Administrators are actively planning for the recently-announced Global MMS program, which the Fuqua School of Business hopes will prepare students around the world with the skills needed for success in the 21st century.
Fuqua hopes to offer the Global Masters of Management Studies program in several countries including China, India, Brazil and the United Arab Emirates, Fuqua Dean Blair Sheppard announced at Academic Council last week. In an interview with The Chronicle he provided further details about the program, including that it will have a curriculum almost identical to its Durham counterpart but with varying region-specific concentrations.
The program, which will likely first be offered in China, is expected to begin in August 2012—coinciding with the opening of the Duke campus in China’s Kunshan Province.
Students will be required to take eight core courses in basic business disciplines and four thematic courses in a chosen area of concentration, such as public policy.
For example, a Global MMS student in Shanghai might choose to concentrate in banking, Sheppard noted, calling Shanghai “the New York of China.”
“It’s highly likely that in your career, you will work for people conducting firms everywhere in the world,” Sheppard said. “Students are saying, ‘I want to go to a school that’s preparing me for the 21st century, not the 20th.”
Fuqua hopes to partner with other Duke schools to give students the opportunity to gain knowledge in business management and a chosen sub-field. The Duke Global Health Institute has already agreed to organize global health courses for MMS students abroad. This combination of different graduate programs to provide students with an interdisciplinary global experience will make the program valuable and unique, said Kathie Amato, assistant dean of executive education at Fuqua.
Michael Merson, director of DGHI, said that providing courses abroad would benefit the institute’s current efforts to expand globally as well as enhance the quality of the University as a whole.
“One of the real strengths of Duke as a university is its ability to bring together faculty from different schools and institutes and disciplines in its education and research,” Merson said. “Many of the world’s problems today are best addressed through a multidisciplinary approach.”
Both the Global MMS degree and the traditional MMS program, which was implemented in 2009, are intended to teach recent college graduates the business skills needed to pursue entry level jobs with companies and organizations. The Global MMS program will be tailored to the needs of the region in which it is taught.
“In some parts of the world, the thematic courses will be different than what we have [in Durham] because the needs in that global region are different,” Amato said. “That’s where the rest of Duke comes into play.”
The MMS program addresses two separate needs: Recent college graduates with a liberal arts background and no work experience were having trouble starting their careers, and undergraduate programs were not successfully preparing their students for roles in major global firms.
After outlining a one-year masters program that would give American students an advantage when entering professional settings, Sheppard said he realized that the MMS degree was also a “perfect” solution for the needs of students around the world. It would help students become familiar with the global economy and network with major business leaders, and it would also increase Fuqua’s international standing.
Although the Global MMS program in China has not yet been approved officially by the Academic Council or the Chinese Ministry of Education, Sheppard said he is hopeful that the proposal will be successful because of the potential research opportunity for faculty, current successes of the local Duke MMS program and Duke’s current investment in Kunshan.
“It’s our belief that if we don’t go, we won’t be meeting the needs of our core students,” said Sheppard.
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