People, Planet, Profit: The Triple Bottom Line at the Heart of Bard’s Newly Top-Rated MBA Program

Since her release from prison in 2019, Stacy Burnett has dedicated her life to expanding access to information and technology for incarcerated men and women. Antonio Castillo founded Ceiba Coffee Solutions to connect consumers with small-scale, eco-friendly coffee farmers in Latin America. Eliza Edge is helping startups and entrepreneurs build prosperous economies in Hudson Valley communities where residents can find strong local jobs not reliant on tourism. 

These leaders prioritize social good over the bottom line. They learned how to marry their idealism with business fundamentals at an innovative MBA program offered by Bard College.

Unlike conventional MBA programs that focus largely on maximizing profits for shareholders, often at the expense of other critical business considerations, Bard’s MBA in Sustainability teaches students how to prioritize long-term environmental and social impact alongside financial growth. Founded in 2012, the program attracts a diverse set of students—traditional business-minded professionals but also artists, farmers, nonprofit leaders, and engineers—united in their shared commitment to using business as a tool for social change.  

Despite being one of the few programs of its kind in the nation, Bard’s approach is gaining national recognition. Last year, it ranked first in The Princeton Review’s Best Green MBA and Best MBA for Nonprofits. Now, having produced a decade of graduates working in everything from criminal justice reform to ethical supply chains and economic development for more than a decade, the program’s founders say they are creating a new generation of business leaders positioned to tackle some of society’s biggest challenges.

“What really unites [Bard students] is that we’re all part of this program because we want to make the world a better place to live. And we want to use the business skills that we’re learning from the MBA program to do that,” said Castillo. 

Bard’s MBA in Sustainability was born from a belief that business education needed to change. In 2009, Eban Goodstein moved to the Hudson Valley to lead Bard College’s Master of Science in Environmental Policy program. He was concerned that American business was not doing enough to deal with what he saw as existential threats: climate change, ecosystem collapse, extreme inequality, political instability, and resource constraints. At the time, business schools, for the most part, didn’t see these challenges as their responsibility, and so they weren’t equipping students to address them. 

“Most business students are not trained to worry about the future or to deal with climate change,” said James Stoner, a professor emeritus at Fordham University’s Gabelli School of Business, a more traditional business school. Determined to shift this paradigm, Goodstein launched Bard’s MBA in Sustainability. 

Based out of Bard’s satellite campus in DUMBO, Brooklyn, the 82 students in the two-year program take a curriculum that looks, at first glance, like a traditional MBA: courses in accounting, finance, operations, marketing, strategy, and leadership. But embedded in every course is how to use standard market analysis and management tools to build businesses designed to solve social and environmental problems, Goodstein said. 

Edge, a 2020 graduate, chose Bard because she didn’t want to be trained in “business as usual.” Concerned that traditional business models often benefit a few at the expense of the many, she instead sought a program that would equip her with the skills to create a positive impact on her community. 

Now, as the program director of the Hudson Valley Venture Hub, Edge works to bring investors into economic development initiatives in the region. She says she applies the lessons she learned at Bard daily. “I think every day about concepts like the triple bottom line,” she said. In a traditional business education, students are taught to focus on a single bottom line—profit. But the triple bottom line expands this approach, integrating social and environmental impact alongside financial returns.

“I’m operating in a capitalist state of mind, working with investors who want returns,” Edge said. But the perspective she gained at Bard is that success is not solely about making money; it’s about ensuring that investments create desirable impacts in the world, she said. “For me, that impact is making the Hudson Valley a more prosperous place for all residents,” she said.

Working in a very different field, Castillo echoed this sentiment. For him, the triple bottom line—people, planet, and profit—is central to his work in the coffee industry. The coffee farmer should be earning a livable wage, he said. “And I’m respecting the environment while doing that.” This approach still allows him to earn a healthy income “but in a balanced way,” he said.

Not putting profit first allows for other calculations in business decisions. Burnett, a 2023 Bard MBA alum who previously earned her bachelor’s degree through the Bard Prison Initiative, described how this perspective plays out. A typical real estate developer might restrict public access to a parcel of land to increase its value. “It’ll be more valuable if it’s exclusive,” she explained. Someone with a Bard MBA, however, would consider a broader set of stakeholders—the developer, the community, and the environment—and devise a way for all to benefit.

