Business education at St. John's University: an interview with Richard A. Highfield, dean, the Peter J. Tobin College of Business

Review of Business, Spring, 2004 by Larry W. Boone

Founded in 1870 by the Vincentian Community, St. John's University is one of America's leading Catholic universities. The Peter J. Tobin College of Business has been an integral part of St. John's University for more than 75 years. With a global network of over 34,000 alumni, the College offers business leaders a strong foundation in management education focused on developing individuals for the world's most senior corporate positions. The importance attached to practical business knowledge, technology, the special ethical challenges of contemporary business practice, and globalization, enables the College to offer unique opportunities for students who are committed to excellence. The College was, in fact, among the first American business schools to establish a campus abroad--in Rome, Italy. With 100 full-time faculty members, the College currently serves a student body consisting of approximately 2,200 undergraduates and 700 graduate students throughout its campuses in historic Queens, the financial district of Manhattan, Staten Island, Eastern Long Island, and its Graduate Center in Rome. The Tobin College is fully accredited by AACSB International--The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, and it offers B.S., M.B.A., M.S. and APC degree programs in a wide variety of business fields. Programs include Accounting, Actuarial Science, Computer Information Systems, Decision Sciences, Economics, Finance, International Business, Management, Management Information Systems, Marketing, Risk Management & Insurance, and Taxation.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Richard A. Highfield became dean of the Peter J. Tobin College of Business at St. John's University on September 2, 2003 and currently resides in Manhattan. He was formerly dean of the University at Albany School of Business, SUNY for four years, associate dean at Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management, and had been on the Cornell faculty since 1985. A graduate of Stanford University, Dean Highfield holds a MBA degree from Santa Clara University and a Ph.D. in econometrics and economics from the University of Chicago. His academic research has been in the areas of monetary economics and business forecasting. He has served on the executive board of the MBA Enterprise Corps, which placed MBA graduates in Peace-Corps-like assignments in locally controlled businesses in emerging market economies, and also on the board of Student Agencies, Inc. of Ithaca, NY, the country's oldest student-run corporation. Most recently he served on the board of Junior Achievement of Northeastern New York, the executive board of the Capital Region Chapter of the American Marketing Association, and sang tenor with Albany Pro Musica. Dean Highfield was the host of the weekly television show "Business Matters" on WRGB, Channel 6, Schenectady, NY from September 2001 through July 2003.

Q: What is your assessment of the current state of higher education in the field of business?

A: Higher education in business is in flux partly because of all the things that happened at Enron and World Com and with other corporate scandals. I think that tarnished the image of people with business education--having people with Harvard MBA's in front of Congressional committees shown to be scoundrels hasn't helped at all. Plus, and here is where I am on thinner ice as to causes, during the big buildup in the '90s what you actually found was that the economy was booming like crazy and a lot of people, for lack of a better term, disintermediated. In order to be a success you didn't need a business education, because it was hard not to be a success. And you actually found some applications for schools going down during that time. In almost every other subsequent downturn, we have seen a rush back to school. In other words, formal business education is a way to retool, to give yourself an edge, to distinguish yourself from other people in the job market. By and large, this hasn't happened during this most recent downturn. There hasn't been a big rush back. So the question is--is this just a blip or are we seeing a major change in the way business education is fundamentally valued? Of course, this is at the graduate level, not so much at the undergraduate level, which continues to be pretty strong.

Q: What do you think are the strengths of business schools? What do business schools do best?

A: There's a difference between graduate and undergraduate programs. Good undergraduate business programs provide students with disciplined ways of thinking about things. And, if they're doing it as well as the best ones do, as well as I believe we do it here at St. John's, they give you lots of different ways of thinking about things. You know the old saw, "The most dangerous person is the one who has read only one book on the subject." By having a broad set of business-related disciplines, each attacking what are often surprisingly similar problems, you get lots of different technical angles on analyzing problems. I think that's one of the strengths at the undergraduate level--giving students the ability to think their way through something in a disciplined way and come out with a good, defensible result. That's important in business as well as non-business education. Business education has a lot of those pathways fairly well-defined.