Kent State’s Ambassador Crawford College of Business and Entrepreneurship has been living – and thriving – inside its beautiful new home, Crawford Hall, for more than a year. It’s a modern building filled with natural light, open spaces and state-of-the-art classrooms and labs. Every aspect of its design was carefully planned to provide an exceptional experience for students and prepare them with knowledge and skills that will give them a competitive edge in their careers after graduation.
Building the Very Best Environment for Teaching and Learning
The college’s drive to continually provide students with the best, most current business education and technology inspired the construction of the new building.
Deborah F, Spake, Ph.D., dean of the Ambassador Crawford College of Business and Entrepreneurship, said, “Certainly one of the arguments for support of the building that I made over the years was that we just couldn’t deliver the kind of education we truly wanted until we had a different kind of facility. So, it was a compelling reason to our donors when they made contributions toward the building that we would, in turn, be able to have the most modern technology and the very best spaces to deliver modern business education in the way we knew we were truly capable of doing.”
Spake said that the capabilities of the new building have helped the college add new coursework and programs. New laboratory spaces, in particular, were key. “One is the Robert M. and Janet L. Archer Trading Lab, which is where financial education takes place,” she said. “In that lab, they have the very latest and modern financial analysis displays as well as Bloomberg terminals. Some of the coursework we’re now teaching is either enhanced because of the technology or the technology enables us to teach in ways that we just couldn’t do previously.
Continually Adding New Courses and New Programs
Having this state-of-the-art technology and enhanced learning spaces also allows the college to be more agile in adding courses and programs to be ahead of business trends. “It means a lot more because we’re changing our curriculum more often,” Spake said. “Because the tools that are being used in the world of business are changing; 10 years ago, you would not have found a cybersecurity course. You wouldn’t have found a cryptocurrency course. You wouldn’t have found an artificial intelligence course, unless maybe MIT had something like that. But today, we’re able to offer those kinds of courses.”
Some of the new courses being offered are: Artificial Intelligence Tools for Business, Managing Cybersecurity, Fintech & Cryptocurrencies: The Future of Finance, Machine Learning, Golden Flash Asset Management Member and an Accounting Internship.
“These courses use the new technology in the building and allow us to showcase some of our top students and faculty,” Spake said. “They also touch on topics that would be of interest to new students, like AI, cybersecurity, financial management, fintech and cryptocurrency, or are experiential, like internships and Golden Flash Asset Management.”
One of the new programs, pending final approval, made possible by the addition of new courses and technology, is a Master of Science in Accounting, Business Technology and Analytics.
'The Winningest Team in the Nation’
The Golden Flash Asset Management Group is a point of pride in the college. They are a group of students who manage a real investment fund that they analyze in the trading lab. Using their initial funding, provided by the university and the Kent State Foundation, they’ve been able to grow their investments and are currently managing $1.5 million in real money. Other business schools also have asset management teams and participate in national competitions, like the G.A.M.E. Forum in New York City. The Kent State team has performed exceptionally well, Spake said.
“There are different categories or types of funds you can invest in, like a fixed income fund, for example,” Spake said. “In the first year, they took first place in the nation in the fixed income category. And every year, they have brought home one or more trophies or plaques because they’ve been earning either second or third place in a variety of categories. Sometimes, they’d have more than one because they had done will in two different types of funds. At the moment, they’re the winningest team in the nation, which we’re proud of.”
‘In the Future, Cryptocurrency Will Be Like Electricity’
Albert Lloyd is a lecturer in the Ambassador Crawford College of Business and Entrepreneurship and is teaching several of the new courses being offered. He spent more than 25 years working in finance before retiring. After meeting people at the college, he decided to come teach at Kent State.“Kent is doing a great job of staying on the front end, the cutting edge, with these courses that are being offered. There aren’t a lot of colleges out there embracing this right now. They should. Kent is one of the few,” he said. “So, by offering these kinds of classes, Kent prepares their students for the future.
One of the leading-edge courses Lloyd teaches is called “Fintech & Cryptocurrencies: The Future of Finance.” Fintech covers topics like machine learning, algorithmic trading and the tokenization of real-world assets, which includes cryptocurrency. “In the future, cryptocurrency will be like electricity,” he said. “You turn on a light and electricity is there. You don’t really know how it works or why. It’s just that it works. Cryptocurrency will be the same thing. It will be pervasive; it will be behind there, working all the time, being used every day, much like we use electricity now.”
Sometimes, the term “cryptocurrency” is used as a blanket term to describe what are actually several different currency systems. Lloyd explained that the key difference between Bitcoin and cryptocurrency is decentralization. Bitcoin is decentralized, spread across a network of thousands of nodes with no central point of failure. Other cryptocurrencies have a central point of failure, he explained. "If you take Ethereum, for example, the central point of failure is Vitalik Buterin, he’s the man. If something happens to him, I don’t know what happens to the cryptocurrency. Ethereum probably continues on, but it takes a hit.”
There’s also stablecoin. “Stablecoin complies like Tether or USDC, they have dollar-for-dollar backing,” Lloyd said. “It’s not supposed to change; it’s stable to the price of the dollar. What will end up happening is you’ll have a stablecoin wallet on your phone and you probably won’t use dollars anymore, you’ll use a stablecoin of some sort that is pegged to the dollar for transactions. You’ll find that organizations will probably use stablecoins to do transactions in the future.”
Preparing Students as Leaders
In Lloyd’s class, students are presented with this question: If you were presenting to an investor who had $10 million and wanted them to understand Bitcoin and cryptocurrency and the nuances and differences between the two, which one would you recommend they invest the $10 million in? Each group has a different cryptocurrency to evaluate against Bitcoin. The assignment begins on the first day of class and the results, their presentations and recommendations are their final projects. “Everybody learns about Bitcoin as it relates to all these other cryptocurrencies, and they learn about the cryptocurrencies,” Lloyd said. “It is a great way to create awareness about things that the other students have researched.”
Lloyd said that these are the kinds of experiential learning exercises that put Kent State graduates ahead of their peers. “I think the No. 1 benefit is they’re going to be more prepared, more so than students from other colleges that don’t offer these kinds of classes,” he said. “We’re prepared to lead, to go out there and go through the interview process. Can you imagine going to an interview and somebody saying, ‘We’re really trying to figure out how to use stablecoins to transact,’ and our student saying, ‘Oh, I know all about stablecoins?’”
“They can talk to them about stablecoins, from taking a class like this, and help them learn more about it,” Lloyd said. “Imagine how much further that puts them ahead of everybody else that’s going in for an interview.”
New Building, New Energy
“Having this building, I think, gives a certain impression of the college in a very positive light,” Spake said. “And I think employers believe that we are producing students reflective of this kind of space and technology. It’s helping our brand as much as it’s helping the students in the classroom learn new techniques and technologies.”
She says that employers see that Kent State business students are “very well prepared.” “They’ve been exposed to the latest technology in their fields. I would say, besides our students being prepared for their jobs, employers probably view Kent State, particularly this college, more favorably than they did in the past. And our students are proud to graduate from this college,” Spake said.
