W. P. Carey Dean Ohad Kadan (left) speaks to Poets & Quants' John Byrne. Courtesy photo
When John Byrne, the journalist who launched Poets & Quants and pioneered modern business school rankings, looks back on nearly four decades covering business schools, he sometimes jokes that he feels like Dr. Frankenstein.
“I created this monster in the lab,” he says of launching the first major business school ranking in 1988. “And now it roams the earth and terrorizes everything.”
The remark came late in the evening inside the Heard Museum in Phoenix after a private tour of the galleries and a closed-door dinner for deans attending the 2026 Western Association of Collegiate Schools of Business Conference. Servers had just cleared dessert plates and poured coffee. The museum, closed to the public, had gone quiet.
It was then that Byrne and Ohad Kadan, Charles J. Robel Dean and W. P. Carey Distinguished Chair in Business, settled into a fireside conversation about what has changed in business education over four decades and what must continue to evolve.
“What hasn’t changed is that business schools have been more responsive to market demand than any other school in the academy. When the needs of business change, business schools quickly respond,” Byrne said.
Kadan framed the next part of the conversation with a simple question: What must change next?
The answer was steady — but urgent.
Business schools, Byrne argued, have historically moved faster than the rest of higher education. From globalization to the digital revolution, they have reshaped the curriculum to match employer demand.
“That’s been true from the very beginning until today,” he said.
Now comes artificial intelligence.
“You’ve seen the last few years in particular (change dramatically) in curriculum and programming, essentially to address the needs of business and how AI is impacting the world of work.”
At the WACSB conference, AI was not a buzzword but a working agenda. Deans discussed embedding AI across courses, expanding experiential learning, and preparing students to lead in environments shaped by automation and data.
For Kadan, the issue is not whether business schools will adapt but how quickly and how thoughtfully.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, business is the largest field of master’s degrees conferred in the United States, and industry reporting from Poets & Quants notes that the MBA has been the most popular individual graduate degree for the past 15 years. But its structure and its economics have shifted.
“The peak years for the MBA, in terms of ROI, were probably the 1980s,” Byrne said, noting the steady rise in costs since then.
Still, he was unequivocal about its enduring relevance.
“The value of business education has not gone down,” he said. “It’s gone up. The world is more complex. It’s more complicated. It’s more sophisticated. It’s more global. Making decisions in this world that are good and smart requires more expertise, more skills, more tools than ever before.”
The key shift lies in where growth is happening.
“What’s changed is that the areas of growth for business education have become undergraduate business and specialty master’s degrees and online.”
Business is now the most popular major for undergraduates in America. Specialized master’s degrees — in analytics, supply chain, finance and emerging technologies — continue to expand. MBA pathways have multiplied: full-time, part-time, executive, accelerated and online.
“There are many, many different ways” to earn the degree now, Byrne said.
Kadan pushed on the implications: With so many options and providers, what ensures long-term strength?
Byrne’s answer was characteristic.
“When you lose something, and it forces you to be more innovative and rethink your way out of the problem, I think that’s what we’ve seen.”
Business schools, he added, measure success differently.
“It’s the only school in the academy that says its job is not done when it turns over a piece of parchment to a student. The job is done when the student gets a job.”
Kadan turned to rankings — a system Byrne helped pioneer.
“You basically created the first ranking,” Kadan said, noting how it transformed business education into something closer to competitive sport.
Byrne resisted the theatrical framing.
“How do you make a market work?” he said. “You make a market work when there’s data that’s available to allow people to make informed decisions.”
In the late 1980s, dozens of schools claimed elite status with little shared evidence. Rankings introduced comparative data into a largely reputation-driven marketplace.
“The reason why the MBA remains the most popular graduate degree in America is because of rankings,” Byrne said. “Year after year after year, major publications reinforced the degree’s visibility and perceived return on investment.”
The system is imperfect, he acknowledged, but it elevated business education’s global profile in ways few disciplines experience.
Kadan then asked what characteristics distinguish deans who truly transform institutions.
“One is courage. One is innovation,” Byrne replied.
Effective leaders, he said, “truly innovate in the field beyond the ordinary,” and have “the courage to fight the institutional battles that you have to do in a bureaucracy … and can still get stuff done.”
Launching new undergraduate programs, modernizing MBA delivery and strengthening industry partnerships — these shifts require political capital and persistence.
“You look for courage, and you look for innovation,” Byrne said.
In a room of deans navigating cost pressures, technological change and shifting student expectations, the message was clear.
Near the end of the conversation, Byrne shifted from analysis to memory.
“My parents were uneducated,” he said. “My father couldn’t read or write, never even got out of grammar school. They were both factory workers. I was the first person in my family to get a college degree.”
When he earned his master’s degree, he said, “They started calling me ‘the professor.'”
Education, he told the room, “completely transformed me. It opened up a world that I didn’t even know existed.”
“It’s not just about making more money. That’s not all it’s about,” Bryne said. “It’s about living what I consider to be a multidimensional life.”
Business education, in his view, is exposure to ideas, to ambition, to people who expand how you think.
“You’re going to make enduring friendships that will make a real difference in your life,” he said. “You’re going to meet professors who are incredibly intelligent, among the most intelligent people you’ll ever collide with.”
Kadan widened the lens: The responsibility of business schools, he said, is not only to respond to markets but to shape them. As industries evolve and technologies accelerate, schools must prepare leaders who combine technical fluency with judgment and ethical clarity.
The task ahead is not preservation. It’s evolution. And if Byrne’s four decades are any indication, business schools will not wait for the future to arrive. They will build it.
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