Mark Funk was named director last year of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock School of Business, which houses about 1,000 students in its MBA and MS programs along with eight undergraduate programs. Funk previously chaired the Department of Accounting, Economics & Finance; he was also an interim associate dean and interim chair of the Department of Marketing & Advertising.
Funk earned bachelor’s degrees in history and economics from Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, and holds a doctorate in economics from the University of California, Davis.
Funk teaches managerial economics in UALR’s MBA program.
What are business students being taught today that would be completely foreign to business students from 20 years ago?
The obvious answer is the artificial intelligence tools, but maybe not how you expect. AI is just an extension of software and tech — Excel, coding languages, machine learning, analytics software, even the grammar checkers from Word, and we all knew this AI era was coming someday. Students from 20 years ago were expecting flying cars by 2025, so AI today would not be foreign or surprising to them. What has changed over the last 20 years is how we have integrated tech into teaching. Back in 2005, many faculty were still worried about students looking up answers on Wikipedia. Closed-book tests of memory were still common even in advanced capstone classes. In 2025, we tell our students they must use AI — exactly how it is used and what tool should be used depends on the class — but the students do not have the option of not using AI. College instructors have become better at teaching students how to evaluate the answers they find on Wikipedia, and how to work with AI to determine what questions we should be asking in the first place. The closed-book tests are limited to intro-level tests of knowledge, while advanced classes embrace AI and tech to develop critical thinking and higher order abilities. So what would be completely foreign to students from 2005: They would be shocked to hear a prof start a class with “open up your AI.”
What do you think differentiates UALR’s School of Business from other business schools?
The combination of faculty with applied experience and the student body with incredibly diverse backgrounds. Any particular course will have traditional 20-year-old students mixed with mid-career working professionals, business owners, maybe an officer from the air base, athletes and international students. So think about how this impacts team projects. My student experience was with project teammates who were more or less the same as me — our resumes were interchangeable. We didn’t bring anything unique to the team. In the School of Business, it is a whole different world. Working with teammates isn’t as simple as meeting at the library, so our students have to learn how to solve basic team organizational issues, including generational differences in communication and thought processes. With their differing backgrounds, everyone is bringing something unique to the team, and students can learn from their teammate. And if you add good value to the team, a teammate might offer you a job after graduation.
Do you have a favorite “business” book?
How about my favorite pairing of two “business” books? “Command and Control” by Eric Schlosser, a true and terrifying Arkansas story revealing how little we can control, even in the most centralized command structures. Pair that with “Creativity, Inc.” by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace, a sanitized true story of how to inspire and lead innovators. Read them together. Then spend an evening with your favorite beverage thinking through how your new insights apply to AI today.
Are there any major threats facing business education?
I think the main threat comes from a nationwide failure to demonstrate the value of business education. Everyone knows business majors have high lifetime earnings — there are few majors that can be as life-changing as a business major. But by focusing on the return to the individual student, we’ve ignored the impact business education has on society as a whole and thereby undermined the need for public support of business education. No exaggeration: You can measure the impact of business education on regional productivity. Slight exaggeration, but testable: Next to clean water and paved roads, teaching people to read a financial statement may be the best public investment we can make. A city cannot survive without people who know how to start and manage businesses and organizations. But the students who most need life-changing business education, and who might be most likely to stay in the city after graduation, may not be able to afford the education, with or without student loans. Business schools need to do a better job of making the case to the public for business education affordable to everyone — all incomes and all ages. I’m proud that UA-Little Rock is a leader in ensuring affordable quality education.
How are you all teaching AI to business students?
We’ve had a fun couple of years figuring out what the next gen of AI will enable us to do. We design classes six months to a year ahead of delivery, and curriculums a year or two ahead of that, so we are combining active experimentation with some long-term planning and design. Right now, we offer courses to teach students how to build agents to automate business processes. For example, marketing students learn how to build and use AI tools for branding, content creation and email automation. More generally across the business curriculum, students use AI to improve their research, analyze data or brainstorm business ideas. Overall, we encourage students to use AI to boost their productivity and think more creatively about how business problems can be solved. The goal isn’t just learning a tool. It’s helping them understand how AI fits into real business workflows — and to think innovatively and entrepreneurially about how they can shape AI in business. One of our student teams is competing in the Governor’s Cup this year with an AI-based idea, and our faculty are working closely with them to help bring that idea to life.
How is AI changing the way you assess students?
It depends on the purpose of the course. Intro courses emphasize acquiring a solid base of knowledge, and later classes build on that knowledge base for higher-level learning. The key is to recognize that AI allows students to do more than before, so our expectations should increase too. For example, in entrepreneurship courses, students can use AI to work out logistics for a potential venture, which makes their projects more realistic. Because AI can handle some of the basic tasks, we now assess students more on their higher-level thinking: how they make decisions, how creative they are, and how they apply concepts. AI lets us focus on the quality of their ideas instead of whether they can manually produce everything from scratch.
What are the primary sectors and jobs students of the School of Business are entering after completing their undergraduate or postgraduate programs?
Our mission is to prepare and advance students in their professional careers. For the students we are preparing to start their professional careers, 25% enter the financial sector after graduation, with another 15% going into accounting. The government, nonprofit and education sector takes another 20% — we are in the capital city — and health care another 10%. But the other part of our mission is to advance students within their careers. Fifty percent of our incoming undergraduate students are already working full time, and 28% plan to stay with their current employer after graduation. Those students are more likely to be from the corporate and manufacturing sectors, and much less likely to be working in the financial sector.
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