mihaylov, Mizen, Parker, Renault, Smietanka and Thwaites2020).

However, uncertainty should logically have an enormous effect on programs and curricula, insofar as it accelerates the obsolescence of teaching: the more quickly and significantly the future is different from the past and the present, the more the knowledge acquired is blamed. To illustrate this, Jaime Weinman (Reference Weinman2020) recounts that in the novel A Semester in the Life of a Garbage Bag by Canadian author Gordon Korman, the protagonist writes a political science report on the governmental structure of an obscure monarchy whose ruler is overthrown and executed on the day the report is due. All the hero can do is add “until yesterday” to the title.

Likewise, the COVID-19 crisis seems to have largely indicted (not to mention made obsolete) strong trends in the global economy and the social evolution that is taking place – trends that had been seen as basic concepts of business school education. However, they must absolutely avoid providing teaching that would be relevant until yesterday. Two examples, among many others, illustrate this phenomenon:

• The until-recently-ultra-dominant idea of an increasingly interconnected world economy seems to have been largely demolished. The concept of the open economy of the Western world began to be questioned in 2016 with the announced desire of US president-elect Donald Trump to weaken globalized market policies, as well as to strengthen border restrictions. The British “Brexit” was also a signal of this tendency for countries to move toward economic independence (McMahon and Hartigan, Reference McMahon and Hartigan2018). There is no doubt, however, that the sudden appearance of COVID-19 has given a boost to this notion of market fragmentation in parallel with that of the return of national sovereignty in the economic field. This change should have consequences in the teaching provided in business schools and should lead to changes in perspective.

• The global coronavirus pandemic has exposed and worsened social disparities in human societies and pushed millions of people into poverty (Ashford et al., Reference Ashford, Hall, Arango-Quiroga, Metaxas and Showalter2020). COVID-19 has given renewed acuity to these themes. Further addressing the problems of socioeconomic inequality in business school classrooms and courses is now seen as an urgent need.

To be able to take into account such cardinal changes, it is necessary that business schools do the work of mourning the previous situation, which is over. Nothing can be more disabling than to stick to approaches supposing that when the effects of the coronavirus are no longer felt, we will return to the previous situation – this approach prevents us from putting ourselves in a situation to respond effectively to new challenges.

This is particularly glaring if we take the case of foreign students at American universities: while their numbers had been steadily increasing, in 2020, they decreased. Studying with international students from all over the world and working with them on assignments is an experience that will not be familiar to the students of American business schools this year. It is particularly noteworthy that the percentage of international students who study at American business schools will be significantly lower as long as the virus remains around because these students will not pay the high tuition fees that such establishments charge for an educational experience that consists only of e-learning. The paradox is that the spread of distance education has turned many students away from foreign universities and made them prefer local universities (Moules, Reference Moules2020). But above all, contrary to what seems to be the fundamental hypothesis of the great American universities, nothing says that these students will return once the COVID-19 crisis is over.

Likewise, although it is commonly underlined how COVID-19 has had a strong impact on the ways of teaching in management education institutions and how quick and, in many respects, how successful the transition to distance learning has been, it is nonetheless clear that this development has not been accompanied by changes of the same magnitude in the curricula.

Likewise, teaching methods have often remained practically the same, and it is commonly reported that no review of technical aspects such as the length of sessions or the ideal number of students in each class has been performed, and students feel the lack of human connection with their faculty, school staff, and their peers (Liguori and Winkler, Reference Liguori and Winkler2020). All these elements constitute enormous methodological challenges to overcome.

It would be excessive to draw conclusions that are too extreme and claim that pedagogy has not been affected by changes wrought by the coronavirus. Institutions have profoundly rethought their methods. The example of the South Korean Sungyunkwan University is particularly interesting: starting from the belief that fatigue is a major challenge of e-learning in many business schools, the decision was made not to record classes to increase student attention and involvement. The principle behind this decision is that watching the video is insufficient and that active watching is necessary not only to fully understand the course but also to ensure its quality (GBSN Emerge, 2020). To encourage active learning, some other schools recommend dividing the lesson into short segments of about 15 minutes, with a short activity between them; obviously, the length of teaching time slots in educational institutions is a contingency factor for organizations.

On another level, Weinman reports that when COVID-19 hit, McGill University’s Bensadoun School of Retail Management was opening a 2,300-square-foot retail innovation lab to study the retail business experience; the lab was redesigned to take into account that the coronavirus has ushered us into the age of physical distancing, allowing students and faculty to simulate “how customers can make their shopping journeys without interacting with anyone or touching a single item in the store” (Weinman, Reference Weinman2020, para. 5).

In addition, noting how much of a general influence the coronavirus crisis has had on the curricula of business schools should not lead us to neglect the cases where, to the contrary, special courses were created to deal with questions raised by the COVID-19 crisis, considering that schools cannot afford to stick to old curricula and not react or update themselves to take into account the effects of the crisis. For example, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania launched a course called “Epidemics, Natural Disasters, and Geopolitics: Managing Global Business and Financial Uncertainty.” The London Business School will soon be organizing a course titled “The Economics of a Pandemic.”

