May 26, 2026 · Episode 313
How Kogod's AI-First Business School Model Drove 40% Enrollment Growth in Three Years
37 Min · By Dr. Drumm McNaughton
Kogod integrated AI into every business major in under a year. Enrollment is up 40% and faculty adoption tops 90%
Most business schools are still forming committees to study AI. Kogod School of Business at American University formed one too, gave it six weeks and a five-page limit, and has since integrated AI into every department, every major, and every minor. The impact:
- Undergraduate enrollment is up 40% over three years.
- Applications are up 50%.
- More than 90% of faculty are using AI in the classroom.
- Bloomberg Businessweek called Kogod the first AI-first business school, and the program has been named among the top ten to watch two years running.
What makes learning about Kogod’s transformation useful to other higher ed leaders isn’t about AI technology itself (for a change). What makes this discussion valuable is how the school moved from a dean’s instinct that AI would matter to a fully embedded, faculty-driven transformation in under three years. The implementation is replicable, the governance approach worked within existing structures, and the enrollment results are measurable.
In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with returning guests David Marchick,Dean of the Kogod School of Business at American University, and Angela Virtu, Professor of IT and Analytics and Associate Director of Kogod’s AI Institute. Marchick came to the deanship from the private sector, having held senior roles at The Carlyle Group, the law firm Covington & Burling, and in both the Clinton and Biden administrations. Virtu was a data scientist across multiple startups before joining Kogod’s faculty. Together, they have led what the school’s award citation described as the most consequential transformation in business education.
A Conversation at a Cafe Started a Transformation
The initiative started before ChatGPT became a household name. Marchick, newly appointed as dean, was having coffee with a senior Google executive who offered to help. That connection led to Kent Walker, then president of Google, speaking at the school. Walker told the audience that AI would be as profound as fire, electricity, and the Industrial Revolution. Marchick’s reaction was characteristically pragmatic: even if that was a little hyperbolic, if it was one one-millionth true, AI was going to be big enough to act on.
So Marchick went to his faculty. They said they’d form a committee. His eyes rolled back and his stomach churned a little, by his own telling. He gave them six weeks and told them he wanted five pages, not a two-year study and a hundred-page report. The recommendation that came back was ambitious: infuse AI into everything. Every department, every major, every minor. Retrain the faculty. Be AI forward.
Culture Change Was the Real Transformation
Marchick pointed to a recent post citing a prominent Wharton professor who argued that AI transformation in organizations is about culture, not technology. That tracks with everything Kogod experienced. The school ran a combined top-down and bottom-up approach. Marchick brought the energy and the institutional permission from the dean’s office. Virtu and the faculty deans handled what she described as the nitty-gritty operational work: curriculum reform through the Educational Policy Committee, revised learning objectives, faculty training in large and small group settings, and constant socialization of what was working.
The tactical move that accelerated everything was leaning heavily into the school’s 14 core undergraduate curriculum course coordinators. Each one leads a foundational course taught by multiple faculty. Virtu’s team got these 14 coordinators energized about AI first. As they started using the tools and sharing what they learned, the faculty teaching alongside them began experimenting on their own. That experimentation spread into research, then into electives. Virtu described it as spreading like wildfire.
The adoption curve tells the story. Year one produced a handful of faculty volunteers. Year two reached 30 to 40% buying in. Year three hit a tipping point. Today, Kogod has stopped counting which courses include AI and started trying to count which ones don’t. Marchick called that a pretty good problem to have.
Marchick is open about what made this possible from his end. He came from the private sector. He doesn’t have a PhD, and he moved fast at Carlyle. He knew his strengths and weaknesses going in, and he made sure to build a team of faculty deans around him who were better than him at the aspects of the job he wasn’t built for. That self-awareness gave the initiative credibility with faculty who might otherwise have resisted a dean pushing the pace this hard.
The Role of the Educator Is Changing
Kogod is challenging the idea that a professor’s primary job is to stand at the front of a room and deliver content. Virtu described the shift as moving professors from lecturers to coaches. AI can curate a ton of high-quality content on its own, she noted. The professor’s job now is helping students figure out what to do with all the information at their fingertips and how to ask the right questions.
Tommy White, a Kogod fellow, built a course with no assigned readings and no textbook. Students get prompts and use AI to find their own readings, videos, and source material. Because everyone’s AI-generated content comes back slightly different, class discussions put students in the room with the same topic but different materials. The classroom runs on critical analysis and peer challenge, not shared memorization of the same assigned text.
Kelly Frias, a professor of marketing, teaches an advertising course filled with non-quantitative students from outside the business school. As one observer put it, these are dyed-hair, nose-ringed, tattooed students who never wanted to take a math course. By the end of the semester, they are programming and building functioning applications using AI. In December, Frias’s class delivered a working suite of tools to a real small-business client: a company selling college-branded apparel through brand ambassadors at 75 campuses. The students built social media content-creation tools for the ambassadors and a monitoring dashboard for the owner to compare campaign performance across schools. The client expected a written marketing plan. She got functioning software she could use in her business the next day.
McNaughton connected this to a concern he hears constantly from the market: there is so much angst right now about graduates not being ready for the workforce. What Kogod is producing goes well past readiness. Students are leaving with the ability to use the tools of the 21st century to identify problems, build solutions, and deliver working products, positioning them to be successful using AI across their entire careers.
