Ohad Kadan became dean of Arizona State’s W. P. Carey School of Business on July 1, 2022. He discusses his plans for the school below. Arizona State photo
Ohad Kadan had the time, and he came to Arizona State with a plan.
The new dean of the W.P. Carey School of Business got the job in November 2o21 but didn’t take over until July; in that time, he tells Poets&Quants in a new interview, he decided that he needed to start his five-year term with big plans.
Big plans for a big school: Between undergraduate and graduate programs, the Carey School has more than 19,000 students, along with more than 300 faculty and another 300 staff. It is, in raw numbers, the largest B-school in the United States.
“It’s a big organization,” says Kadan, who spent 20 years as a finance professor at the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis before taking the top job at W.P. Carey. “Bigger than the entire WashU — not the business school, the university! And so for a big organization, as a new dean that’s a great time to revisit everything that we are doing and think long-term: Who do we want to be?
“What do we want to become? What’s our identity? What’s our goal? What’s our North Star?”
A SCHOOL ON THE RISE
The W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University
Kadan has big shoes to fill at Arizona State. In her eight years in the job, former Dean Amy Hillman led the launch of numerous new degree programs including master’s degrees in finance and global logistics, an online master’s in business analytics, and a master’s in accounting in partnership with KPMG. She oversaw the school designating its MBA program as STEM, and in fall 2020 she led the launch of a 12-month “fast-track” MBA for working professionals.
Most notably, in 2015 Hillman made international headlines by making the Carey MBA entirely tuition-free. The “Forward Focus” MBA led to a dramatic increase in student quality which, in turn, sparked a rise in the rankings, including the Carey School’s first-ever berth in the U.S. News top 25. Though the school subsequently scaled back the scholarship program, every admitted student is still guaranteed a scholarship. The experiment put Arizona State on the map for thousands of graduate management candidates.
And there it remains: Hillman’s efforts continue to be reflected not only in the Carey School’s enrollment, which was up 8% in fall 2021 in graduate programs and 10% in the undergraduate program in 2022, but in the rankings, as well. In the latest P&Q list, Arizona State was 34th, up 10 spots in one year. The Carey School’s full-time MBA ranked 29th in the most recent U.S. News list (tied with Kadan’s Olin School at Washington University), including top-five rankings in Supply Chain and Project Management specializations, and its part-time MBA was 18th. Online, Carey’s MBA was ranked 20th by P&Q in 2021, up seven spots from 2020, and seventh (tied with Arizona’s Eller College of Business) in U.S. News‘ 2022 ranking. Its online bachelor’s program is ranked No. 1 by U.S. News this year; its four-year undergrad program is 23rd in the country according to that magazine.
ACCESS, EXCELLENCE & INNOVATION
Big shoes to fill at a big B-school. But Kadan, with two decades in the classroom and in various leadership roles at one of Carey’s peer schools, may be the perfect man for the job.
Kadan joined Washington University as an assistant professor of finance in 2002 after earning his Ph.D. at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel. An award-winning researcher and educator, his research covers different aspects of liquidity, information, risk, and incentives in financial markets, and his work has regularly appeared in top academic journals in his field. As a vice dean at Olin, he oversaw the Olin School’s undergraduate, graduate, and global programs, as well as its Center for Digital Education. He also spearheaded the introduction of multiple innovative programs with an emphasis on values, data, global orientation, and multidisciplinary collaboration.
It’s no surprise, then, that Kadan came to Carey with big plans, convening a steering committee in the first days to guide the launch of a strategic planning process. The committee “engaged all of the school’s stakeholders,” he says, including faculty, staff, students, alumni, the business community, and university leadership. “Everybody was invited to participate,” Kadan says.
What will come of it? What new initiatives will lure MBA and other master’s candidates to consider pursuing a degree in the desert? More programs, more investment in new areas, doubling down on DEI and ESG, and working closely with major business partners in Phoenix and the region — for a start.
“Our vision is to transform the world through access, excellence, and innovation in business knowledge while keeping our tradition, that the culture of business is personal,” Kadan says. “Access and excellence married is a unique feature of W.P. Carey in the ASU. It’s part of the leadership and the vision of (ASU President) Michael Crow. He’s a visionary in that space. And the way we are doing it is through the third leg, which is innovation. We just do things differently. We cannot do everything the same as everybody else because otherwise we’ll end up coming up short on either access or excellence. And so we are trying to create new programs, new approaches, be entrepreneurs, basically, in the education space — and as big as we are, we are insisting on this business in its personal approach.”
‘A VERY SPECIAL PLACE’
What would its new dean like more people to know about ASU Carey?
“We are the largest business school in the nation in terms of numbers,” Kadan says. “At the same time, we are one of the highest-ranked business schools in the nation. If 31 of our programs are ranked top 25 by U.S. News, it says something about our quality. So we are able to marry access and excellence, and we are very innovative in everything we do. And as big as we are, we still able to maintain our culture of caring for each other — that business is personal.
“So all of this — access, excellence, innovation, and caring for each other — maybe some people don’t recognize this, don’t understand that this is what’s going on here. It’s very special.