This underlines even more how much mourning is necessary to lead people to understand that management education will not return to the status quo ante of the situation before the pandemic. It is understandable that until such work is done, management education institutions and their teachers will be reluctant to really change their curricula and psychoeducational practices to meet a need that they feel is temporary.

Resilience

The two attitudes mentioned previously to represent the reaction of business schools to the extreme situation into which the COVID-19 epidemic has plunged them are based on radically different assumptions. Coping is based on the fundamental assumption that this extreme situation and the crisis that caused it are not going to last – that it is just a matter of waiting to return to the previous situation. On the other hand, the work of mourning consists of taking note of the fact that the consequences of the crisis are lasting and that a return to the status quo ante is not possible. This approach – for which examples were given in the previous section – consists of defining one’s decisions, one’s actions, and one’s attitudes by being faithful to one’s identity and one’s objectives and by acknowledging the new situation.

The reaction of business schools to the extreme situation generated by the COVID-19 crisis has led to a third type of response that is also based on the recognition of the lasting nature of the consequences of the crisis. But this response is not satisfied with merely taking note of such durability and determining its attitude to best preserve the objectives and identity of the institution. Rather, it strives to act on the context in which the crisis has put schools in order to improve it. This type of reaction can be grouped together under the generic term of organizational resilience, which initially involves an accomplished grieving process.

An example of this is provided by the Stanford Rebuild initiative of the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB), for which the Startup Garage at Stanford GSB has been a key resource in an 8-week innovation sprint to design or scale up post–coronavirus-crisis economic stimulus plans. In this context, the school is entirely playing its role because this initiative is, first and foremost, a large-scale brainstorming session focused on large-scale problems and guided by eminent specialists from the business and academic worlds. The 8-week program began on June 22, 2020, and ended with a high-profile event in September (Ethier, Reference Ethier2020a). Stanford Rebuild is not limited to Stanford students; it is an event open to students, entrepreneurs, innovators, and business leaders from around the world. The school calls it a “focused investigation of ideas and solutions to accelerate the path to a better post-COVID future” (Ethier, Reference Ethier2020a, para. 6). Stanford’s voluntarism is reflected in how, to give the project maximum impact, Stanford trains the participants by allowing them access to Stanford Embark, “an interactive entrepreneurial toolkit designed to help people explore if they can turn their idea into a viable business” (Ethier, Reference Ethier2020a, para. 6).

The intention of the project is manifested in the enunciation of the four sectors to which it relates: Reimagine Organizations, Reinforce Healthcare Systems, Revitalize the Workplace, and Redesign Human Wellbeing. Even more precisely, this intention is expressed by the type of challenges faced by the participants, which include not only challenges directly related to COVID-19, such as the implementation of scalable, socially responsible tests and contact tracing, but also major societal issues like rethinking childcare and preschool education; the impact of social distancing on mental health; and support for small businesses to recover and, in many cases, reinvent themselves. Finally, it is important to underline that for the projects considered most remarkable, the university has helped entrepreneurs find financing.

The Stanford example is one among dozens of others in which management education institutions are not content to merely take the consequences of the COVID-19 crisis as given but instead are embarking on processes intended to contribute to the reconstruction of post-crisis society. This example has in common with the examples of the grieving process provided earlier that it highlights instances in which the institutions of management education, far from making sacrifices to opportunistic processes to confront the crisis, remain faithful to their identities and their objectives.

The Stanford Rebuild project is presented as an initiative in which the management education institution mobilizes its teachers and students in an extra-academic framework. Certain other institutions have integrated an approach aimed at reacting to the consequences of COVID-19 as part of their curriculum. Many voices from both faculties and business school students call for engaging management and business administration students in actions related to their role as students and future managers in such a crisis. For example, Nyenrode Business University has realized how important it is to involve students in this resilience process and has launched programs in which students help small businesses and families with financial advice, all as part of their study program.

Likewise, an interesting example is the MBA Response project (Garner, Reference Garner2020; MBA Response, n.d.). Harvard University has recognized that many struggling organizations, from those directly battling the pandemic to those devastated by the economic fallout, could benefit from MBA skills – marketing, finance, strategy, and so forth – to help face the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. The MBA program started a project that brings together businesses that need help and students who want to volunteer and help. The initiative spread to Georgetown University and became an inter-business school initiative called the MBA Response (Garner, Reference Garner2020; MBA Response, n.d.).

Some business school projects facing the COVID-19 pandemic are trying to cope with global instability to launch progressive projects. For example, within the London Business School is the Wheeler Institute for Business and Development, which started a whole new business in India during the pandemic (Keller and Kwag, Reference Keller and Kwag2020). Rural areas of India were most at risk from the COVID-19 situation, not only from the health risks it entails (which also affect the rest of the world) but also because of the disease’s impact on development and investment in new opportunities for the underdeveloped society of this country. The Wheeler Institute has established culturally sensitive and professionally empowering “labs” for female entrepreneurs. Knowing that this population was the most likely to be most affected by the pandemic, investing precious resources in times of global crisis is a message of solidarity and courage aiming at systemic progress.