A Scaffolded Curriculum That Builds AI Competency Over Four Years
Kogod rebuilt its undergraduate core curriculum with intentional scaffolding. First-year students get foundational AI literacy alongside introductory business courses. The emphasis at this stage is on understanding where AI fails and how not to use it. Marchick and Virtu were deliberate about this: they teach what’s wrong with AI before they teach what’s right. As Marchick put it, AI can be a collaborator, a partner, an assistant, and at some point it will be an agent. But a human has to be in the loop at the start and at the end. It cannot be a substitute.
Second-year coursework moves into domain-specific AI applications across marketing, finance, accounting, and analytics. Years three and four open into major-specific deep dives where students apply both their business knowledge and AI skills to advanced problems. The sequence wraps up with a fourth-year capstone that combines all three pillars: domain expertise, AI proficiency, and professional communication.
The school has also introduced an AI minor available to non-business students. Virtu sees particular promise in reaching pre-med and pre-law students, who would show up to professional school with an AI credential most of their peers won’t have. The minor extends Kogod’s investment beyond its own enrollment base and positions the business school as a university-wide resource.
Three Pillars: Fundamentals, AI Mindset, and Power Skills
Marchick described Kogod’s model as the combination of three elements. First, the fundamentals. Students still need to know accounting, marketing, and financial analysis. Second, AI as both a tool and a mindset. Marchick asked Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, which AI tool the school should be teaching. Smith’s answer: he wanted them using Microsoft products, of course, but the most important thing was having students feel comfortable experimenting, testing, and trying new tools. By the time they graduate and move through a career, the tools will have changed many times over. The durable skill is the mindset to keep learning.
Third, what Kogod calls power skills. The school moved away from calling them soft skills because the label undersells their weight. Oral communication, thinking on your feet, group collaboration, critical thinking. Marchick tells students he’d rather they mess up an oral presentation in college than in a job. These skills are embedded across the curriculum, built into courses at every level, not isolated in a single class.
The Assessment Problem No One Has Solved Yet
Virtu identified AI assessment as the next big rock Kogod is trying to move, and she was candid that every institution she’s spoken with says the same thing: we have no idea how to do this. The question has two layers. First, is AI integration helping students? The school has been embedding AI across the curriculum and now needs to figure out whether it’s working, and whether the impact can be quantified.
The second layer is whether AI itself can become part of how learning gets evaluated. Traditional methods rely on exams, projects, and knowledge-based assessments. Virtu is exploring whether AI can help faculty evaluate student learning in ways current methods can’t reach. Faculty stay central to the evaluation process. The difference is scale: AI can surface patterns across an entire cohort that individual reviewers would need weeks to identify.
McNaughton framed the broader shift through Bloom’s Taxonomy. The first level, knowledge and understanding, has been blown out of the water by AI. Students can retrieve information instantly. The value has moved to higher-order skills: analysis, evaluation, the ability to read something and determine whether it’s true. Kogod’s curriculum reflects that shift, but measuring it rigorously remains an open problem across all of higher education.
Measurable Results and a Bounce in Everyone’s Step
The enrollment numbers tell the undergraduate story clearly. Applications are up 50%. Enrollment is up 40% over three years. When Kogod hosts student and family webinars, AI is pretty much all they ask about. The graduate picture is harder. Graduate business education is under significant national pressure, particularly from declining international enrollment driven by visa constraints. Marchick noted that graduate business programs can be as much as 50% international, and every school in the country is feeling downward pressure. Kogod believes its AI positioning is producing better graduate outcomes than it would see otherwise, but the headwinds are real.
Beyond enrollment, the initiative has brought what Marchick called a positive halo effect. Front-page coverage in The Wall Street Journal, features in Bloomberg Businessweek, the Financial Times, and the Washington Business Journal. The school recruited six new AI-focused faculty members, close to 10% of its total faculty of about 85. One distinguished scholar told Marchick that AI is like having a PhD student: a wonderful tool for becoming more productive in research.
Ask Marchick and Virtu what they’re most proud of, though, and neither one talks about press coverage or enrollment numbers. They both point to the culture. Faculty are making stuff up and trying things. If something doesn’t work, they pivot. Experimentation and failure are encouraged. There’s a general energy and a bounce in everyone’s step. That willingness to experiment, more than any specific AI tool, is what they believe gives Kogod its real competitive edge.
Phase Two: Domain Apps, Student Portfolios, and Cross-Campus Reach
Kogod’s next priorities include scaling the AI minor across the university, deepening the assessment framework, and preparing for a shift in the AI landscape. Marchick expects the next wave will move from foundational platforms like ChatGPT and Gemini to domain-specific applications. Every function in society, marketing, accounting, podcasting, is going to have its own AI tool. The school wants students graduating with fluency in the tools specific to their career path, with six or seven domain apps on their resume.
The most ambitious idea on the table is a student portfolio model. A photography student, an art student, a dancer, all graduate with a portfolio of creative work. Marchick wants business students to graduate the same way: here are five apps I created. I can make stuff. I can figure out problems. I can create something. If you hire me, I’m going to be creative and entrepreneurial in figuring things out for your company. That portfolio becomes a hiring signal that a traditional transcript can’t replicate.
