OU exists to change the lives of our students by preparing them for a life of success, meaning, service and positive impact. While Price College has been developing successful leaders and business professionals for nearly 100 years, competition for promising students is intensifying, and the challenges they will face upon graduation are becoming more complex.
By helping expand and amplify student support and services, you’ll bolster our ability to attract promising students by increasing affordability and enabling us to better prepare and launch our graduates into rewarding and impactful careers.
Merit and need-based scholarships make higher education affordable, bringing students’ dreams within reach. We must substantially increase scholarships funds to keep pace with other business schools and open doors of opportunity to more students.
Opening a new Price College Career Services Center with career coaches and sector specialists will allow us to prepare our students more effectively for internships and jobs and broaden the number of organizations recruiting from Price.
Free tutoring services will improve our students’ learning experiences and career outcomes. Price College will implement an innovative web-based platform that recruits high-quality tutors and matches them with students they can support.
Mentorship provides a highly personalized and impactful learning experience. By implementing a web-based alumni engagement platform, we will seek to connect nearly 40,000 Price College alumni with our students for mentoring relationships from real-world professionals, thus improving student learning and career development.
We will provide free skills-focused professional development courses that focus on critical soft and digital hard skills to develop future-ready leaders and business professionals.
The changing business landscape is disrupting the knowledge, skills, and abilities required for most professions, increasing the need for professionals and leaders to reskill and upskill, and stimulating the emergence of new occupations and the decline of others. To ensure we produce graduates who will thrive in the new business landscape and help make Oklahoma and our nation more competitive, we must broaden who we educate by focusing on lifelong learning, what programs we offer to best meet the needs of the marketplace, and how we educate to maximize learning.
To do this, we must invest in faculty with the expertise, thought leadership, and passion to help us broaden the programs and courses we offer, including the experiential learning opportunities we provide our students.
Faculty are the core of Price College. Endowed professorships and chairs are critical for recruiting, retaining, resourcing, and rewarding highperforming faculty, allowing us to expand our faculty strategically to accommodate enrollment growth and launch new high-demand programs.
A prestigious teaching innovation award and grant opportunities will encourage faculty to experiment with new pedagogical approaches, technologies, and delivery techniques. We will also employ an experiential learning expert to consult on all learning innovation efforts and implement experiential opportunities in all courses, including live business cases, field projects, complex simulations, and student research.
When business professionals speak at Price, they bring real-world experience to our students. The Dean’s Speaker Series will be the flagship speaker series at Price College, attracting a diverse mix of thought leaders with insightful perspectives on leadership that inspire thought-provoking discussions.
Study abroad programs increase students’ global awareness, understanding, and competence, preparing them for real-world work. Our goal: Increase participation by 50% through scholarship funds to offset travel costs for students who otherwise would not be able to participate.
Competitions, in which students compete in teams under time pressure and present their findings or recommendations in response to a complex challenge to a panel of judges, are one of the most valued experiential learning opportunities in business schools. We will provide scholarships to students to defray travel and admission costs for competitions and provide stipends for faculty coaches. We will also create and host a competition.
The changing business landscape brings new opportunities for graduate programs targeted at high-growth, high-demand professions. We have identified three high-potential programs – an Executive MBA in Healthcare Management, an MS in Cybersecurity Management, and an MS in Real Estate Finance – for which we need support to cover program development and scholarships.
Public pressure for businesses to view environmental, social, and governance (ESG) metrics as primary objectives, in addition to profitability, continues to accelerate. Incorporating ESG concepts into our core curricula will better prepare students for this new business landscape.
Professionals and executives are seeking skillbuilding opportunities to keep pace with the rapidly changing business landscape. We will meet the demand for lifelong learning through short, flexible courses for working professionals and customized programs for organizational clients within the soon-to-be-formed OU Price Institute for Executive and Professional Education.
