Michigan Ross Dean Sharon Matusik: “With 58,000-plus Ross (and 682,000-plus U-M) alumni across the globe who are highly accomplished across their sectors, our ‘Go Blue Nation’ is a very special part of who we are”
Broadening Impact
Our foundational mission at Michigan Ross is building a better world through business. To do that in 2025, we will deepen our position as a premier source of talent, knowledge, inspiration, and connection. We prepare our students to be analytical, action-oriented, collaborative, and inclusive leaders who will thrive in a globally interconnected world. Additionally, we showcase our thought leadership and research-informed expertise on the grand challenges of our times that are highly relevant to the business world. Michigan Ross is among the very top-ranked business schools in the world across our programs and areas of focus. This includes top five rankings of six specialties, and in a broad range of our degree programs. We are also among the top five universities that produce Fortune 1000 CEOs. We are not content to rest on our laurels, though.
Our resolutions for the new year include continuing to monitor the ever-evolving business world to get ahead of the most important changes through adapting our educational experience for our students and community. For example, as artificial intelligence permeates businesses and our everyday lives, we are preparing students to use it, exploring its impact through our rigorous academic research, providing broad access to non-degree students through online offerings on leveraging it, and partnering with executives and firms driving its evolution to help co-create that future. As an illustration of these partnerships, we benefited from having Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, visit campus to share his vision for how AI may impact the future. This, along with other rich exchanges with executives across organizations developing and using AI, is shaping our educational offerings and our research.
While preparing students to develop expertise in emerging technology, we are dedicated to tackling other grand challenges we see across the business world, including those related to foundational business competitiveness, climate, economic inclusion, and a shifting global business landscape. Coursework, partnerships with businesses, entrepreneurial support, leadership training, and mentoring in each of these areas prepare our students to thrive in business while also driving progress in these areas. Our faculty take pride in leading the way on key business challenges through their cutting-edge research. As we celebrated our centennial year as a business school, we reflected on the groundbreaking contributions that our faculty have made to business and business education. The volume of transformative ideas that changed how we learn and work over our first century as a business school is truly astounding. From key concepts around how firms gain a competitive advantage to how to consider serving and learning from solutions to help those at the bottom of the pyramid of economic development, the contributions are profound.
Another one of our top priorities in 2025 will be to boldly advance our reach, reputation, and brand. This will include establishing a new location on the West Coast. In Fall 2024, we announced plans to expand our presence in Los Angeles at The Grand LA, where we will offer more educational programming beyond our Executive MBA that has been there since 2012. This brand-new, customized space for Ross will open up numerous possibilities for our students in one of the most dynamic business regions of the world. At the same time, we will continue to make strategic investments in Michigan. In early 2024, construction ramped up for the U-M Center for Innovation in Detroit, a university-wide project. Michigan Ross faculty and students are passionate about expanding their interaction with businesses in Detroit. From Tinseltown to Motown and beyond, we will continue to strengthen Ross’ connectivity with prospective and current students, alumni, and business executives.
These efforts are also part of another resolution to continue to connect with, support, and engage our alumni community. With 58,000-plus Ross (and 682,000-plus U-M) alumni across the globe who are highly accomplished across their sectors, our “Go Blue Nation” is a very special part of who we are. In addition to the many alumni events and engagements on campus that we traditionally have, this past year, we created a special private equity summit in New York and a technology innovation one in the Bay Area. The goal of these is to bring together some of our most accomplished alumni in each of these sectors to help continue to propel their career success.
We see 2025 as a year that will bring new opportunities in a rapidly changing business and global context. Our resolutions relate to staying ahead of these changes to inform our educational experiences, being at the forefront of rigorous research to create knowledge to help the business world navigate through these changes, expanding our reach, and deepening our engagement with our phenomenal alumni and business community partners.
—Sharon Matusik, Edward J. Frey Dean at Michigan Ross
