Creating an Interdisciplinary MBA Program Within a Small Liberal Arts College

Introduction

Interdisciplinary collaboration both challenges and rewards practitioners (Rafiq et al., 2024). Real-world challenges are rarely solved with simple solutions. Many of the complex issues in today’s economic, political, and social environments might only be solved with creative, multi-faceted approaches and an integrative mindset (Repko, 2008). Given that higher education seeks to provide value in today’s complex world, institutions not only have the opportunity but arguably the duty to provide students with the knowledge and critical thinking skills needed to be successful after graduation. An interdisciplinary approach to education is a sound and viable strategy to achieve this goal (James Jacob, 2015).

An interdisciplinary approach to education creates challenges for both administrators and faculty. For instance, while a school’s administration might espouse interdisciplinary goals, those same administrators might fail to support these stated values with the correct incentives. Interdisciplinary research can be harder to publish because traditional methods in specific functional areas may not be utilized, causing editor and reviewer confusion or criticism. In addition, the generally increased work times and communication issues associated with the approach likely slow the rate at which faculty can expect to be published (Lanterman & Blithe, 2019). Often, administrators do not make allowances for these challenges, with the same publishing schedule utilized for faculty regardless of their interdisciplinary efforts.

Further complicating matters is that many faculty prefer to stay within their respective disciplines (Poole, 2009), and those willing to venture into interdisciplinary waters may simply not have the time. Following COVID-19, more faculty are finding their workloads increasing (Winfield & Paris, 2024). Coupled with reduced resources, interdisciplinary efforts are often deemed not worth the time or effort. Taken together, these factors can all lead faculty not to look beyond their chosen field of expertise.

Interdisciplinary Goals for a New MBA Program

The faculty program committee at Roanoke College anticipated these challenges associated with developing a new interdisciplinary MBA program. Roanoke College, founded in 1842, is a small liberal arts college in Salem, Virginia. The institution has not sponsored a graduate program for over one hundred years (since the 1920s). Thus, the new MBA program would be a brand-new endeavor for the college and its faculty from both cultural and curricular perspectives.

Research of MBA programs offered useful background information. For instance, Walsh and Powell (2020) found that MBA programs have remained mostly unchanged for many years, though they note the potential benefits associated with an interdisciplinary approach. In their paper, they explore a collaboration between art and business faculty in an MBA program that employs team teaching and trans-disciplinary knowledge to help students tackle real-world problems. They suggest the need for MBA programs to move beyond theoretical knowledge and embrace applied knowledge defined as trans-disciplinary, creative, and responsive. They contend that such collaborations help students solve business problems rather than simply providing standard business responses. In addition, Athaide and Desai (2005) discuss possible benefits to interdisciplinary approaches to teaching an MBA curriculum but suggest that relatively few resources exist to support those efforts. Their article provides instructors with a template for interdisciplinary approaches related to marketing management, technology, and innovation.

Lastly, research into the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business revealed an overview of their Multidisciplinary Action Projects (MAPs). These projects are described on their website (Ross School of Business, n.d.) as “a unique feature of the Ross MBA program … [in which] students learn how businesses apply and integrate multiple functions and gain an appreciation for the value of teamwork through an intense hands-on project at a sponsoring company.” Since 2022, over 17,000 students have taken part in more than 3,100 projects with approximately 1,000 students participating each year. Students, employers, and alumni consistently provide positive feedback on the success of the program (Ross School of Business, n.d.).

From a review of the literature, several key themes begin to take shape regarding the best practices of interdisciplinary MBA programs. These include:

• Real-world learning

• Interdisciplinary problem-solving

• Teamwork - team teaching and student teams

• Project-based coursework and/or capstone projects

• Institutional support

With these insights in mind, the program committee met to begin designing the new Roanoke College MBA program. As goals were developed for the MBA curriculum, it was first determined that all classes should include active learning opportunities. An active learning environment works to meet the department’s stated learning goals, and fits with the strategies supported by the department’s accrediting agency (that include critical thinking, collaboration, and professional readiness). Further, research suggests that students report improved critical thinking, problem-solving, decision-making, collaboration, and comprehension when active learning techniques are utilized, as well as increased engagement and satisfaction (McDonald et al., 2022). MBA faculty were encouraged to move students from passive recipients of information to active participants in the learning process.

In addition to providing active learning opportunities, MBA administrators also recommended that an interdisciplinary approach to the programmatic curriculum development could provide graduates with increased knowledge and critical thinking skills in the field of business. Graduates should be expected to demonstrate an understanding of the holistic nature of business and decision-making. Incorporating an interdisciplinary approach encourages students to develop a systems-level appreciation for business decision-making that more closely mirrors real environments. An active, interdisciplinary program provides depth to the business-only curricular development guidelines, while still fitting with the liberal arts culture that permeates the college. But the question remained: how best to create an interdisciplinary business program with an active learning environment?