The Exponential Growth Problem Institutions Cannot Afford to Ignore
Virtu had a pointed message for institutional leaders who tried AI two years ago and walked away unimpressed. We are in a period of exponential technological growth, she said, and that’s really hard for people to wrap their heads around. The capabilities available today are a significant leap from what existed six months ago. Her advice was direct: if you haven’t tried it in the past six months, give it one more shot before making strategic decisions based on an earlier experience, because the updates that have happened in just the last few weeks represent really big strides.
Three Takeaways for University Presidents and Boards
- Culture first, training second, technology third. Kogod’s transformation succeeded because the dean’s office treated AI integration as a culture change initiative. Faculty training, small-group socialization, leaning into course coordinators as adoption catalysts, and an explicit tolerance for experimentation and failure created the conditions for organic, faculty-led innovation to spread like wildfire. Institutions that lead with a technology purchase and skip the cultural groundwork won’t see the same results.
- Teach what’s wrong with AI before teaching what’s right. Kogod’s curriculum starts with AI limitations, ethical risks, and failure modes. This builds faculty confidence and student skepticism at the same time. A human has to be in the loop at the beginning and at the end of every AI-assisted process. Institutions that lead with enthusiasm and skip the critical evaluation risk producing graduates who trust AI outputs without interrogating them.
- Do not wait for the technology to stabilize. AI capabilities are changing on a timeline measured in weeks. Institutions that hold off until they feel confident about a specific tool will find themselves permanently behind. Building the institutional capacity to adopt, experiment, and iterate as tools evolve is the competitive advantage. The mindset to keep learning, more than any single AI platform, is what Marchick and Virtu say employers and students are both responding to.
Quick Overview
- Kogod School of Business at American University integrated AI into every major, minor, and department in under a year
- A six-week faculty committee produced the foundational strategy in five pages
- Faculty adoption went from a handful of volunteers to over 90% in three years
- Undergraduate enrollment increased 40% and applications increased 50% over three years
- The transformation was driven by culture change, not technology procurement
- Fourteen core course coordinators served as the primary adoption lever, spreading experimentation like wildfire across the faculty
- The school teaches AI limitations and failure modes before teaching AI capabilities
- Professors are shifting from lecturers to coaches, with courses rebuilt around prompting, analysis, and peer discussion
- Non-quantitative students outside the business school are building functioning software applications using AI
- A scaffolded four-year curriculum builds AI literacy from foundational skills to domain-specific expertise to a capstone integration
- An AI minor is now available to non-business students across the university, with particular value for pre-med and pre-law tracks
- Kogod’s model combines three pillars: business fundamentals, AI mindset, and power skills including oral communication and critical thinking
- AI assessment is the next big challenge, and no institution has solved it yet
- The school plans to introduce student portfolios of AI-built applications as a hiring differentiator
- Leaders who tried AI two years ago and walked away unimpressed should try again; the technology has made significant strides in the past six months
About Our Guests
David Marchick is the Dean of the Kogod School of Business at American University, overseeing more than 2,000 students across both undergraduate and graduate degree programs. Since becoming Dean in August 2022, Kogod has launched initiatives in sustainability, AI, and entrepreneurship, set fundraising records, attracted the school’s largest undergraduate class, and nearly doubled its number of endowed chairs. Most recently, dean Marchick spearheaded an AI initiative that Times Higher Education’s Poets&Quants called the “most consequential AI transformation in business education.” Previously, Marchick served as COO of the U.S. Development Finance Corporation, where he supported global vaccine manufacturing during the Biden Administration. He also spent 12 years at the Carlye Group, where he served on the firm’s Management Committee.
Connect with David Marchick on LinkedIn
Angela Virtu teaches Business Analytics & AI at American University’s Kogod School of Business, with courses on technology, data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. As Associate Director of AU’s Institute for Applied AI, she helps lead the school’s AI strategy and spearheads faculty and staff training initiatives. Prior to academia, Angela developed AI/ML solutions for pre-IPO SaaS companies, driving organizational integration and measurable business impact.
Connect with Angela Virtu on LinkedIn
About the Host
Dr. Drumm McNaughton is the founder, CEO, and Principal Consultant at The Change Leader, Inc. A highly sought-after higher education consultant with 20+ years of experience, Dr. McNaughton works with leadership, management, and boards of both U.S. and international institutions. His expertise spans key areas, including accreditation, governance, strategic planning, presidential onboarding, mergers, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. Dr. McNaughton’s approach combines a holistic methodology with a deep understanding of the contemporary and evolving challenges facing higher education institutions worldwide to ensure his clients succeed in their mission.
Read the Podcast Transcript →
Transcript: Changing Higher Ed podcast 313
Introduction to Changing Higher Ed®
Welcome to Changing Higher Ed®, a podcast dedicated to helping higher education leaders improve their institutions. With your host, Dr. Drumm McNaughton, CEO of The Change Leader, a consultancy that helps higher ed leaders holistically transform their institutions. Learn more at changinghighered.com. And now, here’s your host, Drumm McNaughton.
[00:00:31] Welcome Back Guests
Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David. Today, I get the opportunity to welcome back David Marchick and Angela Virtu from American University in DC at the Kogod School of Business. David is the Dean there at Kogod, while Angela teaches business analytics and AI.
