Graduate business schools are actively revising curricula, launching new programs, and integrating artificial intelligence into coursework – but a new report finds that most lack the fully institutionalized systems required to make that kind of adaptation the three things it most needs to be: repeatable, coordinated, and evidence-driven.
The Graduate Business Curriculum Roundtable released Curricular Agility in Graduate Business Education: Assessing How Institutional Structures Enable or Constrain Curriculum Adaptation this month, drawing on survey responses from 69 graduate business schools collected between March 30 and May 4, 2026. The study, led by principal investigator Gregg Schoenfeld of MNoet LLC, frames curricular agility as an organizational capability – not a measure of whether schools are updating courses, but whether their underlying systems make sustained adaptation possible.
The central finding is that most schools are somewhere in the middle. The report calculates a Curricular Agility Index – an equal-weight composite across six capability dimensions – and finds a mean score of 3.96 on a six-point scale, placing the average participating school in the “Defined” range of institutional maturity. That is well short of fully institutionalized capability, and the variation across schools is wide, with scores ranging from 2.12 to 6.0.
THE SIX DIMENSIONS
The six dimensions the study measures are Strategic Sensing, Decision Governance, Faculty Enablement, Execution Management, Learning Operations, and Feedback Systems. They are not equally developed across the sector.
Learning Operations scored highest among the six dimensions, with a mean of 4.5, suggesting that most schools have adaptable delivery infrastructure in place. Decision Governance followed at 4.3, indicating that many institutions have established approval pathways and defined authority structures. Execution Management came in at 4.2.
At the lower end, Faculty Enablement registered the weakest mean score of the six dimensions at 3.4, and Strategic Sensing came in at 3.5. The report finds that while many schools monitor markets and seek stakeholder input, far fewer have formalized routines for synthesizing and disseminating that intelligence into curriculum decision-making. Incentive alignment for faculty – aligning rewards and workload expectations with curriculum adaptation priorities – showed the weakest profile of any individual component in the entire study.
“Business schools are not standing still,” says Jeff Bieganek, executive director of the Roundtable. “Many are redesigning programs, revising courses, adding emerging topics such as AI and digital transformation, and engaging employers. The deeper issue is whether schools have the institutional systems needed to make curriculum adaptation reliable, coordinated, faculty-supported, and evidence-informed.”
Source: Graduate Business Curriculum Roundtable
EXECUTION IS THE KEY DIFFERENTIATOR
When the report runs a multivariable regression model examining which dimensions are most strongly associated with higher assessed adaptation capability, Execution Management stands out. Schools reporting stronger implementation coordination, defined responsibilities, monitoring systems, and process discipline were significantly more likely to self-assess as strong adapters, with an odds ratio of 3.39 (p = .001).
Learning Operations, despite its relatively high maturity score, did not independently distinguish higher-capability schools from lower-capability ones once other dimensions were accounted for. The finding suggests that technical infrastructure and delivery flexibility are table stakes – necessary but not sufficient. A school can have state-of-the-art course delivery systems and still lack the coordination and follow-through required to adapt curricula reliably.
The gap between evidence collection and evidence use tells a similar story. Outcome data collection was the strongest single component within the Feedback Systems dimension, with more than half of schools reporting established or institutionalized capability. But evidence-informed revision and structured outcome review – the processes by which schools actually use that data to change curricula – remained concentrated in the middle maturity stages.
SELF-ASSESSMENTS TRACK THE DATA
When respondents were asked to assess their schools’ overall curricular adaptation capability directly, 38% chose “moderate,” 33% chose “strong,” and 9% chose “very strong.” Fourteen percent characterized their schools as having only “limited” capability, and 5% reported “weak” or “very weak” capacity.
Those self-assessments closely track the index findings. A one-unit increase in a school’s Curricular Agility Index score was associated with roughly 15 times greater odds of landing in a higher self-assessed capability category, a relationship the report describes as strong while cautioning that it is associational, not causal.
Course revision activity was common: 81% of schools reported at least three course revisions during the prior 12 months, and 46% reported six or more. New course launches were also frequent, with 70% of schools reporting at least three. Pilot offerings were another matter – 21% of institutions reported none at all during the year.
Source: Graduate Business Curriculum Roundtable
THREE PROFILES EMERGE
The report sorts participating schools into three exploratory archetypes based on their capability profiles. The groupings are relatively even: Activated Agility schools number 24, as do Latent Agility schools, while Constrained Agility schools number 21.
Activated Agility institutions showed mean Curricular Agility Index scores of 5.0 and reported the highest recent adaptation activity, with a mean throughput score of 33.7. Among these schools, 79% were classified as showing aligned capability and activity, and only 4% were flagged as high-friction.
Latent Agility institutions sit in the middle, with a mean index score of 3.8. Their strongest individual dimension was Learning Operations, at 4.7, suggesting that delivery infrastructure is in reasonable shape. But Strategic Sensing and Faculty Enablement lagged, indicating that the capability exists but is not consistently activated through external intelligence or faculty engagement.
Constrained Agility institutions reported a mean index score of 2.9 and mean adaptation activity throughput of 19.8, the lowest of the three groups. Faculty Enablement and Strategic Sensing showed the weakest profiles among these schools, and 81% were classified as high-friction institutions – those where internal capability gaps create the greatest structural drag on adaptation.
“The findings suggest that the challenge is not whether business schools recognize change,” Bieganek says. “The challenge is whether they can translate external signals into authorized decisions, coordinated implementation, and sustained institutional learning.”
WHERE THE BOTTLENECKS CONCENTRATE
A bottleneck analysis in the report examines within-school dispersion – identifying institutions where overall index scores mask significantly weaker performance on specific dimensions. Across all schools, the mean weakest-dimension score was 2.89, in the “Emerging” range, even as the overall index averaged 3.96. High-friction institutions, defined as those in the top quartile of bottleneck severity, had a mean weakest-dimension score of just 1.76, compared to 3.50 among typical schools.
Among high-friction schools, Faculty Enablement was the most common weakest dimension, cited by 39% of those institutions, followed by Strategic Sensing at 32% and Feedback Systems at 16%. Even among typical schools, Strategic Sensing was the most frequent weak point (32%), with Faculty Enablement close behind (29%).
Qualitative responses from 62 participants reinforced the statistical findings. Respondents described governance delays, faculty capacity constraints, budget limitations, cross-unit coordination problems, and approval cycles that lag behind the pace of change in AI and other fast-moving fields. The report notes that several respondents framed AI integration not only as a content challenge but as a stress test for institutional systems – one that exposed gaps in faculty expertise, curriculum coherence, and operational follow-through simultaneously.
The report concludes that durable curricular agility depends on building organizational pathways that convert external signals into authorized decisions, approved decisions into coordinated implementation, and outcome evidence into curriculum refinement – and that the primary leadership task is alignment across those systems, not simply increasing the pace of change.
The Roundtable plans to develop case studies as a follow-on to the quantitative findings, spotlighting curriculum innovations across each of the six agility dimensions. A symposium and workshop hosted by Fordham University’s Gabelli School of Business in New York is scheduled for Oct. 27-30. The report is available at gbcroundtable.org.
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