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New Latin American PhD program kicks off

When the Freeman School first made the strategic decision to do programs in Latin America, the goal was to organize a few student and faculty exchanges and maybe introduce a dual-degree program with a partner institution.

Today, 15 years later, the Freeman School has emerged as perhaps the leading U.S. business school in Latin America, responsible for a significant portion of all PhDs in business across the region.

“We wanted to position the Freeman School as being a leader in management education in Latin America, but we had no idea that we’d end up in the faculty development business,” explains John Trapani, vice dean and director of the Goldring Institute of International Business. “It was just something that happened.”

Trapani is referring to the Freeman School’s faculty development PhD, the innovative program that has fueled Freeman’s expansion in Latin America. The program enables select Latin American institutions to increase their number of PhD-qualified faculty members while enabling those faculty members to enhance their professional careers without disrupting their employment to pursue a full-time residential PhD program.

The students, faculty members at top Latin American universities, attend classes on three weekends per semester at their home university or a participating institution and spend four summers on the Tulane campus in New Orleans to fulfill the program’s residency requirement. Courses are taught by the graduate faculty of the Freeman School in New Orleans, Houston and at the Latin American institutions.

Since the program was launched in 1994, more than 70 students have completed the necessary coursework and comprehensive exams, and 45 of those have earned their PhDs. “I don’t know how many PhDs in business there are in Latin America, but there’s probably no more than 300,” Trapani says. “With 45 PhDs in Latin America, we certainly stand out.”

Trapani adds many of those students who have earned PhDs through the program have since risen to become senior administrators at their institutions.

In June, the Freeman School welcomed the fifth class in the program, 24 students from seven highly respected institutions in Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico and Venezuela. The students spent seven weeks in New Orleans taking classes at the Freeman School, and they continued with classes in the fall at the Freeman School’s facility in Houston.

The students represent five universities that have participated in previous faculty development PhD programs—ITESM (Mexico), IESA (Venezuela), Universidad de los Andes (Colombia), ESPOL (Ecuador), and ICESI (Colombia)—as well as two new institutions, ITAM (Mexico) and Universidad Francisco Marroquín (Guatemala).

Trapani is enthusiastic about the program not only because it’s helping to spread the Freeman School name in Latin America, but because the participating universities become partners that contribute to all the Freeman School’s programs. “We have a double-degree program with ICESI and Francisco Marroquin and we’re working with several of the schools on what we call the International MBA, which would allow a cohort of students to take courses at schools around the region and in the U.S., Europe and Asia,” Trapani says. “So not only are we involved in helping them train their faculty, we’re also working with them to develop creative educational programs in Latin America.”