“Coming from a different school, I feel this is a very special place — all of the activities, all the innovation that goes along here, the many students that we have here — and yet the seeking excellence in everything that we do, is very, very special.”
See the details about Ohad Kadan’s plans for ASU Carey on page 2. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Arizona State’s W.P. Carey School of Business. ASU photo
POETS&QUANTS’ EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH OHAD KADAN, DEAN OF THE CAREY SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AT Arizona STATE UNIVERSITY
Poets&Quants: It’s customary to ask new deans about their five-year plan. I know you just started, but can you let us know what you’ve got planned?
Ohad Kadan: As I was accepting this position in November last year, I decided that I needed to launch a strategic planning process for W.P. Carey. It’s a big organization. We have more than 19,000 students. Just to give you an idea, 19,000 students is bigger than the entire WashU — not the business school, the university!
And so it’s a big organization — more than 300 faculty, 300 staff members — and as a new dean that’s a great time to revisit everything that we are doing and think long-term: Who do we want to be? What do we want to become? What’s our identity? What’s our goal? What’s our North Star? And so what I did is, I gathered the faculty and the staff, and we created a steering committee to launch a strategic planning process that actually engaged all of our stakeholders, including our faculty, staff, students, alumni, business community, our leadership from the university — everybody was invited to participate.
And I’ll share you with you some highlights from that plan that is currently being finalized. We are still not done, but I can already share some major ideas from what we are doing.
So first, in terms of our vision: Our vision is to transform the world through access, excellence, and innovation in business knowledge while keeping our tradition, that the culture of business is personal. So I’m going to pause on each and every word here, okay? So access, excellence, innovation — this is critical. ASU and W.P. Carey are unique among business schools in the sense that they try to merge or marry these two concepts, access and excellence. Many schools are focused on excellence. Take the Harvards and Stanfords of the world. Fantastic schools. Similarly, my previous employer WashU Olin is a great school, amazing school. But what we are doing here at W.P. Carey, we have 19,000 students, so access is our mission, our mission says education is not a luxury. Education changes lives, opens doors, creates opportunities. We cannot afford not to provide education.
At the same time we are saying that we are going to be excellent. We are going to be up there in the rankings. We are going to have some of the best faculty out there. Our programs are going to be outstanding. So access and excellence married is a unique feature of W.P. Carey in the ASU. It’s part of the leadership and the vision of (ASU President) Michael Crow. He’s a visionary in that space. And the way we are doing it is through the third leg, which is innovation. We just do things differently. We cannot do everything the same as everybody else because otherwise we’ll end up coming up short on either access or excellence. And so we are trying to create new programs, new approaches, be entrepreneurs, basically, in the education space — and as big as we are, we are insisting on this business in its personal approach.
Basically, we care for each other. We know our students. We care for our students, and that’s another staple, another symbol of who we are. So it’s a little of a marrying or merging of different contrasts — access, excellence, big — while caring for each other, but that’s why it’s challenging. It is a challenging task. It’s very demanding on resources. You’d say access is demanding on resources. We need to scholarship a lot of students. Excellence is very demanding. Faculty are expensive, all faculty. We need to do all the above, and so I view this as a challenging task for myself and for my team, but we are up to the task. That’s our vision.
If you look at our mission, that’s basically, “What is it that we’re going to do? What are objectives?” There’s three of them. Very simple. One is, we teach. It’s our education mission.
Two is, we research. We create knowledge.
And third, which is not as emphasized, we engage. We engage with businesses. We engage with communities. We engage with the government. We engage with the rest of the campus. We are taking responsibility for our community, and we are committed to advancing knowledge that creates a positive impact in the world. So we are engaged with our surrounding as a business school. That’s critical for who we are.
What new initiatives should we expect under your leadership?
Ohad Kadan. File photo
They will flow from the vision and mission. So I’ll just mention a few.
Grow faculty talent: We have already started under my leadership during the last spring; under my guidance, W.P. Carey has hired 33 new full-time faculty, and 10 post-docs. This was an amazing hiring year, which was already catering to that excellence mission. Just driving forward the reputation of our faculty, critical.
We are going to grow our graduate programs. Our undergraduate program is growing very fast. Just this year we have grown more than 10%. That’s part of our access mission, but we need to keep growing also our graduate programs. And this includes our MBA, full-time, online, executive, evening, but also our specialized master’s programs: master of finance, master of business, master of accountancy, and so on, master of supply chain and logistics. All of these programs need to grow. They are very important for our reputation, but also for generating resources. If you look at the mix between undergraduate and graduate programs among other top business schools, they are leaning toward graduate programs. We know some of the top programs only have graduate programs, only an MBA program, and not even an undergraduate. We are kind of flipped. We are reversed. We have a very large weight on the undergraduate program, but I want to keep growing that. That’s our access mission. But at the same time, I want our graduate programs to keep growing, size and quality.
That’s another initiative: Executive education. Phoenix is one of the fastest-growing cities in the nation. In fact, Maricopa County is, as far as I know, the fastest-growing county in the nation last year. It is basically individuals moving into Phoenix, businesses moving into Phoenix. Just to give you an example, Intel is investing $20 billion in Phoenix hubs. Taiwan Semiconductor in investing $12 billion in a new hub in the Phoenix region.