In January 2024, David and a committee of faculty members launched an initiative to integrate AI at the business school.
They established the initiative in six weeks, and in six months had incorporated AI into all majors at Kogod, ensuring all graduates know how to use AI platforms and tools ethically. These new AI-integrated majors launched in fall 2024 and have been universally accepted by faculty, students, and external stakeholders, including being named one of the top ten schools to watch two years and running.
David and Angela join me today to talk about the changes that have happened, along with where they’re going and how you can and need to implement these changes at your institution. David, Angela, welcome to the program, or should I say welcome back to the program.
David Marchick: very much.
Drumm McNaughton: I’m looking forward to a good conversation and hearing what Kogod has been doing in the last year and a half since you were guests on the program. At that point, you had just started or was right in the middle of an initiative converting your courses over to be AI with a focus on, using it throughout. A lot of water’s gone underneath that bridge, and you guys are doing fabulously. Before we get into it, please give us your backgrounds, if you would. Remind our guests, where you came from and what you do.
David Marchick: You start, Angela.
[00:02:19] Meet Angela Virtu
Angela Virtu: Hi. So, I’m Angela Virtu. I’m a professor in the IT and analytics department here at Kogod and the Associate Director of our AI Institute. And before I joined Kogod in this professor role, I was back in industry being a data scientist for a whole bunch of startups.
Drumm McNaughton: Wonderful.
[00:02:35] Meet Dean Marchick
David Marchick: Dave Marchick, I’m the Dean here. My job’s to support people like Angela, be their cheerleader, and I’ve had three different careers, I was in the government for Clinton and Biden, I was a lawyer, partner at a law firm called Covington & Burling, one of the leading law firms in the world, and then I was one of the senior people at The Carlyle Group, which is a big investment and private equity firm, and happy to be doing mission-oriented work to support young people.
Drumm McNaughton: Great. Thank you so much.
[00:03:06] How Initiative Began
Drumm McNaughton: A little bit of background on the initiative. I’m sorry, I’m just jumping right in here because I’m so excited about this stuff. Tell us a little bit about Kogod and how you got started with AI initiative, some of the things that you did, et cetera.
[00:03:21] Google Wake Up Call
David Marchick: So this actually started at a cafe about a mile and a half away when I first became Dean, I was talking to a friend of mine named Karan Bhatia, he’s one of the top guys at Google. And we’ve just known each other forever and support each other’s careers and wonderful guy. And he said, “Well, okay, how can I help you?”
And I said, “I’m not a technical person”. Angela actually knows what she’s doing. I said, “I don’t know anything about AI, and I think it seems like it’s going to be big.” This was prior to ChatGPT, blowing up. And he said, “Well, I’ll help you.” And what he did is he came to the school and spoke, and he also brought a colleague of his, the president of Google, Kent Walker.
And Kent basically said, “AI is going to be as profound as fire, electricity, as the Industrial Revolution.” And he talked about its impact, and I walked away from that meeting going “All right, let’s say that that’s a little hyperbolic, but if it’s one one-millionth true, AI is going to be big, so we have to do something about it.”
[00:04:22] Six Week Committee Sprint
David Marchick: And I went to our faculty, not being a technical person, I said, “Let’s do something about this.” And they said, “All right, we’ll form a committee.” And I kind of– my eyes rolled back and maybe stomach churned a little. I said, “Okay. Committee, let’s give them six weeks and they can come back with five pages. I don’t want a two-year committee and, a hundred-page report.”
So they came back and basically said, “Let’s infuse AI into everything we do, into each program, major, minor, each department, so marketing, analytics, finance, et cetera, and let’s retrain our faculty, and let’s be AI forward.” And we’ve done that. And Angela really has been one of the key catalysts. She’s trained our faculty. She’s driven the culture.
[00:05:14] Faculty Adoption Tipping Point
David Marchick: And first year we probably had a few hands up for volunteers among faculty. Second year, we had thirty or forty percent of our faculty kind of buying in. And then third year, we had a tipping point, and now we’re ninety percent of our faculty are using AI in the classroom and it’s revolutionized the way that we’re teaching, and students are learning.
And we won an award last year for the best AI program in the country, and the citation said that we had undertaken the most consequential transformation in business education and really proud of that. And Angela has really been one of the key leaders in this and she can talk about it more than I can.
[00:05:59] Governance and Culture
Drumm McNaughton: But Angela, before we get to you, because I really want to hear about this, I want to hear more about how you navigated through shared governance with this. Because I am sure, and I’m sure Angela
David Marchick: be-being
Drumm McNaughton: on the other side of the coin, you will have seen a lot of the what needed to be done to get this through faculty and get to that tipping point.
David Marchick: I’m going to– Let me give you very brief, and then Angela can talk about this better than I can. It was both a top-down and bottom-up strategy. There was a post on X yesterday about AI, and it cited a very prominent professor from Wharton who said, “AI transformation in organizations is not about technology, it’s about culture.”
And I think the most important thing we did was change the culture, and Angela can talk better about that.
Drumm McNaughton: Yes, please.
