Most institutions measure access at admission and affordability, then ration the experiences that actually change student outcomes to whoever finds them. The experiential learning that employers say they want gets delivered to honors cohorts and groups of thirty while everyone else gets the catalog.
In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with Dr. W. Brooke Elliott, Dean of the Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois. The conversation covers how Gies scaled experiential learning from a selective offering into a curricular requirement across every program, and what it cost on the staffing, funding, and governance side to make it hold.
Elliott is starting her third year as dean in her twenty-fourth year at Gies, where the land-grant mission is expressed through a purpose statement committing the college to expanding access to business education. Her operational focus is on what accessibility means after enrollment: whether the live client projects, consulting engagements, and immersions inside a degree are reachable by a large share of learners rather than a selected few.
This conversation is especially relevant for presidents, boards, provosts, and deans evaluating whether to scale experiential learning beyond pilot programs and selective cohorts.
Topics Covered
- Redefining accessibility to include the experiences inside the degree, not just admission and price
- How Gies sources 300 to 400 live client projects a year to place every junior on a team
- Why undergraduate employer projects are free, and how project sourcing functions as the recruiting pipeline
- The staffing model: a dedicated experiential learning office paired with internal learning designers
- Embedding experiential capstones inside online graduate programs serving roughly 7,000 students
- Investing in faculty AI capability for 18 months before changing the curriculum
- The iMBA governance precedent that made current innovation move quickly
Real-World Examples Discussed
- Business 301, Business in Action, a junior-year course placing every student on a live client project, and Business 401, Crafting Your Purpose, sending seniors into their local and home communities
- Illinois Business Consulting, in its thirtieth year, and the Disruption Lab, which pairs Gies and Grainger College of Engineering students on technology problems sourced from inside the college
- International immersions redesigned into domestic and then virtual formats, including a virtual immersion with a partner institution in Japan
- Replacing programming-language modules in the undergraduate core with modules on using AI to program, and launching the MSBAi with a first cohort of 30
- Students correcting their assumptions about John Deere and Caterpillar by working the companies' actual problems
Three Key Takeaways for Higher Education Leadership
- Mission and purpose alignment only matters when it functions as a decision rule for resource allocation and program design.
- Learner-centric requires faculty first, because faculty deliver the experience. Invest in capability before expecting delivery.
- Leading authentically is what mobilizes people past what an org chart can compel, and disruption is where access expands if someone goes after it.
Read the transcript:
Read the transcript: https://changinghighered.com/scale-experiential-learning-to-every-student/
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