The college's new strategic plan will make personalized student services a priority, says Dean Misty Johanson
Dean Johanson chats with members of the college’s advisory council, which includes prominent alumni and business leaders.
Dean Johanson prepares for the college’s faculty and staff strategy
kick-off meeting in September with Professor of Management Erich
Dierdorff, co-chair of the college’s strategic planning committee.
Professor of Management Nezih Altay; Dean Misty Johanson; Kellstadt
Academic Success Office Administrative Assistant Karla Brooks, and
Assistant Dean for Financial Management Helen Conroy show their support
for the college’s strategic plan creation.
Tom Berry, finance professor and associate dean for faculty and student
success, and Dean Johanson prepare to attend DePaul’s 121st Academic
Convocation to kick off the school year this fall.
Dean Johanson addresses business alumni at the annual Driehaus College
of Business and Kellstadt Graduate School of Business fall reception in
September.
July marked the one-year anniversary of Misty M. Johanson’s tenure as leader of the Driehaus College of Business. She was recently named a “Notable Woman in Chicago Education” by Crain’s Chicago Business, which highlighted her role in promoting strategic enrollment growth, student success and industry-college engagement.
An award-winning teacher and prolific scholar, Johanson joined DePaul in 2009 to help establish the college’s School of Hospitality Leadership, which she directed for four years. She previously served as an associate dean of the college, overseeing areas that include academic quality, accreditation and alumni/industry relations.
In this excerpt from a Q&A in the college’s alumni magazine, Business Exchange, Dean Johanson looks back on her first year as dean and ahead at the college’s future, which will be guided by a new strategic plan that will be completed this fall.
How does your expertise in hospitality leadership and human resources influence your approach to leading the college as dean?
When you look at hospitality organizations, such as hotels, many offer similar products and experiences. The ones that succeed differentiate themselves by offering more personalized levels of service and value than their competitors, and by focusing on specific markets. We’re trying to do something similar at the college by transforming how we do business in higher education.
We’re moving from a transactional delivery of programs to a much more service-oriented model. We are focusing on delivering value and establishing long-term relationships with students to build a satisfying experience for them. This means personalizing our programs and services, as well as offering stackable degrees and professional education that serve students’ needs at various stages of their careers and lives. We’re building a portfolio of student segments we serve rather than focusing on maintaining a rigid portfolio of program offerings.
Our service orientation means that, for example, with our cohort MBA programs, instead of having separate people providing recruitment marketing, advising, development and coaching, we’re having a dedicated person provide all of these services for specific segments of students.
We’re also strengthening our relationships with industry to support this model. We are forming partnerships with companies and associations to deliver MBA and MS degree programs onsite for their employees. This serves both the employees’ career advancement goals and the organization’s workforce development plans.
At the undergraduate level, we are partnering with major Chicago employers to create mentoring and career development programs. This adds value for our undergraduate students because it provides experiential learning and skills that enable them to place in good positions after graduation, while also adding value for our partners who are seeking to access to career-ready graduates.
In short, we see ourselves as a concierge of education.
When a parent asks ‘Why should I send my son or daughter to study business at DePaul?’, how do you respond?
DePaul has an unbelievable business and liberal studies curriculum that provides analytical, technical and leadership skills. But other universities could say the same thing. So the question is, what differentiates us? What is our value proposition?
At the college we have an opportunity to add value through our centers and institutes. They have different missions and purposes, but most offer the opportunity to support the student and the student experience by engaging alumni and industry partners with students, faculty and the life of the college.
What we’re doing is developing new programming at these centers and institutes in the form of co-curricular plans for students that will go along with their curricular plans. These plans support what students are learning in the classroom with mentorships, internships and hands-on learning experiences involving our industry partners, and soft skills development.
The model for this is the Marriott Foundation Center for Student Development and Engagement at the School for Hospitality Leadership, which was endowed in 2016. Students take introductory classes in hospitality leadership, hotels, etc. while getting internship experience and skills development. They are learning skills such as how to get a job, how to review their résumés, how to make the 30-second elevator speech, etiquette training so they know how to properly dine at work events and use social media properly. As their academic scores grow and their internship experience deepens, the center matches students to additional soft skills training.
This has come to fruition beautifully; these students have extremely high learning outputs and extremely high placement rates because they are graduating with technical and analytical skills as well as career skills and experience. The center’s success also has helped us to expand the school’s advisory board to include the who’s who in the field because of the high caliber graduates we are producing.
Our plan is to expand this model to other relevant centers at the college. Our fundraising and engagement priorities are to seek support from alumni and donors who want to be part of these efforts to engage our students and faculty with industry and alumni through our centers. We’ve already had success creating two new student success hubs with the launch of the Keeley Center for Financial Services in our finance department and the Office of Student Success and Engagement at the School of Accountancy. Now we’re turning our attention to creating success centers in other areas, including real estate, marketing and leadership.
What are the highlights from your first year as interim dean and then dean?
In addition to the student success initiatives I mentioned earlier, we are focusing on innovative initiatives such as the recently launched Women in Entrepreneurship Institute. The institute supports women entrepreneurs through education, business plan competitions, and research into how to improve the investing climate for women-owned startups. It’s a great initiative that has already attracted support from an extremely strong board and we’re continuing to raise funds for it.
I’ve also made it a priority to support diversity and inclusion at our college. I’m reaching out to develop leadership opportunities for our women faculty and faculty of color.
This fall our enrollment was solid, supported by our strategies to build relationships with students and partner with companies to offer onsite graduate programs. The Doctorate in Business Administration just graduated its first class. We launched a new Master’s in Business Analytics degree this fall and enhanced our analytics course content throughout the curriculum to provide students with skills that are sought-after in the marketplace. We’re looking to create an analytics center.
It’s been a fantastic year with more to come.
What’s in store for the college in its new strategic plan, which will be completed for launch in January 2019?
Over the last year the university completed its strategic plan, Grounded in Mission, and did it differently than the university ever done before, not only setting baseline metrics and goals but also aligning dollars to support initiatives within the strategic plan.
At the college, I pulled together a group of advisory board members, who are alumni and industry leaders, students, faculty from all ranks, staff and college leadership to discuss how to do our strategic plan. With guidance from the president’s office, we built our framework based on the higher education challenges and opportunities that are happening not only in the business college but in higher education as a whole. We looked at challenges in the economy and factors such as there being fewer college-aged students in Illinois. We also looked at how DePaul is positioned — we need to compete with lower-priced public institutions as well as private universities that have similar academic profiles. We need to understand how this impacts DePaul and how we should position ourselves to add value through our strategic plan.
We came up with three defining pillars that are the basis of our plan — supporting academic excellence, engaging the Chicago business community and alumni, and elevating the reputation of the college. We’re focusing on our value proposition, and I believe we have a really great opportunity to address our challenges and create value through the greater service orientation and the student success centers mentioned earlier, among other strategies.
We’ve come up with six key initiatives, and this fall units throughout the college have been asked to create strategic tactics to carry out these initiatives, align with the pillars, and move us into the future.