[00:06:57] Change Management Playbook
Angela Virtu: So to Dave’s earlier point, I think a lot of our early momentum was really coming from the top down, right? Dave would come in, he would energize the entire group, talk about this really big picture idea of how we want to start thinking about using AI. But at the end of the day, it’s a whole bunch of change management to actually encourage our professors to engage with this work and then do all of the EPC actions and actions for curriculum reform and learning objectives and all the nitty-gritty operational stuff to actually go from this big picture idea to actually doing it.
And so in addition to all of the trainings and socialization, both big and small group, one of the key things that we did is we really relied heavily on our core undergraduate curriculum course coordinators. So we have about 14 classes with 14 leads, one for each of those classes. And we leaned pretty heavily into them in order to have them get more energized with using AI within their core course.
Because then as we then expanded out to all of the other professors who are also teaching that same course, and they could start using AI, and maybe they then start using AI within their research and they start getting more comfortable with the technology, we then kind of like wildfire have the support to, to have that cultural change.
Drumm McNaughton: Yes.
[00:08:17] Moving Fast In Academia
Drumm McNaughton: And I understand that, getting to that tipping point from a change management perspective, but what intrigued me was, David, you said you gave the faculty six weeks to come back to you, which is almost unheard of for a faculty mi- committee to come up with something like that. Did you have to provide any stick and carrot, or did you just say, “This is what we’re going to and go there?
A lot of it had to be top-down, but you had to get the buy-in to do it as well.
David Marchick: It’s a really good question. And I think that probably– I come from the private sector, I’m not an academic, I don’t have a PhD around my business degree, and we move fast at Carlyle. So I’m sure that the people on the other– As much as my eyes rolled to the back of my head when they said, “We’re going to form a committee,” I’m sure their eyes rolled to the back of their head when I said, “Okay, you have six weeks.”
[00:09:15] Building The Right Team
David Marchick: One of the things that, one of the things that I did when I was recruited for this job is I think any good leader is aware of their strengths and weaknesses. And when I interviewed for the job, I said, “Here are the things I can do well, but I’m not an academic. I’ve never managed faculty, and I want to make sure I have a team of people around me that are better than me at the aspects of the job that I’m not good at.”
And luckily, I have colleagues, Parth Von David, Ayman Omar, and Casey Evans Who are the three deans, we’ve added one other, Sarah Matty, the three faculty deans in the dean’s office with responsibility for faculty, undergrad, grad, and then now special projects and new strategic initiatives.
And they were– They’re good partners, and they’re like, “Okay, this is what he wants to do. Let’s figure out a way to do it within our governance.” And it worked. So I feel lucky to be at a school where the faculty is really, really innovative and creative. And, as Angela can tell you a little more, there’s been so much change and adoption that we can’t even keep track anymore.
So we used to count the classes that had AI, and now we have to try to cl- count the classes that don’t have it. And I actually asked Angela before you got on, like, “What’s going on in this part and this part?” We actually don’t know because there’s so much innovation, and we’re having a hard time keeping up.
That’s a pretty good problem to have.
Drumm McNaughton: That is a darn good problem to have. And so thank you, I appreciate that because one of the big challenges that I see in most organizations is faculty want to move slower, they want to study things more. So, having the leadership in place and to be able to drive this, I is critical.
[00:11:18] Three Big Shifts
Drumm McNaughton: Angela, you started to get into the three big changes that you’ve seen going forward. Culture change is absolutely one that, that old saying, And gosh, and I can’t even remember who said it. Culture eats strategy for breakfast and lunch and dinner in many institutions.
David Marchick: Drucker.
Drumm McNaughton: Thank you. I knew somebody would know it who was in a business school.
So culture change, in the undergraduate curriculum was critical. There’s some other critical things that have been done to embed it, to make it work as it’s supposed to
Angela Virtu: Yes. So culture change I think is the biggest one because without that we never would have had the catalyst to actually achieve the other two.
[00:12:07] Measuring AI Impact
Angela Virtu: The next one, which is our next really big project that we’re tackling, is actually figuring out the AI assessment piece. And this AI assessment piece is really two different components because right now we’ve been using AI in all of our classes and we now need to figure out is it working? Is it helping our students? Is it hurting our students? And can we quantify that impact?
So first layer of the AI assessment is just is the way that we’re bringing AI into our classrooms and into the curriculum beneficial? The second layer to this is we want to now start leveraging AI, not just as this learning outcome, but as a new tool or new methodology to help us assess that learning process.
And so that’s very much an untapped market right now. I think all of the institutions that we’ve talked to in the past, they all are like, “We have no idea how to do this.” And so that’s our next big rock that we’re really trying to tackle is getting some more grounding on this concept of AI assessment.
David Marchick: So, pardon me if I’m being a little facetious. You’re going to use AI to see if AI is actually working? Is that… That can’t be
Angela Virtu: Potentially. Potentially.
[00:13:18] Using AI For Assessment
Angela Virtu: So one of the things that we’re looking into is right now our traditional assessment methods of these learning outcomes are things like exams, very knowledge-based, maybe a project. And so one of the techniques that we’re trying to assess is there a way that we could not AI-proof those assessment methods, but is there a newer way where we could have AI help us assess that student learning?
It’s not to say that they’re going to replace teachers at the moment. It’s not going to replace all of our grading, but is there a way that we could put it in that process to help us evaluate how are we doing?
Drumm McNaughton: Fascinating. Obviously, I don’t get this excited about a lot of technology stuff, but this one really has me excited.
