Opinion Papaper

Decision modeling in MBA

Why the MBA curriculum is including one or more classes in decision making modeling? Studies show that the skills acquired by students that attended these classes are some of the things employers are looking for to hire.

Many universities are teaching decision modeling classes to their MBA students as a way to enhance the curriculum and better accommodate the needs of companies and employers. Since there is a lot of competition in the school business many schools are trying to differentiate from one another. Some schools have been successful accomplishing this goal, according to Professor Dey, from Birla Institute over the past five years changes have been made to the MBA curriculums and some of the changes have been the inclusion of introduction of core papers such as supply chain management, business analysis and management tools in decision making. (Key, 2009).

As an example of this, in Dartmouth’s MBA program a decision modeling class has been taught by Professor Peter Regan, his approach is to introduce new techniques to support each week’s case and topics while the students can build their knowledge. During his classes he tries to make the decision process as realistic as possible, he approximates the experience of the class to a professional setting by applying decision-science techniques as it would happen in a professional environment (Regan, 2006).

Another example will be the researched developed by Will Millhisier where he and some of his colleagues were able to find that one of the most desired skill employers are looking for is spreadsheet modeling. Once they added this classes to the MBA curriculum of the university of Western Ontario’s Ivey school the enrollments in the program increased and the current students were very excited and requested an addition of a more advanced class (Millhiser, 2009).

As part of teaching decision modeling; spreadsheets and other complex models are included in the syllabus...