BW Online | May 17, 1999 | Up Close and Almost Personal with Maryland's Dean

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MAY 17, 1999

B-SCHOOL NEWS

Up Close and Almost Personal with Maryland's Dean
Prospective MBAs considering The Smith School can now "chat" with Dean Howard Frank, via CD-ROM

STORY TOOLS

Wouldn't it be great to get your B-school questions answered directly by the dean, without even making an appointment? If you're applying to the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business, now you can -- sort of. To have a somewhat candid discussion with Dean Howard Frank, all you need is a low-end computer equipped with a sound card. A little patience is required, too (after all, deans do tend to be a bit verbose). You can chat with Dean Frank through an interactive CD-ROM called Meet the Dean, the school's newest marketing tool, and the latest in a growing list of technological innovations MBA programs are introducing to appeal to their top applicants.

With applications soaring for most of the 1990s (Business Week's Top 50 schools received a record 109,954 apps in 1998, and early signs indicate that 1999 will surpass that), B-schools have had the luxury of tightening their admissions standards. Explains Frank, "Every school has the same goal: to enroll better and better students each year." But that's a sticking point for up-and-coming B-schools that don't yet have the name recognition of a Harvard, Wharton, or Stanford. Maryland B-school is a case in point: While the number of applications to The Smith School has doubled over the last eight years, to 1,941 in 1998, and the percentage of students accepted has fallen, the percentage of accepted applicants who actually enroll (known as a school's yield rate) has stubbornly held steady at roughly 53%. Harvard has the highest yield rate at 87%, followed by Stanford's 80%.

This explains the rush to build image, increase visibility, and plain show off by launching interactive CD-ROMs and a spate of other technologically driven programs -- many of which are being delivered over the Internet. In March, SMU's Cox School of Business conducted the first live Webcast, a two-hour virtual tour and information session that was targeted at 100 of its top admitted students. MIT's Sloan School of Management has run six private online chat sessions for its prospective students, allowing them to grill current students and faculty members. And the University of California at Berkeley's Haas School provides an interactive Web tour of the school, MBA life, and the surrounding California area.

"MORE MEMORABLE." Maryland's Meet the Dean CD, which has been shipped to a total of 90 prospective students since late March, is special because of its advanced speech-recognition capability -- a first for a B-school. "Often, our short conversations with prospective students are more memorable for them than sifting through a packet of glossy brochures," says Frank.

Through a program named Virtual Conversations developed by Bethesda-based Interactive Drama Inc., CD users are able to essentially steer their conversations toward their specific, individual topics of interest, mimicking a natural conversation. The CD opens with a list of subjects to talk about with Dean Frank -- including the curriculum, the faculty, the admissions process, student activities, and the dean's background -- with a digitized image of the dean's face eagerly awaiting your next move. After clearly uttering your choice into a microphone (provided by the school as part of the CD-ROM package), the dean flies into full motion, attempting to quench your curiosity (in fairly broad terms).

After an answer, the program selects three subsequent topics using "intelligent prompting," which infers what you would like to hear about next based on your prior selections. For example, I asked Frank to "tell me about the Maryland faculty." Next, I chose to learn about how "Maryland compares to Wharton." And after hearing about Wharton's teaching excellence -- which Maryland aspires to attain shortly, my next choice unearthed that Maryland plans to hire over 30 top-notch faculty in the next two years. "We tried to make it as close to what you'd ask the dean as possible," says Frank. And, for the most part, I found my questions answered (though again, in general terms). Moreover, I had very little problem "conversing" with the dean. To round out the CD's package, users can also take a two-minute virtual tour of the school or sit through a recording of a stuffy television interview.

BASIC STUFF. The school has been careful to keep the technological requirements for using Meet the Dean to a minimum. The CD is designed to work on a Windows-based, Pentium 155 megahertz computer or higher, with 32 megabytes of RAM and a soundcard. "If you've bought a computer in the last 6 to 12 months, you shouldn't have a problem," says Beth Wade, Maryland's assistant dean of external relations.

Meet the Dean cost nearly $100,000 to develop, but that's tiny compared to the school's roughly $1 million to $2 million total marketing budget. Still, maintains Frank, "we're not looking at it from a cost savings standpoint. We're trying to improve the competitive position of the school."

Indeed, since Frank became dean in 1997, Maryland has been actively promoting itself as an up-and-coming B-school with a strong technological bent. Prior to his arrival at Maryland, Frank oversaw the one of the world's largest information technology budgets as the director of the IT office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In the 1970s, the telecommunications consulting firm he cofounded contracted with the U.S. government to develop what is now known as the Internet.

REACHING THE TOP. After two years of Frank's leadership, the school's largest academic department is now decision and information technologies. And in 1998, students and employers voted Maryland into Business Week's Top 25 (it landed at No. 22) for the first time in the school's history.

Though Maryland officials won't be able to say what Meet the Dean's effect will be until the first day of the school year, they're hoping it helps increase the school's yield rate by at least 5%. Anything higher would be "incredible," says Frank. The Virtual Conversation program will be back next fall. And Interactive Drama hopes to develop a Web version of Meet the Dean as soon as bandwidth increases to allow more seamless streaming video.

Looking back at Meet the Dean a few years from now, says Frank, "I think this [CD-ROM] will be revolutionary." There you have it, straight from the dean's mouth.