From a traditional perspective, the curriculum associated with a business education has numerous interconnected knowledge areas, including finance, marketing human resource management, operations, and strategy. In the real-world of business, these functions do not operate in silos. Since we needed to create the curriculum for the new program, we sought to educate students on the interconnectedness of these functions. Further, the expectation of MBA graduates is that they will be able to progress from the simple retention and organization of knowledge to the much higher-level skills of integration and application to all functional areas. Therefore, we felt we must foster students’ abilities to integrate learning - over time, across courses, and within academic, personal, and community life. As such, the program committee identified one core tenet of our new MBA program as a focus on the integration of multiple competencies and skillsets that contribute to success in any discipline. These skillsets include competencies such as teamwork, communication, ethical reasoning, and overall leadership ability. These skillsets cross academic and professional disciplines and can be lacking in some graduate-level programs.

In particular, the MBA suffers from an increasing level of skepticism as to whether or not it provides graduates with the desired competencies to succeed in the business world (Tan & Ko, 2019). In a 2009 study, Rubin and Dierdorff found that the competencies that managers considered to be the most critical (decision-making, strategy, innovation, and managing human capital) were not well represented in the core curriculum for most MBA programs. However, more recent studies have suggested that while MBA degrees are still widely criticized, there has been increasing alignment between MBA curriculum and desired management competencies through the implementation of “intercompetency” approaches (Amblee et al., 2023). It was this integrative “intercompetency” approach that further motivated us as we began to design our program’s curriculum. However, while having an accepted (and worthwhile) end goal is a great start, it does not necessarily lead to the creation of a successful program. We continued to ask: how can we develop concrete, integrative pedagogies that work toward our program goals in individually-taught courses?

Interdisciplinary Project Design

While numerous program-wide pedagogical efforts were considered (and some were eventually implemented), this paper discusses the challenges and benefits experienced as the three authors/instructors attempted to create and implement an interdisciplinary project, encompassing the fields of accounting, investments, and marketing. These three disciplines were chosen because a single cohort of MBA students is scheduled to take these three classes during the same semester each academic year.

While the term “interdisciplinary” is used to describe the project, it is not the more traditional interdisciplinary project-based learning where students in one area of specialization develop projects with students in different academic disciplines. Instead, the goal was for the project to provide business students (with similar business backgrounds) the opportunity to experience how the three disciplines of accounting, investments, and marketing work together – feed off each other – and can eventually make for a successful (total) effort with the proper considerations for each. From a strategic perspective, every business decision could potentially be influenced and require input from any functional area. Our desire is for students to recognize and appreciate that each business function draws from and overlaps with multiple practical disciplines. In addition, we desired to foster development of “intercompetency” skills – teamwork, leadership, communication, motivation and the softer skills that some studies have suggested are underdeveloped in today’s MBA graduates. In short, we desired to create a truly integrative, interdisciplinary project.

With this goal in mind, the three instructors brainstormed ideas to incorporate each course’s knowledge gains into a single, comprehensive final project. The project would be “tested” on the program’s inaugural MBA class of eleven students in the fall of 2023. Our project ultimately asked three student groups (of approximately four students each) to imagine themselves working for an investment company. The project states that their group is to use fundamental analysis to identify the best companies (accounting), whose stock should be included into a new mutual fund product (investments). Next, the groups are asked to create an appropriate marketing strategy for the new fund based on its features and design (marketing). Once completed, the student groups submit a written deliverable of their work and provide a professional presentation to program faculty of their analysis, findings, and decisions.

Assessing the Project (Methodology)

Unsurprisingly, based on the research associated with interdisciplinary efforts, the instructors quickly discovered that the time and effort required to create, implement, and assess this project would be far beyond the typical course-contained effort. Therefore, the instructors also created a plan to assess the overall project, using a mixed methods approach, to determine if the project was achieving its goals. The central question of this paper is: Was the extra time and effort expended on creating an interdisciplinary project worthwhile? Should we make minimal changes and continue? Or should we simply cut our losses and develop a new strategy to achieve our desired student learning outcomes?

In order to assess the success of the project, a brief Likert-scaled questionnaire was developed for students. The questions were motivated from an article by Johansen, Scaff, & Hargis (2009) that was designed to measure the benefits associated with an interdisciplinary project-based model. Students were asked to rank their integrative knowledge of business from 1 “strongly disagree” to 5 “strongly agree” before the final project was discussed. Then again, after completion of the project, the students completed the same survey. Significant improvements in mean scores would suggest the project to be worthwhile while decreases would suggest otherwise. The same, or similar, scores for both tests would prove inconclusive. Specific survey items included the following:

1. Combining disciplines into a single group project is a helpful way to integrate my knowledge in business.

2. My training in group projects has helped me to be more confident about my ability to integrate all of my knowledge.

3. I see how all of the different functions of business fit together.

In addition to the quantitative survey for students, qualitative surveys were also utilized. After project/course completion, students were surveyed to determine their thoughts about the project and encouraged to use their own words to describe the benefits and challenges of their experiences. Lastly, the three instructors kept a list of their experiences regarding their perceived successes, opportunities, and failures as they related to the project.

