MBA360.. formerly Journey to my MBA

Integrated Reasoning section of the GMAT makes debut

2011-12-04T23:38:00.000-08:00

Anxious business-school applicants have something to add to their to-do list: preparation for the new "integrated reasoning" section of the GMAT.

Although the new section was initially announced a year and a half ago, the Graduate Management Admission Council has offered scant details about what questions will look like and how they will be scored. With registration for the new test starting this month, many students are wringing their hands. Some test-prep experts say they may even see a rush of applicants wanting to take the test in the next few months just to avoid the new section, which won't appear on the exam until June.

The idea behind the "integrated reasoning" unit—which will be added to the existing verbal, quantitative and analytical writing sections—is to gauge how well applicants can extract and analyze complex data. The change comes as schools fall under increasing pressure from corporate recruiters to introduce more data-driven courses to better prepare students for the challenges they'll face after graduation.

"You're much more likely to have to analyze an integrated set of data than you are to do a geometry problem" in business school, says Andrew Mitchell, director of pre-business programs at Washington Post Co.'s Kaplan Test Prep. Geometry will still be covered within the GMAT's existing quantitative section.

So far, the council has published just four sample integrated-reasoning questions. One shows a table of data regarding flight traffic at various airports and asks the test-taker to determine relative passenger volume, flight landings and takeoffs at specific locations. Another question shows a scatter plot of ocean and air temperatures taken at a fixed location over the past year and asks test-takers to determine relationships between the two.

Many schools say GMAT scores, along with academic transcripts, are helpful predictors of how students will perform once they arrive on campus, but they are hopeful that the new section will provide an even more relevant data point.

"It's a step in the right direction," says Peter Zemsky, deputy dean of degree programs at INSEAD. Zemsky says that given the speed with which complicated decisions must be made in the business world, it's important to test applicants for such skills.

Still, admissions officers say they'll need at least a year before they know how to read results from the new section, as they see how test-takers progress through their first classes.

The test is still just a part of the total application package, which also includes interviews, references, essays and undergraduate transcripts.

Many admissions officers lament that students put too much emphasis on their GMAT scores, at the expense of other parts of their applications. "It doesn't matter what we say, applicants are going to stress out about the GMAT because it's (a) controllable, and (b) comparable," says Derrick Bolton, assistant dean and director of M.B.A. admissions at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Data reflect that attitude: Admissions-consulting firm Veritas Prep found in a client survey that applicants already spend 71 hours preparing for the GMAT, but just 28 hours writing their essays and nine hours preparing for interviews.

The figure for test-prep likely will increase once the new version launches, say testing experts.

ROSS EMBA coming to LA

2011-12-04T23:37:00.001-08:00

link

This past week, the Ross School of Business announced that it will offer its 20-month MBA Program in Los Angeles beginning in August, 2012. Following up on this announcement, the MSJ had a chance to sit down with Professor BillLanen, the Associate Dean and Head of Global Initiatives at Ross, and discuss this exciting initiative.

The 20-month program will offer the same curriculum as the current EMBA program, with classes offered once-a-month that offer a blend of action-based learning and leadership development initiatives. Michigan faculty will fly to LA once a month, adding authenticity to the program which should help to maintain the value proposition of a Ross MBA. The intent is to leverage the current Michigan alumni-base, with a worldwide network of approximately 500,000 members, to help build and expand the brand on the West Coast. Ross graduates will help to recommend candidates, sponsor employees, and recruit graduates. Currently, the EMBA program primarily appeals to business professionals in the Midwest and East Coast. This expansion offers an opportunity to expand the Michigan brand to a key market, and offer a unique opportunity to West Coast business professionals that could not otherwise participate due to travel restraints. According to Dean Alison Davis-Blake, "this West Coast expansion allows us to respond to a market need and replicate a model of delivery to future markets across the US and beyond."

One challenge that we raised to professor Lanen was how to maintain the Michigan / Ross culture in LA? He acknowledged that some connection will need to happen, but this challenge is not unique, and has been successfully addressed in other programs that Ross has rolled out. For instance, in the Brazil Global MBA program, students reside in Ann Arbor for two months, which helps to acclimate students to Michigan and permeate the Ross culture. Moreover, in the Global MBA program, where students complete the core curriculum in Osaka, Seoul, and Beijing, students get to enjoy a global learning environment, then return to Ann Arbor to complete the second year. One step that has already been taken to ensure the Ross culture in maintained is a student orientation in Ann Arbor, where students will get to come to campus and learn the "Ross way" on the ground.

After a very informative discussion, we closed with a pretty direct question…..can this work? Professor Lanen stressed the importance of the student base that is selected, and the impact that they eventually have on the local region. As with any MBA program, the ultimate success is typically predicated on the quality of the student base. Given Michigan's track record, expansive alumni network, and global brand, I am willing to bet that "Go Blue" chants in LA executive circles will be expanding for many years to come!

UCLA Anderson charts its worldwide impact with new online, interactive global map

2011-12-01T23:55:00.000-08:00

bragging or tuberous. you decide...

article link

During its 75 years of "business beyond usual," theUCLA Anderson School of Management has educated tens of thousands of students and served as home to hundreds of distinguished faculty members whose work and research have had a tremendous impact throughout the world.

But how to keep track of all those accomplishments?

In an effort to highlight these significant accomplishments, the school has launched its Global Impact Map, the first-ever interactive microsite designed to chart the achievements and advances the UCLA Anderson community has made throughout the world.

The site, AndersonImpactMap.com, was developed to encourage social interaction between current students, faculty and alumni, as well as to offer an ever-expanding look at the contributions they have made to corporations, organizations and various communities through their work, studies, research and discoveries, both during and since their involvement with the school.

