Boston University’s Questrom School of Business introduced a new curriculum allowing students to take career-specific classes earlier while replacing the longstanding CORE program.
The new curriculum, now in effect for freshmen, aims to improve the study abroad experience, introduce new opportunities to work with corporate partners and streamline prerequisites for transfer students, Questrom Associate Dean Jeff Furman said.
The soon-replaced CORE program is four courses bundled together — finance, marketing, operations management and business analytics — taught all in conjunction during a single semester of sophomore or junior year, according to Questrom’s website. Taught by a team of faculty, students in CORE are also placed in teams and design a product from scratch throughout the semester.
Current freshmen students will still eventually take those four courses, but they will no longer be bundled together in the fixed CORE sequence. Instead, students will have the flexibility to complete them in any order.
The core innovation project, previously embedded within the bundle, will now be reworked as its own standalone course, starting with one company partnership and expanding as more sections of the class are introduced. Furman said the school is also creating new concentration-specific courses focusing on projects with corporate partners.
Anita Carson, a professor in Questrom’s Operations and Technology Management department, benchmarked more than 50 of the top undergraduate business programs, when researching a potential curriculum change.
“Compared to other universities, our students were not able to take business fundamental classes, such as finance, marketing and operations early on in their program,” Carson wrote in an email to The Daily Free Press. “Other schools had hands-on projects with companies, so they had more exposure to current problems facing businesses today.”
Furman said by getting rid of CORE, students will no longer be delayed before taking essential courses. The updated curriculum allows for students’ courses to better align with internship recruiting timelines.
Maya Dvoskina, a Questrom sophomore studying information systems and finance, said the legacy curriculum structure has limited her in the internship recruiting process.
“With finance, I had to teach it to myself this summer because I knew that I wasn’t going to take it until CORE, which is already setting me back,” she said.
Carson said a curriculum change was needed to keep up with the evolving business environment.
“We hadn’t done a major overhaul of our curriculum for 30 years when we first implemented CORE,” Carson wrote. “Although CORE had served us well, the world has changed since it was first implemented and we needed to update our structure.”
Furman said the curriculum shift does not mean that CORE is ineffective.
“We know that the legacy curriculum works, and the real reason that we’re changing is not that it’s failing our students, but rather that the market is evolving,” he said. “It requires greater flexibility in the curriculum.”
Dvoskina said she had mixed feelings about the curriculum change.
“It’s a bit unfair to the people who have already enrolled into Questrom, and suddenly they’re getting this new thing,” she said.
Julia Miller, a Questrom freshman concentrating in innovation and entrepreneurship, said she welcomes the curriculum change.
“It might honestly be good that we’re diving into these sooner, so that we get ahead of things rather than just doing them later,” she said.
Miller said the Questrom faculty had been supportive of the first class to navigate the new curriculum structure.
“I think that they’re guiding us pretty well,” she said. “They have told us that things have changed, but they’ve explained to us why it’s beneficial.”
Carson said Questrom was average in size compared to other schools’ business programs which had already introduced similar initiatives, motivating the curriculum change.
“We shouldn’t use ‘we’re too big’ as a reason to shy away from being bold with our curriculum,” Carson wrote.