Faculty Perspectives - The Challenges

As stated above, the desire to ensure that we did not indiscriminately persist in the challenging effort of creating an interdisciplinary project that only provided students with minimal value motivated us to keep notes on our thoughts and experiences as they related to the project. To be sure, the creation, implementation, and assessment of the project all incurred numerous challenges. These challenges included:

Balancing Priorities Across Disciplines – The first challenge was designing a single project that incorporated the learning outcomes from three different courses. Each of us brought distinct priorities, and at times, what felt central in one discipline seemed secondary in another. For example, the investment objective of analyzing performance risked overshadowing the marketing component of a defined target audience, while the accounting outcomes of financial reporting had to be woven in without becoming purely technical. This balancing act could easily have derailed the collaboration, but through repeated brainstorming and discussion, we reached a framework that, while not perfect, adequately addressed the core outcomes of all three courses.

Communication & Coordination – One of the primary characteristics of any successful project development team is a commitment to a sound communication strategy (Muszynska et al., 2015). It became evident during the process that our team of instructors needed to be more aware of how we coordinated our efforts. For instance, on several occasions an individual member of the team would make relatively minimal changes to the project, but email updates proved insufficient in informing the remaining team members of the change. To improve our communication, we settled on having regular face-to-face meetings to discuss the project and any updates we had made or might wish to make for future iterations of the project. While these meetings were incredibly helpful from a communication perspective, they proved difficult to coordinate and added significantly to a third challenge.

Time – We estimate that the combined interdisciplinary project took us approximately sixty to eighty percent more time than if each of us had simply created a functional project for our individual classes. The time commitment is largely front-loaded, but not entirely. For instance, after the project was created and assigned, we still had to coordinate our assessment strategy and grading efforts. Something as simple as the project weighting in each course needed to be discussed rather than left to individual faculty members to decide. For instance, from our initial grading discussions, the three of us decided to have different project weights for our individual courses. The project represented twenty percent of the course grade in two of the classes but reflected twenty-five percent of the course grade in the third. This was done to better reflect the project’s requirements relative to the total course workload. However, this was something that needed to be carefully communicated to the students. The remainder of the project grading scheme consisted of a rubric (representing the presentation quality, the necessary criteria of each of the three individual courses, and general professionalism) that each instructor completed after viewing the presentation and reading the written deliverable. After completing the rubric individually, we met once again to discuss and create a single finalized rubric with an agreed upon project grade that was delivered to each of the three student groups. In short, assessing the three projects took considerable time and coordination.

Further, as is often the case in any assignment, we continue to question our strategies, directions, and overall pedagogical goals. Any new ideas, proposal suggestions, and changes to the project are something that all now need to be coordinated amongst the three of us. This effort continues to take much more time than an individual assignment.

Confusion – Arguably, at the heart of what makes an interdisciplinary effort intimidating for many faculty is the lack of expertise in the other disciplines. This unease has some merit. For instance, on several occasions, students asked us questions about the project that were outside our areas of expertise. In these circumstances, the response can be challenging. Does the instructor send the student group to the expert or give the students their best guess? In our experience, the lack of a detailed understanding of the subject matter and the potentially complex goals of the “expert” instructor led to several instances of confused communications between students and faculty. In one instance, it seemed that an individual student may have even attempted to use one faculty member’s last minute generalized response to a question to contradict another instructor’s much more specific instructions. Our commitment to communication significantly aided these efforts, but in some cases, the challenge of finding the time to coordinate our discussions led to confusion.

Faculty Perspectives – The Benefits

Higher education at its best can be inspiring beyond measure to both the student and the teacher. From the faculty perspective, there are many different strategies available to ensure that educators continue to grow as teachers and help students to become the best versions of themselves. However, one potential source of inspiration for faculty is to challenge themselves to think and practice beyond their academic discipline in a way that provides students the opportunity for a richer engagement, an improved experience, and a better overall education (McCune, 2010).

Whether or not we achieved this goal for our students is debatable, but what is true is the fact that our attempt brought us joy. The three of us agree that simply acting on the aspiration to grow as teachers and improve our pedagogical initiatives was intrinsically rewarding. While this reward is quantitatively immeasurable, it has proven to be the most valued of benefits.