Angela Virtu: Yes. It’s at the cutting edge for sure.
David Marchick: Yes.
[00:14:00] From Lecturer to Coach
Drumm McNaughton: And then when we spoke a couple of days ago, you told me about the third big change is how you develop and you teach courses. Tell me more.
Angela Virtu: So we at the moment are really challenging the idea of the role of the educator in the classroom. Where we’re really trying to move away from this lecture-based classroom style, to having the professors become more of a coach. And so we have one incredible fellow named Tommy White at our institution, and he has completely developed a course that has no readings, no textbooks.
And in lieu of that, he gives all of the students prompts, and he has each student go through this entire prompting exercise to get readings and get videos, and everyone is going to get slightly different readings and materials. And then when they come to class, they have the same topic, but different articles, and they can get together and discuss and challenge each other’s ideas.
So he’s done that at like a 100 level class. And then in one of his other classes that are entrepreneurship based, he’s literally having students use the AI prompts to help them refine a business case, build a business, and basically create their own business from scratch. Dave might want to add something else to that.
[00:15:15] Non Business Students Coding
David Marchick: The other cool thing we’re seeing is, this is one of my main priorities for this year, is non-business students taking classes and becoming the equivalent of technical. So we have a professor, Kelly Frias, who’s a professor of marketing. She teaches the– an advertising marketing course, which has been taught forever at business schools.
But this is not your father’s advertising marketing course. It’s mostly non-business, non-quantitative. Someone said it was like, dyed hair, nose ringed, tattooed students. They’re non-quantitative, and Kelly has them programming and building a portfolio of apps, in class to create social media campaigns, to measure social media impact.
And I went to the final presentation of the class in December, and I was just blown away. These are all students who basically said, “I never want to take a math course. I never want to do anything quantitative.” And they’re leaving the class knowing how to program and write software using AI, and it’s just incredible.
[00:16:32] Real Client App Portfolio
Drumm McNaughton: Give me an example of an outcome from that class.
David Marchick: Okay, so the traditional advertising marketing class, as your final project, you might be asked to write a marketing campaign or conduct some basic consumer research. That’s your final project. Here, Kelly went way beyond that. You have to develop a marketing campaign, you have to do consumer research, but you’re actually creating your own software or apps to solve the problem that you were asked to solve.
So it was– it went way beyond just writing a piece of paper it was actually implementing a tool, and she brought in a small business client for the class. , This small business kind of sold T-shirts and sweatshirts and pajamas to college students, and they had ambassadors at seventy-five college campuses who would promote their clothes.
It might have Tulsa or, Miami University on the sweatshirt. And it– The students created tools for the brand ambassadors to create and post social media postings, and then they created an application for the owner of it to monitor– a dashboard to monitor the effectiveness, of amount, quality, and impact of the social media campaigns so she could compare, “Oh, this person at the University of Georgia is doing a great job, but this person at X university is not doing as much.”
And so they delivered these tools to the client for the class, and the client was blown away. She’s like: “I thought I was going to get, a piece of paper that said, ‘Here are some things you should think about for advertising,’ and they actually created a tool that I’m going to use in my business.” It’s just incredible.
Drumm McNaughton: That is incredible, especially with, and I’m going to take it to a big picture perspective. Right now, there is so much angst in the marketplace about graduates not being ready to join the workforce, et cetera, and what you’re doing is going way beyond that. You’re basically training them how to use the tools of the 21st century to get beyond, those basic level skills.
You’re really training them and positioning them to be successful using AI in their entire career.
David Marchick: Exactly.
[00:19:14] Mindset And Power Skills
David Marchick: And I think what we’re doing is we’re taking– we’re combining three elements. The fundamentals of every subject. So you still need to know accounting and marketing. You need to know the fundamentals of those classes. Then you add AI to that, and it’s not just about the AI tool, it’s about being AI curious and having an entrepreneurial mindset to figure stuff out.
So we had Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft here, and I asked him this question. I said, “Well, which AI tool should we be using? Should we be using Chat? Should we be using Perplexity, Copilot?” And he says, “Well, of course, I want you to use Microsoft products. But the most important thing is actually not what product they use. It’s having them feel comfortable experimenting and testing and trying new tools, because by the time they graduate and by the time they’re in the workforce, and then over the– their life in the workforce, the tools are going to change. So it’s really about the mindset.”
And third is We have doubled down on what traditionally were thought of as soft skills, but now we call them power skills, which are oral communication, the ability to think on your feet, the ability to work in groups, critical thinking, all the stuff that we all have done for our professional lives that, when I was in school, I never had any projects to learn with other people or to work in groups or to oral presentations.
Those skills are lifetime skills, and I tell students I’d rather have you mess up an oral presentation in college than in a job.
Drumm McNaughton: Yes. I get it. And you’ve got these embedded in all your courses. Has this changed how you can look at gen– GE courses, general education, embedding that in there? because you’re talking about all those different skills that you would learn in GE, not necessarily working in teams, but critical thinking, analyzing data, et cetera. Is this changed the structure and the pedagogy your general education classes?
[00:21:23] Scaffolded AI Curriculum
Angela Virtu: So I don’t know if it’s necessarily changed the general education courses, but I think the way that we’re thinking about it from the business school perspective is how we can build these AI and communication skills scaffold throughout the student experience. So alongside with our really big AI push, we’ve updated all of the undergraduate core curriculum.
