Since taking over as dean of the Smeal College of Business in July 2024, Corey Phelps has been busy getting to know Penn State’s people and its systems, and integrating them with an eye on the future has been an overriding priority. We sat down with the former University of Oklahoma business school dean to discuss a variety of topics, including new initiatives within Smeal, how the college’s graduate programs can succeed in the face of increasing competition, and how faculty are incorporating AI into their curriculum.

PENN STATER: What about this job appealed to you? 

COREY PHELPS: My predisposition is to want to connect business schools to the rest of the campus. It’s this notion I’ve talked about here of putting Smeal at the center. And the reason I’m interested in doing that is because I don’t care what your major is, your area of study, if it’s physics or English or whatever, you’re probably going to work in an organization where you need to know something about business. This is what business schools do. Being more connected. If you look at the biggest problems the world is facing, these are problems that really rely upon the integration of complex knowledges and skill sets. Business is one of them. I think about climate change—you’re never going to solve the climate problem without the help of financial markets. You need to have finance professors doing research with climatologists, for example.

The idea of connecting the business school: Historically, business schools are on the periphery. We’re professional schools, so we don’t really fit into the arts and sciences mold. Are we sort of vocational because we’re business? By the same token, business schools are often quite comfortable being left alone. I think it’s a disservice to the university, to the students, the community, if we’re not well integrated and connected. A place like Penn State, where there’s excellence everywhere you look, the ability to really integrate and be connected to other excellent schools, it’s a great playground to be in. When I was at my previous institution, we had an explicit goal in our strategic plan to have a collaborative academic program with every college. We’re in the strategic planning process right now; I wouldn’t be surprised if we had a similar sort of goal. I’ve had conversations with the leadership of [Earth and Mineral Sciences] about this, we’ve been talking to people at Eberly [College of Science] and people at engineering about how we can work together.

Part of the answer to the question “Why Penn State?” was the ability to have access to all of these centers of excellence from the colleges, and being able to elevate not just the business school, but the university. The Smeal brand name is a strength of Penn State; a lot of students come to University Park and the university as a whole because of the interest in Smeal. There was a huge opportunity that I saw. The second thing was, just the scale and scope of Smeal was very intriguing. It’s a fantastic foundation, but again, I think we could elevate the college and the university by being more integrated.

PS: Could you give one or two examples of what that integration might look like, whether it’s an engineering student who gets a little more experience with business courses, or a business student who gets some [Information Sciences and Technology] skills?

PHELPS: It’s definitely both. The educational program side is one. I’m someone that is really passionate about entrepreneurship and leveraging universities to be engines of economic growth by helping to create startups. In that vein, a really powerful combination is engineering and business, right? So Smeal students having a better understanding of engineering in terms of, let’s say, prototype development. The Learning Factory that engineering has, which is a fantastic venue for our students to really understand how you move from taking an idea for a physical product and making it something that potential customers can touch, feel, and give you feedback on. But also engineering students coming into business and learning something, whether it’s finance or accounting or leadership; it’s really the flow of students both ways that I see.

On the business side, we have the Borrelli Institute for Real Estate Studies. We have primarily finance faculty members that study different aspects of real estate markets. Two of our faculty members in that group have an evolving interest in thinking about climate risk for real estate. In this conversation with the folks at Earth and Mineral Sciences, they’ve got meteorologists who are experts in climate risk, in weather risk. Here’s a natural partnership opportunity to connect those folks with a couple of our real estate investors and start having discussions about research collaborations, right? Again, I really see trying to connect the College of Business not just on the academic programs side, where our students are flowing out and benefiting from the expertise of other colleges and vice versa, but also on the research side, and even moreover would be community engagement. We are actively working on creating a number of additional IUGs [integrated undergraduate/graduate programs]. We have this great IUG with Eberly, and a lot of places they call it a 4+1 program. They do four years there and come over here and do a one-year program. We’re talking to additional programs in Eberly, in engineering, and in EMS as a pathway into our one-year residential MBA program, but also a few of our other residential programs—our master’s in finance program, for example.

