John Duggan, Dean, Leo J. Meehan School of Business – Stonehill College
School rankings are becoming more focused on value-add and return on investment – and Stonehill College is climbing higher in those rankings. “Students are leaving with a degree that is valuable and that provides them a pathway to financial growth and also to personal growth,” John Duggan, dean of the Leo J. Meehan School of Business at Stonehill College, told Invest:.
What are your key priorities as the new dean of the business school?
My priorities are strengthening our relationships with the business community – local, regional, and national. We have a lot of good, ongoing relationships with our undergraduate and graduate school programs, and we make sure that we can leverage those for the best outcomes for our students while meeting the needs of the business community.
What are some of the key achievements or milestones for the School of Business, and also for the university in the last year?
We’ve redesigned our graduate programs in marketing and data analytics, creating a variety of pathways for those looking to enhance their skills. The business school has two new undergraduate majors coming on board this coming fall. Our business analytics major and our talent and human resource management program are a response to industry needs and the pathways that our students are finding in the job market. We have so many students and alumni in human resources that we wanted to make sure that we were meeting the needs of our employer partners. We also have some great relationships with regional economic partners like the Mass Fintech Hub. We hosted the Fintech Bootcamp here this past spring. We have faculty on staff who are also Small Business Administration SCORE mentors, mentoring startup businesses. We have been integrating our community and business partnerships into everything we do for our business students, leveraging that to enhance our students’ experience and outcomes.
What are the key partnerships you have in place with businesses?
One of the main ways that we engage with businesses is through our senior strategy capstone course, where students engage in real-world business consulting projects. We work with local and regional banks, nonprofit institutions, and business community partners. That’s a great opportunity for our students to showcase their talent and what they’ve learned over their time at Stonehill, and also for our business partners to have a first look at the talent that’s on the market. These students are presenting their findings from their consulting projects. They’re presenting to executives from these companies and getting that one-on-one discussion with executives and people who are in hiring positions. That helps our industry partners find high-quality talent, as well as highlighting for us what their needs are in the workplace.
In which sectors do you see the most opportunity for growth?
In Massachusetts, the healthcare industry is significant with a lot of needs across several disciplines. We have a healthcare management program at the Meehan School of Business that has been very successful. It’s a certified undergraduate program, one of very few that is AUPHA-certified. Our healthcare management students do 400-hour internships that are required for their majors making them industry ready from the day they graduate.
Financial services is another top industry in Massachusetts, and the fintech area is sparking growth and innovation in that space.
Those two places are big opportunities for our students, and opportunities for our school and faculty to work with those industries.
How are you adapting to changes in student demographics?
We try to meet students where they are, and that starts with bringing them in and onboarding them as first-year students or transfer students. Even graduate students are finding their way to us in all different parts of their lives. We want to get to know them and to provide the resources that are necessary to help them succeed. One of the great things about Stonehill is that we are a smaller institution; we do have that personal touch with our students. We want to know what they want, and what they need to succeed, and focus on providing not just the educational framework for them to do that, but also the mentoring, support, and networking that we can provide to give them a step up in the job market.
How are you incorporating innovation and technology into your experience from an educational standpoint?
Generative AI has impacted every industry. Our faculty are focused on not just utilizing the tools, but also providing our students with a grounding in the tool so that they can showcase what their value adds to the job market; not just being able to plug something into ChatGPT but making sure that they are adding that human touch, that analysis, that perspective, that focus that the tools don’t have.
From a faculty standpoint, we are integrating various analytics platforms into our courses, from Power BI to Python to SAS and augmented reality, as opportunities for students to engage in learning and coursework in different ways.
It is important to first engage with the students and to make sure that they’re well-prepared when they leave here. We don’t want to lose focus on the fundamentals that students are going to need in the workplace, but we do want to provide them that step up into what they’re going to need as the business grows and integrates these technologies even more.
How is the school providing an affordable option for students in the region?
We are competitive in cost. Stonehill is supportive of students with generous institutional scholarships and financial aid. We are focused on providing a pathway to higher education for our community. One of the things that we’ve done well is not just to try to remain affordable, but also to be a value-added institution.
As the college ranking systems have changed to focus more on value add and return on investment, we’ve immediately seen Stonehill rise higher in those rankings because we do have that history and tradition and a continuing focus on making sure that our students are leaving here with a degree that is valuable and that provides them a pathway to financial and personal growth. We want our students to not just be good employees, but to be good people.
What are your top priorities for the next two to three years? What is your outlook for the school of business and the college?
We have a lot of growth opportunities in the graduate space. Stonehill has a relatively new focus on graduate programs, and we’ve seen a lot of success over the past two years there. We’ll continue to see that as we expand those programs.
For the business school particularly, it’s really about meeting the needs of the industry and making sure that we are staying agile, competitive, and that we are staying in touch with the needs of our employer partners. We want to make sure that we are not just a place for industry to hire people, but also to make relationships and to create those networks with our faculty, with our staff, and with our students that can enhance education.