So our first year students, it’s a combination of foundational business skills and business courses, but it’s also building in the foundation of their AI literacy. So like we teach them how to use AI, how to be skeptical of AI, how to use it, how not to use it, and really setting the tone. In year two, we then go deeper in those core business skills while also going deeper into AI.
So now it’s not the intro course, but now it’s domain specific where we can think about marketing and finance and accounting and how AI plays into those domains. And then when you get to years three and four, it’s really an open field for the students where they’re done with their foundational AI and undergrad business courses, and that’s where they can go into their major specific deep dives in the domain areas that they’re interested in from their knowledge bases, from their AI infusion of those courses.
And then we end with the fourth year capstone, where it’s all three of those pillars combined into one big project where they work on their communication skills, they work on their knowledge of their finance, accounting, marketing, and then they also layer AI into that project.
Drumm McNaughton: Wow. Wow. that’s, that is amazing. And I– You know, my mind is just spinning at this point with the possibilities. Going to a three-one bachelor’s, master’s, looking at changing around the entire GE course format to where you can actually go into learning some of the core skills that you need to under the guise of your GE courses and a three-year bachelor’s.
I, I see all sorts of possibilities with this. I’m sorry, I’m just really excited.
Angela Virtu: And that’s one of the things we’re really excited about too, is we’ve actually introduced an AI minor. So we’re now actually trying to use some of our courses that we’ve developed to really branch out to the broader university, because one of the biggest areas we see AI transforming is the healthcare space.
And so if we could get like our biology students or pre-med students to take this AI badge, like they would be more than ready for their med school applications when they get there.
Drumm McNaughton: Wow. And of course, AI will fill your med school application, right? No, I’m just kidding.
David Marchick: There could be a draft.
You have to have a human.
Drumm McNaughton: That’s– You bring up a great point, David. AI is not the end-all to be-all. It still needs the human intervention. It still needs the critical thinking that a human can do.
AI isn’t necessarily there.
David Marchick: Correct. And I think that one of the things that Angela and Dean Casey Evans designed is we start our teaching on AI by teaching what’s wrong with AI and how not to use it before we teach what’s right and how to use it properly. So we believe that AI can be a collaborator, a partner, an assistant. At some point, it’ll be an agent.
But ultimately, it has– a human has to be in the loop before, and it has to be in the loop at the end, that AI cannot be a substitute, but it can be an additional tool.
Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm. Again, I am just blown away.
[00:25:03] Results Next Steps Wrap
Drumm McNaughton: Now, you’ve seen some great results from all this. You’d mentioned, named to the top 10 schools to watch for two years in a row. What’s it done to your enrollment?
David Marchick: So our undergraduate enrollment has taken off. We’re up forty percent over the last three years. Our applications are up fifty percent. There’s a lot of excitement. And when we do, student webinars and, welcome students and families, this is pretty much all they ask us about. It’s really created a buzz.
Grad enrollment is d- the grad business environment is very tough right now because of a variety of reasons, including the kind of downward pressure on visas. So grad business education is heavily international, as much as fifty percent. So, we are– every school in the country is seeing some negative downward pressure in grad.
We’re seeing more positive than we would otherwise without AI, but grad is much– it’s a much more challenged market.
Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm. And I can easily see that with all the things that are going on out there. You had mentioned before, 94%, 90-plus percent of faculty, of professors are using the tools, and 100% of your courses have AI incorporated in them. How has this changed the way students learn?
Angela Virtu: I think it’s put a lot more ownership on the student to dig deeper and invest investigate in a way that it wasn’t before. So in the example I was talking about how Tommy’s been structuring his class, like knowledge memorization isn’t necessarily the end all be all that it used to be, right?
And our jobs as the professor isn’t necessarily just curating content, right? AI can curate a ton of really high quality content for you. And so now the skill set is how do we sift through all of this information that’s at our fingertips, and how do we know what to do with it and how to ask the right questions.
And so I think it’s challenging the students in slightly different ways than maybe perhaps it did five years ago, if we think more traditional academia, where you could just take your notes from the professor and read the PowerPoint slides or the readings and, like, you’re done, and you don’t really need to think about all of the other interconnectiveness.
So I think more of the power is on the students now, which is both scary and empowering at the same time.
Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm. I’m reverting back to my old faculty, assessment, Bloom’s Taxonomy, level one, knowledge and understanding. You’ve essentially blown that out of the water. People need to be able to read something and say, “Yes, this is true,” or, “It’s not true.” But you’re– the tools that you’re teaching folks and that they’re learning is taking them right into the analysis portion, and that’s where the real critical thinking comes in.
Does that make sense?
Angela Virtu: Yes, I would agree
Drumm McNaughton: So, those are some of the things, changing the pedagogy, faculty, your enrollment’s up. What are some of the other positive results that you’ve seen from incorporating the AI as much as you have?
David Marchick: Well, I think it’s brought a lot of, positive halo effect to the school. We’ve had wonderful press coverage, front page of The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, business Week called us the first AI first business school. We were featured just the last week in the Financial Times, Washington Business Journal.
