What the First Week of Class Reveals

A January reality check from inside business school

The first week of class in January always tells the truth. Not the glossy brochure truth. The operational truth.

Students walk in wired, overloaded, and quietly unsure. Laptops open by reflex. Tabs multiplying. AI sitting there like a co pilot nobody asked for but everyone uses. And the institution? Still pretending this is a minor adjustment year.

It’s not.

Here’s what most serious observers agree will shape business schools in 2026. I am not inventing this stuff, I am reading the same reports as everyone else.

• AI is no longer a tool. It is infrastructure.
  AACSB, FT, GMAC, McKinsey, pick your acronym. The consensus is clear: AI will sit underneath every discipline, whether faculty like it or not.

• Experiential learning is no longer a differentiator. It is the baseline.
  Live projects, simulations, field work, messy constraints. Schools that cannot prove learning through action will struggle to justify tuition.

• Credentials are fragmenting.
  Micro credentials, certificates, badges. Not because students hate degrees, but because degrees struggle to prove what graduates can actually do.

• Students are more transactional than schools admit.
  They care about employability, skills, and confidence under pressure. Prestige still matters, just less than before.

Now here’s where I stop nodding politely.

The real issue is not AI - it’s that the classroom contract is broken. Open internet plus generative AI means you cannot teach, assess, and manage attention the same way and pretend rigor still exists.

So what should business schools actually do this year?

1. Redesign assessment so it cannot be outsourced.
   More live defenses. More oral reasoning. More “explain why you chose this.” Less lonely Word documents written at midnight with a chatbot.

2. Make AI usage explicit and graded.
   Students must declare where AI helped, where it misled them, and where they overrode it. This is key, because then “judgment” becomes the deliverable.

3. Decide what happens with devices in class.
   Either you design activities that require connected work, or you ban devices to protect thinking. Half rules create half attention.

4. Stop rewarding speed and volume.
   Fewer slides. Fewer frameworks. More depth. More friction. Learning is not a content race.

5. Integrate adjunct faculty properly or stop pretending quality matters.
   Last minute parachuting produces last minute learning.

What am I testing in January? A published class operating system. Clear device rules. Mandatory AI usage traces. Live defenses replacing part of written exams. Fewer slides. Less guidance. More whiteboards, constraints, and uncomfortable silence. Students thinking out loud instead of hiding behind AI polish. In a nutshell, I’m removing the safety wheels.

Why now? Simple. I’m writing this because there is a growing gap between how business schools talk about learning and how learning actually feels on the ground. Students feel it first. Faculty feel it quietly. Institutions rarely feel it at all. This post is my way of putting that gap on the table. Not to provoke for sport, but to say clearly that credibility will not be saved by language. It will be saved by what happens, concretely, in the room.

So, it’s the start of a new year, and that feels like the right moment to stop pretending. At least in the classroom.