The other thing we’re doing is having conversations around collaboration with respect to graduate programs. We have a program called SMEXL—strategic management and executive leadership. That program is fully online and marketed by World Campus and delivered by us. It’s targeted toward mid- and senior-level executives. Next to our doctorate of business administration program, that’s the most senior audience we work with. We’re seeing that health care is an exploding field— biggest sector GDP in the country and the state of Pennsylvania. We’re seeing interest from health care. We started exploring how could we build in a health care track or a spinoff—SMEXL for health care. We’re talking to Health and Human Development, because they have an undergraduate/graduate program in health policy and administration, about collaborating. We’ve had some other ideas for how we might collaborate on other graduate programs.

Being a business school, having a strong presence and focus on entrepreneurship, what can we do to help the university do a better job of creating startups? The traditional model in higher ed is a faculty member working in a lab, they file a disclosure on the technology, get a patent or two, and then they’re going to build a company to commercialize that technology. That’s a very small part of the overall impact on university startup formation. I was talking to James Delattre ’97 Sci, who runs Invent Penn State, and basically [he asked], “How can we help you?” They’re going to be setting up an alumni ANGEL network, called Nittany Angels. They’re very deep into that process, and what we’re hoping is to create an experiential learning opportunity not just for Smeal students.

PS: You studied corporate strategy and innovation. How did that help you as a leader at other institutions, and how do you envision it helping you as dean here?

PHELPS: It shapes and informs everything I do. Strategy at the end of the day is really about asking some fundamental questions. How do we create value for an audience? How do we create value for students, for recruiters, for alumni? And then, what do we do to capture some of that value in the form of revenue to make sure that we pay all of our costs? When I think about business schools, I’m always thinking about, Are we creating value for students, for recruiters, alumni? Are there new ways to do that? And once you start thinking that way, that opens up to, What are the forces that are impinging upon our ability to create value? The rise of generative AI—that’s something we need to make sure we are educating our students on, to make sure they are prepared for a future working world where generative AI is pervasive. That’s one way to say, Do we need to change the nature of our offering? In other words, do we need to change our curriculum to make sure we are developing these generative AI skills in students?

Another way to think about this is, is this going to raise the possibility of increased competition? Yes. For years if not decades, higher education has come under the commoditization track. You go back way early in the rise of what we would call the modern comprehensive university—at that point, knowledge was scarce. And it was controlled by universities. Knowledge is ubiquitous now. I can go on YouTube and find the answer to anything. Better yet, I can ask ChatGPT. So what does that mean in terms of the future of higher education? If students can say, “I don’t need to go to Penn State and spend four years and a lot of money to get access to this knowledge, I can get access for free,” what does that mean in terms of how we’re creating value for students? We’ve got to fundamentally rethink how we do it.

As a strategist, this is how my mind works. It immediately thinks, we are in a competitive landscape. It’s not just other institutions of higher education we’re competing with. We’re competing with, in some veins, consulting firms, but also with new technology platforms like ChatGPT, like Gemini from Google. The nature of competition has changed. We’ve got to figure out how we adapt to this changing and competitive landscape, and if we can’t figure that out, we die.

We are a special type of institution—special in the sense that we have what I would consider to be an extremely noble mission. But at the end of the day, I do think we are a business; we generate revenue, we have to make sure our revenue at least matches our costs. We have competitors. So we’ve got to think strategically, just like businesses do. And if we don’t, we’re not going to be able to adapt. And it’s just that right now, the pace of change in our environment is starting to accelerate. There’s the technological side of things, there’s what’s happening with the federal government and what that portends for funding for higher education. There’s what’s going on with the politicalization of higher education. You’ve got the affordability crisis, demographic changes, the coming demographic cliff … there’s a wave of changes that are coming and hitting higher education. We have to be thinking strategically. Because if we don’t, we’re not going to be able to adapt and thrive and survive over the long run. And I do think that we, as a set of institutions, need to be thinking much more strategically, and if that means more like a business, then yes, more like a business.

PS: How are you integrating AI into your curriculum, and how will your faculty and staff use it?

