It won’t be business-education-as-usual at the new UCSD
Rady School of Management.
“
We want students who are bilingual and bicultural. They will speak
the language of science and technology—and
the language of business,” says Robert S. Sullivan, the school’s
founding dean.
That’s good news for San Diego’s technology-driven
economy. In recent years, some of its best and brightest young
workers have
left the region to pursue MBAs at prestigious universities elsewhere.
Now these rising stars can “order in.”
In the 1980s and ’90s, UCSD enriched the local economy
with close to 200 spinoffs—many of them in biotechnology
and biomedicine. As these entrepreneurial companies grew, their
CEOs deplored the
shortage of home-grown management skills. America’s finest
city was also America’s only major metropolis without a B-school
in the Business Week top-50 survey.
Rady’s founding dean aims
to change all that. “San Diego,
in order to continue its growth and transformation, needs a world-class
school of management—not another school of management. We
will be among the best in the world,” Sullivan promises.
Keeping up with the Whartons and the Harvards doesn’t mean
looking like them.
While traditional management schools draw about
25 percent of their student body from the ranks of science and
engineering, UCSD is
aiming for 60 percent. Rady’s lab-coated young scholars will
receive solid training in finance, accounting and marketing fundamentals—the
mark of any great business school. But they will also garner cutting-edge
information about idea-to-market commercialization, product innovation
and technology transfer to global companies via licensing.
Rady’s
FlexMBA is a part-time, executive MBA program that targets working
professionals, who have an interest in technology, science,
entrepreneurship and innovation. In addition to short courses,
a variety of part-time and full-time MBA programs, and a small
doctoral component, the Rady School will offer joint degrees in
engineering,
medicine, science and international relations with the Jacobs School
of Engineering, the School of Medicine, the Graduate School of
International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS), and other
UCSD institutions.
Non-degree leadership courses began in November
2003, the FlexMBA program will launch in fall 2004, and the charter
class of full-time
students is slated for fall 2005. The 2012 goal is for 600 full-time
students, 510 part-timers and 50 doctoral candidates.
Elite management
schools do not come cheap. The long-term funding goal for the Rady
School exceeds $100 million.
A $30 million gift from San Diego businessman Ernest Rady and the
Rady Family Foundation will support faculty
recruitment and the construction of a 51,000 square-foot building
on the north side of UCSD’s Eleanor Roosevelt Campus by fall
2006. 
Information on this and other gifts to
the Rady School of Management  MORE
|
