A year into her tenure as dean of George Washington University’s business school, Sevin Yeltekin is leading through two forces reshaping business and higher education: the rapid adoption of AI and a shifting policy and geopolitical landscape.
Dean Yeltekin didn't get a slow start at GW Business. She took the helm just a few years after LLMs like ChatGPT and many others became mainstream, making its way into classrooms and raising questions about how these tools should be used. Yeltekin moved quickly on the AI front, launching an AI initiative that produced usage guidelines, skills workshops and a new master's degree in artificial intelligence for business.
But she argues that preparing students for what comes next requires more than teaching the latest technology. It means combining domain expertise, technological fluency and real-world experience while understanding the policy forces shaping the business environment.
In a recent conversation, she discusses college debt, the limits of the trade school-versus-college debate and the jobs AI is quietly reshaping. And she argues that the skills that matter most in the workplace may be the ones that are easiest to overlook, like ethics, judgment and experience.
: You're now more than a year into your tenure as dean at GW Business. How has leading a business school in Washington, D.C., changed the way you think future business leaders should be educated?
A year in Washington has cemented how important it is for a business leader to understand the policy and geopolitical landscape. Policy defines the environment businesses operate in. In just the past year we've seen policy developments and geopolitical tensions reshape everything from tariffs and supply chains to energy prices and stock market valuations. No leader is going to be equipped to operate under uncertainty and deliver value if they don't understand the impact of policy, not just on their own company and industry, but on the global economic system.
: In a recent Poets&Quants interview, you spoke about the need to rethink business education in response to changing technology and workforce demands. As an economist, what do you think higher education needs to change most urgently?
We need the trifecta: domain knowledge, technological fluency and experience. That means fewer lecture-based programs and more active learning that involves integrated technology, applied projects, experiential learning. It isn't easy to do at scale; it means retooling for faculty and new support structures. Change is only possible when you align objectives and resources, and that's why we launched our AI initiative. We needed expertise, focus, resources and a structured approach to help our programs transition to this new paradigm.
There's still a lot of work to do, but waiting is not an option. In its first year alone the initiative produced AI use guidelines, AI awards recognizing teaching, research and operations, skills workshops, active participation in the university's AI initiative, a new degree program and AI tools integrated into more of our classes. Much more is on the horizon.
: You recently launched GW Business's new MS in Artificial Intelligence for Business. As AI evolves rapidly, how should students consider the long-term value of an AI-focused degree?
AI is going to evolve faster, and in ways we can't anticipate. This degree isn't meant to teach you the tools du jour and hope those tool-specific skills stay relevant. It's designed to teach you how to integrate a powerful, general-purpose technology into an organization, how to deploy it responsibly and effectively, how to use it strategically and how to evaluate it. It's about managing operations, talent, projects and data with increasingly sophisticated tools, as an advanced user.
When I did my PhD, I wrote a lot of code for economic simulations. I learned Fortran first and did almost all my thesis work in it. Fortran is no longer widely used, but the language was never the point; it happened to be the right tool at the time for the right problem. I learned algorithmic thinking: how to define objective functions and constraints, how to take a problem and translate it into something a computer could execute. That's what the MSAIB is meant to deliver: the ability to solve business problems and add value with advanced tools. Tools become obsolete. The skill to adapt to and master a new one does not.
: You've argued that "sleeper skills" like ethics, strategic judgment and risk governance will become increasingly valuable in the age of AI. How should GWSB students communicate these strengths during the hiring process, especially when employers are focused on immediate impact?
This is where experiential learning matters. In almost any experiential setting, a course project, an internship, an externship, there's a deliverable, or evidence of the experience. Talk is cheap and a resume only tells part of the story. Our job is to increase the number of opportunities where students can showcase their talent, build credentials and produce work they can point to, so they walk into the hiring process able to demonstrate their judgment, not just claim it.
: AI often dominates the conversation about the future of business education. From your perspective, what broader economic or societal shift do you think deserves just as much attention?
Policy and geopolitics. For all the reasons I gave in answer to the first question. The environment a business operates in is being redrawn by policy shifts and geopolitical tensions, and that shapes strategy at least as much as any single technology.
: In the Washington Examiner article 'Higher education must evolve for the global economy,' Jacqueline Cartier notes that trade grads enter the workforce faster, carry less debt and out-earn college peers early on.
- A) As a business school economist, how do you make the long-term economic case for a GW Business degree?
- B)) What do you think families often overlook when they compare those two paths?
There's an incredible amount of confusion and misinformation about college debt. The debt problem stems largely from for-profit colleges, not from non-profit, R1 research universities like GW. Families should start by separating those two very different stories.
Second, employment prospects are highly domain-specific. There are fields where openings are scarce or pay sits on the lower end of the scale and others where the opposite is true. So I'd encourage families to do their research: talk to college counselors and admissions officers, and ask hard questions about placement support and placement statistics before drawing conclusions.
Third, the choice between trade school and a four-year degree depends on your goals and how settled those goals are. If you train to be an electrician, yes, you'll finish sooner and enter the workforce earlier. But that path can lock you in. What happens if you decide the work isn't for you? How quickly can you move to another industry or job? A college education opens many doors at once. You don't just acquire skills in one narrow area. You develop communication, critical thinking, problem-solving, the ability to learn and adapt, domain knowledge, exposure to a range of disciplines and a network. That combination makes you more agile and your skills more transferable. People move from engineering to marketing, from political science to law, from art to business. That optionality has real economic value, and it compounds over a career, which is exactly why the early-earnings comparison, on its own, is misleading.
Insight on Economics
: Your Poverty and Self-Control paper argues that financial environments shape people's ability to stick to spending rules. Recently, "loud budgeting" has emerged among Gen Z, with people publicly reinforcing their financial boundaries. Through the lens of your research, do you see this as a modern commitment device that strengthens financial self-control, or is something else driving the trend?
Yes, it's a commitment device and a fairly clever one. My work with coauthors on self-control starts from the idea that willpower isn't purely internal; the environment either helps you keep your rules or quietly works against you. A commitment device is any way of raising the cost of breaking your own rule ahead of time. What loud budgeting does is borrow other people's eyes to do that. Once you've told your friends you're not spending on dinners out this month, backing down costs you something socially. You've put your reputation on the line, which is exactly how a good commitment device is supposed to work.
But I'd be careful not to read my research as pure financial discipline. My research would predict that commitment devices help most when you already have a little slack. Access to some financial resources, or an initial set of assets. If the environment is squeezing you hard enough and you are extremely constrained, no amount of announcing your boundaries with loud budgeting fixes the underlying problem of having very little resources.
: If you had to make one economic prediction about the future of work over the next decade, what would it be, and what should today's students do now to prepare for it?
My prediction is that AI won't replace most jobs wholesale. It will rewrite what's inside them. The tasks that make up a job get reshuffled: the routine, codifiable parts get automated, and what's left leans harder on judgment, on knowing which questions to ask, and on working effectively alongside the machine. The economic value shifts from doing the task to directing and checking the tool that does it. The real risk isn't mass unemployment; it's polarization. A widening gap between people who can harness these tools and people who are merely displaced by them.
So what should students do now? Don't over-invest in the tool of the moment; invest in the ability to pick up the next one. I've said this about our own programs. The goal is the trifecta of domain knowledge, technological fluency and real experience. Learn to work with AI as an advanced user rather than around it, get comfortable being the person who defines the problem rather than just executing the steps, and build the habit of adapting, because you'll be doing it your entire career. The graduates who thrive won't be the ones who learned today's tools best. They'll be the ones who learned how to keep learning.