Burnett, like many Bard MBA students, arrived already armed with a deep sense of purpose. While working in public health on New York City’s COVID response team, she saw how MBAs were deployed to solve logistical problems, and she wanted to acquire those same tools without compromising her values. 

When Burnett took a job at JSTOR, a nonprofit digital library, where she worked to provide access to academic research in prisons. In doing so, she found herself applying concepts from Bard’s MBA curriculum directly to her work. One key lesson came from Bard’s leadership class, where she learned the importance of centering employees’ needs and professional growth rather than viewing employees as “cogs in a wheel.” She also learned a stakeholder-driven approach to problem-solving. Rather than trying to get everyone in the same room, she met separately with the State Department of Corrections, librarians, and IT teams to address their unique interests. This allowed her to get buy-in from all parties, ultimately making the initiative to install JSTOR in prisons more effective. “I looked like a freaking genius at work,” she said.

Burnett also applied Bard’s principles of environmental sustainability to her work, helping JSTOR switch to renewable energy and consider its long-term climate impacts from mass data storage.

Across the country, in the face of mounting social and environmental crises – climate change, growing wealth inequality, and political instability – business schools are responding to students who want more than the traditional profit-maximization model. In 2020, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB International), the organization that provides accreditation to business schools, set an expectation that accredited schools make a positive impact on society.

Though some of the country’s top business schools, such as the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business, have introduced sustainability-focused courses or centers in recent years, Bard’s MBA in Sustainability remains one of the few that fully integrates environmental and social impact into every aspect of its curriculum. Bard MBA professors and alumni believe that without this level of commitment, sustainability initiatives amount to little more than greenwashing, misleading the public into believing a company or product is more environmentally responsible than it actually is, and will not meaningfully shape future business leaders.

A recent report by the sustainable-economy research institute Corporate Knights examined the extent to which business schools integrate the “social purpose business model” into their curricula. Of the 209 schools analyzed, only 45 explicitly named improving society as a primary purpose in their mission statements, as Bard does. 

Bard’s emphasis on mission-driven business doesn’t have to be at odds with striving for financial success, professors insist. Program leaders believe that solving social and environmental problems can be profitable. However, Bard graduates tend to earn lower starting salaries than their peers from elite business schools. According to The Princeton Review, Bard MBA graduates report an average starting salary of $110,000, compared to $182,500 at Stanford Graduate School of Business, which ranks #1 for career prospects.

But for the kinds of students Bard’s MBA attracts, success isn’t just about salary. “Most people with my education could go make a killing in hedge funds or private equity,” Burnett said. “But that’s not true to me or my values, and I’m not willing to compromise on those things.”

Since its founding, the program has graduated some 350 students. Their work showcases the potential of Bard’s alternative approach to business education. “What I love is that there’s this mini army of Bard MBAs who are now in positions of power across different organizations,”  integrating sustainability into their work and influencing business practices from the inside, Burnett said. 

Alumni like Chelsea Mozen, Sustainability Director at Etsy, who leads the company’s carbon-neutral delivery program, and Jordan Sabine, US Sustainable Sourcing Manager at McDonald’s, who leads their regenerative agriculture strategy, demonstrate the program’s reach. Together, these graduates are proving how a Bard MBA business degree can be a force for environmental and social good. 

For Edge, training helped her secure a $1.3-million grant from New York State to establish an Innovation Hot Spot in the Hudson Valley, fostering economic growth and entrepreneurship in the region. 

Through her work bringing JSTOR to prisons, Burnett has helped incarcerated individuals improve conditions both during incarceration and after their release. In North Carolina, for example, a group of incarcerated individuals in prison used JSTOR to research what reentry services are available in other states and to draft legislation aimed at expanding reentry services based on those models. That bill is now sitting in committee in the North Carolina legislature, waiting for a vote, Burnett said. 

Castillo’s fieldwork has taken him to coffee-growing regions in Chiapas, Oaxaca, and El Salvador, where he has connected directly with small-scale farmers to document their stories. In doing so, Castillo seeks to expose the persistent inequities within the coffee value chain. “Everything starts with awareness,” he said.

In a rapidly changing world, the question isn’t whether business education will adapt but how quickly, the founder of Bard’s MBA program believes. “We can’t keep pursuing business as usual,” Goodstein said. “There’s an imperative for business in the 21st century to radically reimagine what it’s doing on the planet.” 

The post People, Planet, Profit: The Triple Bottom Line at the Heart of Bard’s Newly Top-Rated MBA Program first appeared on The Daily Catch.