Piercing the bubble: How management students can confront poverty in Colombia

This article describes the current relationship between management education in Colombia and the efforts of the management program at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana (UPB) in Medelln to reduce local poverty. The article uses the metaphor of "the bubble" to illustrate how social class, family socialization, and the current UPB management curriculum insulate management students from thinking about and interacting with the poor in Medelln. Based on the authors' experiences, five interventions are described that (a) integrate the issue of poverty more meaningfully throughout the management curriculum and (b) pierce this bubble within which UPB management expect to live their entire professional lives.