It was also rewarding to learn more about each other’s disciplines. Working at a liberal arts college, one of the primary tenets of our mission is to create life-long learners. Sometimes we might forget that this goal is helpful for us as well. By working together on the project, all three of us feel that we have grown professionally. This, in itself, is a satisfyingly constructive accomplishment. Though there are continued challenges, for our part, we agree that on an intellectual, pedagogical, and social level, we enjoyed the experience.

Student Survey Results

While our experience with the implementation of the project was a net positive, the students’ experience is most important. Therefore, we applied a more dedicated methodology in the attempt to discover if the project had the desired impact on students. Using a mixed methods approach, we surveyed students to discover their thoughts.

The results of our repeated measures survey were, in short, inconclusive. The results of our t-tests did not result in any significant findings. This is unsurprising given the limitations of our survey which include a very small sample size (n = 11 students) and a largely unproven survey instrument. In addition, the surveyed cohort of MBA students had all recently completed an undergraduate degree in business. This perhaps influenced the relatively high pre-test mean scores (averaging 4.24 out of 5). However, we did note that the mean scores for our measured variables (while statistically insignificant) all increased in our post-test survey. While this finding does not provide strong support for the project, it does serve to indicate that students found the project worthwhile. The score improvements are displayed in Table 1.

In addition to the quantitative survey, we also asked students to express their thoughts on the project. These emailed surveys were not anonymous and were communicated well after completion of the project. As such, only three surveys were returned with specific insights. Prompts for these thoughts included:

1. What was your experience with the project?

2. The project attempted to incorporate several areas of business (accounting, finance, & marketing). Is it worthwhile for business students to integrate their overall business knowledge?

3. What advice do you have to help us improve the project?

The qualitative assessment proved to be much more instructive as the students had mostly positive responses. For instance, one student wrote:

I really appreciated the interdisciplinary approach of the final group project. It was a great opportunity to apply what we learned across accounting, finance, and marketing in a more holistic, real-world context. It challenged us to think critically, collaborate effectively, and see how these core business functions are interconnected in practice—not just in theory.

Another student expressed similar thoughts:

Integrating accounting, finance, and marketing made the mutual fund project feel real. It forced me to think like a portfolio manager and a marketer at the same time. This type of project was the exact kind of academic challenge grad students need in order to tie everything together.

And while this next comment suggests that the project could benefit from more time, coordination, and communication on our part (three of the challenges we already struggle with), it is likely the comment that proved to be the most motivational for the three of us to continue with our effort:

I definitely think the project should continue in future courses. It pushes students to move beyond siloed thinking and encourages a more strategic mindset, which is essential for any business leader. If anything, I’d suggest providing a bit more structure or milestone check-ins for the students with all three professors throughout the project timeline, just to keep teams on track and ensure alignment across disciplines. Overall, I thought it was one of the most valuable parts of the semester.

Conclusion

The decision to collaborate with other faculty members to create an interdisciplinary project is complex. Numerous variables dictate the success or failure of the endeavor. We have identified and determined that several of these variables came together in a way that aided us significantly in our effort. We offer the following observations:

1. While we are not experts in each other’s fields, the three of us have a high-level understanding of the different functions of business. While we would not deem this to be imperative to a successful interdisciplinary effort, it was helpful and aided us as we communicated with one another regarding our desired learning outcomes.

2. The three of us have worked together before, are familiar with each other’s pedagogical styles, and generally get along well. One instructor’s ability to work with another may be the most important variable for consideration of a similar venture.

3. Related to our ability to get along with one another is the fact that we share similar values when it comes to our desire for the education of students. We are motivated by the same outcomes. Having goal congruence aided us significantly as we mapped out and pursued the implementation of the project.

4. While still a challenge, it was not impossible for us to work together to create a project that incorporates all three of our areas of discipline. It is worth noting, however, that we found this difficult, even when the disciplines were related. Fortunately, we were able to strategize a method for our three areas to fit together in a way that makes sense for a student project, but we recognize our fortunate circumstances related to this effort.

5. We were encouraged by administration. In our case, the developers of the new MBA program recognized the opportunities and challenges of educating students in today’s complex business environment. Goals were developed that included opportunities for the integration of subjects. Knowledge retention was deemphasized while critical thinking skills and “intercompetency” approaches were encouraged. As we developed our courses, we were encouraged to aspire to anything that we felt could help distinguish the program and improve the perceived value of the new program.

Even with these five factors working in our favor, success was far from certain. Each of us, at different points, questioned whether the project was worth the effort amid its many challenges. Yet reflecting on the outcomes has renewed our commitment to continue. Without much hesitation, we agreed to run the project again—not only because it has helped us grow as educators, but because we’ve seen its genuine impact on our students’ learning. That shared sense of purpose continues to drive our collaboration forward.