So there are huge opportunities for partnerships between the school and these and other businesses?
Huge, huge. And a huge industry around real estate, healthcare, and other industries.
We are not as active as we need to be in executive education, in the lifelong learning space. That to me is a low-hanging fruit. And I not only launched that effort, I created a new unit headed by our Senior Associate Dean Raghu Santanam, who even before I started had started leading that effort.
Other initiatives: D&I, everybody’s talking about this. We are already in terms of student population quite diverse, I would say, more diverse than many other schools. If you look at our undergraduate population, about one third of our population is underrepresented minorities. If you look at our full-time MBA, 24%. So these numbers are maybe not where they need to be, but I think better than some other schools.
And we are still not where we need to be in terms of diversity in our faculty. That’s still a work in progress and we are working on that, but that’s not the end. We need to take D&I very seriously as a school which means that we need to infuse it into our curriculum. How do we teach and educate around D&I and into our research? How do we develop knowledge on D&I? Similarly, ESG, environment, society and governance. In business, everybody’s talking about this.
Given what ASU is about, given the access mission, given we take responsibility for our community, we need to be leaders in ESG. So we are launching major initiatives and centers around ESG. We need to be leaders in education around ESG, in both degree and non-degree. Like certificates and leaders in research, creating knowledge around that. We are particularly interested in three industries here in the Sun Valley. These are the semiconductor industry — very significant industry around here — healthcare industry, again, highly significant. We have a strong collaboration with the Mayo Clinic. And the real estate industry. There is a boom in real estate here in Phoenix following the migration of businesses and individuals. And we are here to become the national leaders in that space. Add to that, supply chain has been a strength of W.P. Carey. We are going to hone that and develop that.
We are going to develop centers and activities around what we call resilience. Basically, how do we recover after a shock? How do we prepare better for the next shock, talking about the pandemic?
And finally, a major initiative is going to be around a global engagement. We are already a global school. We have very successful executive MBA program in China. Number nine in the world by Financial Times. We also have a DBA program and a master of management program in China, so we have strong operations in China, very successful programs. We want to venture into other locations like India, Middle East, Africa, Latin America. So we have big plans on making education accessible, not only in Phoenix or nationally, but also globally.
So these are some kind of major initiatives. We have a few more, but this gives you enough I think.
You mentioned growth of some programs. I wonder if you have any plans for growth in online programs and where you see the Carey School investing there. You have a very highly ranked and well-regarded online MBA. Might we see some other degrees go online or other investments in online?
Definitely yes, we are going to see — and planning to see — growth in online. We have an online MBA. We have an online undergraduate program that is number one in the nation by U.S. News. So we have thousands of students in the online undergraduate program.
We have hundreds in the online MBA. We have just recently launched a summer intake for our online MBA. It’s been going really well.
So the demand for our online MBA is growing, very robust. We also offer specialized master’s programs online already and we plan to grow that: our online master of business analytics, master in supply chain. And we are looking at others, potentially, specialized masters programs. We’re looking at different modalities like async and sync as possibilities. We are also looking and also started to experiment with online certificates.
The idea that you only get a degree online is kind of outdated. We understand today that some students cannot dedicate a full two years or four years to get a degree, and so they want to break it down, or they would benefit from breaking it down into pieces called certificates or credentials. This could be at the undergraduate or graduate level. And so, for example, we just launched a graduate certificate in supply chain, three courses. And if you complete these three courses, you get a pathway toward our master of supply chain online.
So the idea is that you get these credentials and these credentials would end up into a degree down the road. That’s something that is a new approach to online, that it doesn’t have to be a full degree.
What’s one thing, if you could narrow it down, that people should know about business education at Arizona State?
I think it goes back to what I said in the beginning. We are the largest business school in the nation in terms of numbers. At the same time, we are one of the highest-ranked business schools in the nation. It says something about our quality. We are able to marry access and excellence, and we are very innovative in everything we do. And as big as we are, we are still able to maintain our culture of caring for each other, for “business is personal.”
So all of this basically — access, excellence, innovation, and caring for each other — is something maybe some people don’t recognize, they don’t understand that this is what’s going on here. It’s very special. Coming from a different school, I feel this is a very special place with all of the activities, all the innovation that goes on here, the many students that we have here, and yet the seeking excellence in everything that we do. It is very, very special.
And on the flip side of that, is there a myth you’d like to debunk?
We are working very hard to debunk the myth that ASU is the “greatest party school ever.” At least at the undergraduate level, that’s the story that we’ve been told. It’s not that there are no parties here!
But Michael Crow, the president here, has spent the last 20 years completely transforming this university and making it a really top school. He’s able to marry access and excellence, in a school that is very inclusive and at the same time is committed to discovery that creates an impact and takes serious responsibility of our community. This is an amazing university — amazing research is going on here. So I don’t want to say that there are no parties here, but the image of this being kind of the ultimate party school, I think it’s long gone. And so if anybody’s thinking that this is what it is, they should come here and visit with us because amazing things are going on here at ASU and W.P. Carey.
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