So, it’s brought a lot of positive, exposure. We’ve recruited six AI faculty, so that’s been a significant investment. We have, eighty-five-ish faculty, so, almost ten percent of our newest faculty are AI focused. It’s enhanced the productivity of our scholars, so they’re using AI to do, you know, research.
I was talking to one professor today who’s a very distinguished scholar, and he said, AI is like having a PhD student in some ways. It’s wonderful to help me be more productive.”
The other thing is that I think that there’s just a general level of enthusiasm and energy and a bounce in everybody’s step at school, the faculty, the staff, and the students around what we’re doing. We feel like we’re at the cutting edge, and we’re honestly making stuff up as we go along. And that gets back to the point that Angela said at the beginning about culture.
The thing we’re most proud of is the cultural change, because our faculty are just making stuff up and trying things, and if it doesn’t work, they just pivot. So we’ve created a culture where experimentation and failure are encouraged, and if something doesn’t work, just try something new.
Drumm McNaughton: That is incredible, and that is one of the keys to a great entrepreneurial college is the willingness to fail, learn from your mistakes, and move on.
David Marchick: 100%.
Drumm McNaughton: So When we spoke before, you said you were hitting scale and you’re going into phase two. So what’s next? I mean, you’ve got all these accolades. Things are really going well. You’ve changed how students learn, how faculty teach. These are all incredible things that are needed in higher ed. What’s next?
David Marchick: So we’re thinking about a few things, and we’re working on a few things for this year. Number one I mentioned, which is really creating opportunity– Or Angela mentioned, creating opportunities for non-business students to, to get a minor certificate or badge in AI. So, you’re a public policy or political science student, and you get a minor in AI. You’re going to be pre-med or pre-law, you get a minor in AI. So you go into those professional schools having AI skills.
Number two is the point that Angela mentioned, which is around assessment of learning outcomes, so learning about AI and learning with AI. We are working a lot with a lot of the leading technology companies on new experiments, on disseminating best practices. And then as technology changes, right now, the last few years everybody’s been focused on the foundational technologies, the infrastructure technologies, ChatGPT, Gemini. Now you’re going to see the proliferation of domain-specific apps, , in marketing, in accounting. There’s going to be a podcast AI tool. Every different function in society is going to have its own AI tool, and we want to introduce those into the class so that- When a student graduates and wants to go in to be a podcaster, they have six or seven different podcast apps on their resume.
And then the other thing we’re toying with is can we create a structure where at the end of when a student finishes school, they have a portfolio of AI tools they’ve created in the same way that a photography student, an art student, a dancer has a portfolio that they can show of their creative works.
How cool would it be for a business student to be able to have the fundamentals of business, AI, all the professionalism communication skills we’re teaching, plus they can say, here’s five apps that I’ve created to show future employers that I can make stuff. I can figure out problems. I can create something. And if you hire me, I’m going to be creative and entrepreneurial in figuring stuff out for the company in which I work.
Drumm McNaughton: Wow. You’re on the cusp of reinventing education. As we used to say in the Navy, Bravo Zulu. Kudos to you.
David Marchick: Thank you very much. I’m not doing much. It’s really my job is to empower people like Professor Virtu who actually knows what she’s doing.
Drumm McNaughton: Well, it takes a good leader to be able to do that. So not only to you, Angela, kudos, but David, you as well. You guys have done something incredible here, and I just hope that there are more institutions who can learn from what you’ve done and go in their own directions with it.
David Marchick: Thank you for having us back.
Drumm McNaughton: My pleasure. Three takeaways for presidents and boards. What do they need to know in this new AI age that if they want to establish programs, they’ve got to do it?
David Marchick: Culture, training, technology. What do you think, Angela?
Angela Virtu: I agree. The only other thing, and maybe this is more of a tip, I’ve been hearing a lot of chirps lately in my circles of people who’ve tried AI, two years ago, and they weren’t super impressed with it, or it didn’t work, or they weren’t happy with it. And we’re really in this period of exponential technological growth, which is really hard for us to wrap our heads around, like what that means.
And so if you are one of those people who are just a little disillusioned with the technology, give it one more try if you haven’t tried it in the past six months, because all of the updates that have happened last week, two weeks, six weeks, not that long ago, has like really big strides in what you can do with the technology now. And I think that might help broaden your horizons in like what’s possible.
Drumm McNaughton: Great. Thank you. What’s next for you? What’s next for Kogod besides what else you’ve said?
David Marchick: Well, we are intensely focused on four or five areas, AI, entrepreneurship, sustainability. We’re starting a new sports management program. And the main thing is to help our students be successful. That’s what we wake up every day feeling inspired and motivated by the mission, which is knowledge creation and helping our students.
Drumm McNaughton: Great. Well, David, Angela, thank you so much for being back on the show. You couldn’t tell I didn’t enjoy this, I was just– I’m just over the moon with what you guys are doing. I look forward to hearing more about it in another year, two years, see where you’ve gone from here.
David Marchick: Thanks so much, Drumm. Thanks for having us, and thanks for all what you do.
Drumm McNaughton: Thank you.
Thanks for listening today, and a special thank you to my guests, David Marchick and Angela Virtu. Folks, it was great having you back on the program. I look forward to the next time we get to talk about AI and all the great things that have happened at Kogod. To my listeners, thanks again for tuning in.
See you next week.