PHELPS: Our instructional designers have taken the lead and put together a program called AI at Work. We have an initiative on bringing AI into the curriculum. This is again being led by eLDIG [eLearning Design and Innovation Group]. We’re setting up what we call a Smeal AI exploration fund to help encourage experimentation with AI, whether it’s in the classroom or in research or in operations. If you have a very specific idea of how you want to leverage generative AI and you need additional resources, it’s a small grant fund you apply for. That has started to encourage bottom-up innovation. We are licensing a platform called BoodleBox. It allows everybody that has a license, every faculty and staff member, access to multiple foundational elements—Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity and others. The other thing we’re doing is buying extra licenses so we can do pilot projects to bring it into the curriculum. The challenge that we had was professors were asking if they could require their students to use ChatGPT. The free version is greatly limited. We realized that wasn’t going to be sufficient, so we need to be able to provide paid subscriptions for students. We’re piloting this in about 8 to 10 courses in the spring semester. Once we learn more, we’ll be able to scale this up. Eventually, we want to have AI integrated into every relevant undergraduate or graduate course in the college.

PS: What are you doing to address some of the broader challenges in higher education—rising tuition, the demographic cliff, declining enrollment?

PHELPS: One of the things we focus on is, how do we strengthen the value proposition of Smeal? How do we make it more attractive for a student to want to come here and do their business degree in a way that can help us push back against these trends that would put downward pressure on demand. We’ve been fortunate. If you look at applications for Smeal, we’ve been up 2,000 each year for the last five years. We’ll see what happens this year, because the demographic cliff kicks in in 2026. We are doing a lot of things we think will strengthen the value proposition of our programs, both graduate and undergraduate, to help us push back against that. There are other things that have been more recent we’ve less anticipated, which are things around the federal government and immigration and what that’s doing for international students. I talked to my Big Ten dean counterparts, we’re all seeing the same thing—declining applications and enrollments from international students, because of what’s happening with immigration laws at the federal level. What that tells us is we need to be even more focused on the domestic market. And we can be. I just don’t think we were very well prepared for it. But moving forward, we’re assuming we’re going to be seeing declining demand from international students, and we have to be even more effective from a marketing, storytelling, and domestic standpoint.

The other thing we’re focused on, and this is Smeal-specific, is that I think everybody needs a business education. You’re going to work in an organization where you need to know a little bit about business—about leadership, finance. The reason I say that is because we have students graduating in the natural sciences and engineering, and a lot of times they think about doing a master’s degree. Many of them do a business master’s degree. We have a lot of offerings, one of the most extensive portfolios of graduate programs of any business school in the country. What we realized we lacked is awareness at the University Park campus amongst undergraduate students in other colleges about what we do. We have been really working hard to create awareness, so that a student who is in engineering who wants to do an MBA or master’s in analytics, they know we’re here and that we have a strong offering for them. Since the summer, our office of graduate programs has done 50 events [at] University Park targeted toward juniors and seniors of other colleges, because if we can get some of those students, it can help offset what we’re seeing from an international student perspective.

PS: How do you like to interact with the students, in formal or informal ways?

PHELPS: One of the great disappointments and challenges of being a dean is that it’s really hard to commit to teaching a full semester class. My wife tells people one of the reasons she married me is that I love teaching and I’m good at it. And one of the things that she was really disappointed in when I became a dean was that I went in with the idea that I was going to teach one class a year. And I thought my director of advancement was going to shoot me. You cannot commit to two days a week for 15 weeks. I’m needed on the road for fundraising. So I came up with a creative alternative. I’m a huge fan of alliteration. Corey in the Classroom is an initiative where a few months before the start of the semester, I send an email out to every faculty member and volunteer to be a guest speaker in their class. Here’s a list of topics I can talk somewhat intelligently about, and if none of these fit, I can always talk about what is it to be a dean or what’s going on in the business school, strategy, that sort of thing. I make myself available.

I started doing this at OU coming out of COVID. I wanted to make sure I was as visible to as many students as possible and as many faculty as possible. When you teach one class, it’s great, but your colleagues don’t see you, and you touch a very small number of students. With Corey in the Classroom, I get visibility to a lot of faculty members. I will do probably 15 of these each semester, and get in front of 600 or more students and a dozen or more faculty members. [And] every month, we do Donuts with the Deans down in the [Business Building] atrium. I basically tell faculty and staff, if you’ve got something that you’re doing with students, even if it’s on a weekend, I will come speak to it. I try to be as visible as possible.