Bentley University is a private institution that combines business education with arts and sciences. Founded in 1917, the Massachusetts-based business school aims to strike a balance between leadership and understanding to inspire students to ‘be a force for positive change’. With a greater focus on equipping students with critical thinking and practical skills to apply in the real world, Bentley has been recognised as one of the top 5 colleges in the States for the average alumni income.

Phil Uhlmann is a senior lecturer at Bentley University who covers a broad array of topics relating to finance for both undergraduate and postgraduate students, such as Large Investments and International Project Finance. Phil has been teaching at the university for over two decades after a long-standing career in banking. He is an avid reader of the FT with the “equivalent of many filing cabinets full of articles,” that he has managed to save over the years.

Throughout the day, Phil mentions how he is hooked onto a number of alerts. He mostly uses his laptop or computer to access the FT but also has the FT app on his phone so whenever something happens, he gets an instant notification on his phone. Phil enjoys reading “everything Gillian Tett writes as it is all common sense”. He also finds himself drawn towards articles by “Gideon Rachman, Martin Wolf, Megan Greene and Raghuram Rajan when he contributes to the FT as a guest.” In simple terms, Phil prefers reading anything relating to banks internationally.

“The other thing I like to read are the comments underneath FT articles,” says Phil. He explains how the comment section can be full of very insightful and useful points made by subject-matter experts who “quietly offer an opinion” and nudge people to consider a different perspective. The FT covers a range of topics from “debt rescheduling to new transactions” making it easy for an academic like Phil to search through articles that could be useful to reference in class.

According to Phil, the FT helps him support Bentley University’s initiative for ‘Creating Leaders for Positive Change’ as they move away from textbook learning. Textbooks provide the foundations but insight from the FT helps “better prepare the students who’ll be going into real jobs and will need to demonstrate strong commercial awareness from their first interview.”

Over the last 130 years, the FT has developed and adapted its journalism to meet the demands of a changing world. For business schools, the FT is a necessary tool for achieving a high success rate in employability. As an education resource alongside classroom materials, the FT allows students to connect classroom learnings to what is happening to the current state of the economy.

David Hunter is a student at Bentley University who has enrolled in multiple courses taught by Phil. David explains how he frequently used the FT as a resource in his classes. By engaging with FT content, David claims he’s been able to “bridge the gap between in-class learning and real-world application.” At Bentley University, students are not only taught about the current economic and political climate but what this means for the future. As a result, when students graduate, they are equipped with the necessary skills to succeed in their future endeavours.

Naturally, a lot of students come straight from high school where in the first couple of years at university, “students go through exercises and sort of blindly jump through the hoops.” Phil explains how there is a perceived gap between theory and practice which is only bridged when students couple class with FT insight. “I'm trying to get the students to use the FT to connect the dots,” says Phil. The reason is, there needs to be an understanding as to why something is happening in a particular industry and the impact this will have on other parts of the world. For example, “When Copper prices were increasing, I expected students to go further and understand what the problem in Peru meant for that industry and even internationally.”

The FT plays an important long-term role in employment as well. It’s not just about shaping their minds for today, their next lecture, assignment or interview but Phil illustrates how the benefit one derives from reading the FT goes beyond that. If students plan on being a part of the senior management team, "they'll need to start thinking the way that those people think fairly early, anticipating the questions they’ll come into meetings with.”

There is a level of training the mind to think outside the box that only comes when one engages with the FT for said number of years. It’s the practice of reading high-quality journalism that makes students more likely to succeed in their professional lives.

Offering a range of media and technologies to access FT articles is a means to make credible journalism as accessible as possible. At Bentley, the value of an FT Professional Subscription is having the opportunity to encourage a way of thinking that most students appreciate. “Students come back and tell me about their job interviews and eventually the jobs they secure, so I think this method works.

Phil makes it very clear to students from his first lecture that the focus is going to be on learning, “Do that and the grades will take care of themselves,” he says. At a time when students can access information from many different outlets, it's a priority for those in higher education to source information scrupulously.

Having university-wide access to the FT makes it easier and more accessible for both teaching staff and students to engage with a range of content. “I think the FT is very nice and easy for everyone to understand, you just need to get an account.” As the FT expands, it can innovate ways to convey information in a more easy-to-understand format. For example, Phil mentions how FT’s coverage of the conflict in Ukraine has been rather extensive with visual guides to the war in the form of digital maps. In that respect, the FT has done “a great job of helping people understand things very quickly.” Phil elaborates on how “market data and how to search for information about a particular industry” all make the FT a worthwhile investment for business schools.

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