Through our Tom Love Division of Entrepreneurship and Economic Development, the Tom Love Innovation Hub (iHub), and the Ronnie K. Irani Center for the Creation of Economic Wealth (I-CCEW), Price College is critical to catalyzing OU and Oklahoma startups, building an entrepreneurial culture across campus and the state, and equipping our students with the necessary knowledge and skills to succeed as entrepreneurs.
Our strategic plan calls for strengthening existing iHub and I-CCEW programs and services, integrating them into our academic programs to provide more experiential learning opportunities for students, and significantly expanding our programs and ser vices for aspiring entrepreneurs and innovators.
The Venture Fellows Program will incentivize graduate students to work with Oklahoma based startups by providing them with stipends to underwrite their participation. Startups will benefit from the expertise and efforts of Fellows at no cost, while Fellows will benefit from the experiential learning opportunities.
This new program will recruit and train students to work with inventors and entrepreneurs who utilize the iHub’s facilities, services, and programs, providing a unique opportunity for entrepreneurial skills building. Student Innovation Fellows will work on advanced prototyping projects for OU researchers.
A free eight-week program offered twice a year, the EAC will teach entrepreneurs the fundamentals of accounting. A Price College accounting faculty member with startup expertise will teach the course, with Master of Accountancy students serving as tutors.
Early-stage startups need access to legal expertise and business advisory services, including intellectual property protection, legal organizational forms, and commercial relationships, which may be cost-prohibitive. The ELC will provide entrepreneurs free counseling through teams of business, law, and engineering students guided by pro bono attorneys and business advisors.
We will strengthen existing startup programs at the iHub by adding a Startup OU executive director position and hiring personnel for expansion to Oklahoma City’s Health Sciences Center and OU Tulsa. We will also launch Startup Storytellers, a new support service, to help startup program participants and OU entrepreneurs produce and distribute their stories in video, print, and podcast formats.
We will create an innovative, year-long master’s program for entrepreneurs and innovators. This degree program will be integrated with a graduate certificate program for OU graduate students in engineering, natural sciences, and health sciences, who will take courses with the master’s program students to facilitate peer learning and serendipitous creative collisions.
The iHub Fab Lab currently occupies about 8,000 square feet, with a wide variety of tools for prototyping physical products, including 3D printers, laser and water jet cutters, and CNC machining. Funding will support additional staffing, including a Director of Operations and Prototyping Lead, prototyping materials, and equipment upkeep.
The OU Faculty Entrepreneurship Fellows program will foster a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship by annually awarding select faculty throughout the University a paid fellowship. Participants will lead entrepreneurship programs as advisors, mentors, guest speakers, and joint researchers.
Transforming how we prepare students for the new world of business will not be possible unless we d ramatically and comprehensively overhaul our physical and digital infrastructure. Although Price College is the fastest growing and second largest college at OU, our physical facilities and technology infrastructure lag far behind our peers and are woefully inadequate for meeting the challenges of transforming business education.
To accommodate our growth, remain competitive in recruiting students, faculty, and staff, and provide the best learning experience for our students and research environment for our faculty, it is imperative that we transform our physical spaces and technology infrastructure.
We must invest in a comprehensive remodel and renovation of Adams Hall, the renovation of Price Hall, and the systematic upgrade of all instructional and research technology throughout the College.
Completed in 1936 as a Works Progress Administration (WPA) project, Adams Hall was expanded in 1964 to its current size of nearly 80,000 square feet. To accommodate our continued growth and enable the transformation of business education, we must complete a comprehensive remodel and renovation of Adams Hall.
Price Hall’s 69,000 square feet of space, completed in 2005, needs to be refurbished and partially remodeled to accommodate our continued enrollment growth, allow for a new, state-of-the-art career services center, and continue to serve as an essential resource in attracting outstanding students and exceptional faculty and staff to Price College.
All Price classrooms and conference rooms need a major upgrade of their information and instructional technology to allow them to be used as state-of-the-art hybrid teaching environments. leaders and business professionals.