"This is an exciting innovation of UCLA Anderson, introducing an interactive tool that tracks the extraordinary accomplishments of our students, alumni and faculty," said Judy Olian, dean of UCLA Anderson. "It's most impressive and heartening to observe the depth and breadth of our community's leadership and societal accomplishments."

The impact that students, alumni and faculty have had ranges from effective international business leadership and new business development to community service projects, including the promotion of children's literacy in Guatemala, research in Japan that has affected education in the U.S., and efforts to eradicate poverty.

To encourage interactive participation, the Global Impact Map allows users to document their own accomplishments, review those of others and nominate members of the UCLA Anderson community to be included in the map.

For more information and to interact with UCLA Anderson, visit www.AndersonImpactMap.com.

Field of dreams Harvard Business School reinvents its MBA course

2011-12-01T23:53:00.001-08:00

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YOUNG mums shopping in the Copley Mall in downtown Boston last month found themselves being questioned about their use of soap by students from Harvard Business School. The students were not doing odd jobs to earn beer money. They were preparing to help a firm in Brazil launch an antibacterial cleanser.

Fieldwork—ie, going out and talking to people—is a big change for HBS. Its students used to sit in a classroom and discuss case studies written by professors. Now they may also work in a developing country and launch a start-up. “Learning by doing” will become the norm, if a radical overhaul of the MBA curriculum succeeds.

The 900 students arriving in Boston this summer for their two-year course were told they would be guinea pigs. The new practical addition to HBS’s curriculum is known as “FIELD” (Field Immersion Experiences for Leadership Development). Not all the staff and students are overjoyed to be experimented on. But the man responsible, Nitin Nohria, who became dean of HBS in July 2010, says that “if it works, the FIELD method could become an equal partner to the case method.”

Long before he became dean, Mr Nohria lamented the failure of business schools to fulfil their mission of turning management into a profession similar to law or medicine. Asked what should be expected from someone with an MBA, he replies that “obviously, they should master a body of knowledge. But we should also expect them to apply that knowledge with some measure of judgment.” MBA students have long been sent on summer internships with prospective employers, but HBS, like most business schools, did little else to help them with the practical application of management studies.

What happens in the second year of the new course is still being worked out. But the first year has three elements. First, team-building exercises. Students take turns to lead a group engaged in a project such as designing an “eco-friendly sculpture”. They learn to collaborate and to give and take feedback. These exercises are loosely based on ones used in the US army.

Second, students will be sent to work for a week with one of more than 140 firms in 11 countries. Already the new intake have had conference calls with these companies, ranging from the Brazilian soapmaker to a Chinese property firm, and gone off-campus to conduct product-development “dashes” like the one in Copley Mall. This sort of structured learning-by-doing is a world away from HBS’s traditional encouragement of students to “go on an adventure” outside of classes.

In the third novel part of the course, students will be given eight weeks, and seed money of $3,000 each, to launch a small company. The most successful, as voted by their fellow students, will get more funding. It remains to be seen if this amounts to much more than a souped-up business-plan competition, though Mr Nohria says he hopes some real businesses will be created. (If only HBS had thought of this when Bill Gates was thinking of starting Microsoft, or Mark Zuckerberg was creating Facebook—perhaps the school would have received shares in those firms.)

It is unclear how much the one-week working assignments will achieve. Pankaj Ghemawat, a management guru, says “the literature suggests that an immersion experience needs to be at least 2-3 weeks and be backed up with time in the classroom.” The HBS students’ classroom preparation will have to be pretty thorough, then, to make up for the brevity of their field trips. Moreover, some of the HBS alumni who have agreed to offer work experience at their firms say they are unsure what meaningful work they can offer the students.

Privately, some faculty members are sceptical that all this change will be worthwhile. In January, the vote in favour of trying the field method was “as enthusiastic as you could get from a faculty,” says Mr Nohria, wryly. He wisely ensured that ownership of the idea was widely spread by delegating design of the new curriculum to several faculty committees. The vote gave the go-ahead to run a “delicate experiment for 3-5 years to see if we can move the needle”, he says, compared with the 13 years it took to develop the case method into more or less what it is today.

The experiment does not come cheap, adding 10-15% to the course’s cost (students pay at least $84,000 a year), which HBS will bear while it figures out what works. A lot is at stake. For where Harvard leads, other universities may follow.

MBA costs soar. Salaries? Not so much.

2011-11-18T21:39:00.001-08:00

The total cost of a Stanford MBA is now more than $350,000. And salaries have not kept pace. Yet another look at the diminishing returns of the degree.

By John A. Byrne, contributor

(Poets&Quants) -- Getting an MBA degree from a top-tier business school in the U.S. now costs more than a third of a million dollars. That's the unmistakable conclusion of a new analysis by Poets&Quants that takes into account the opportunity costs of quitting a job to attend graduate school for two years.

The highest total cost comes from Stanford Graduate School of Business, where students typically leave jobs that already pay them more than $88,000 a year. If you tack two years of forgone earnings to the school's recommended student budget, the total cost of getting an MBA is now a whopping $351,662.

Stanford is hardly alone. There are eight U.S. business schools where the cost of earning an MBA now exceeds $300,000. They include Harvard ($348,800), Wharton ($326,400), Columbia ($322,590), Dartmouth ($316,200), Chicago ($315,608), MIT ($313,264), and Northwestern ($310,378).

Even MBAs from the best public universities barely lighten the load. The total cost of a two-year MBA from the University of Virginia's Darden School is now $279,650, while the University of Michigan MBA costs $271,448. The only relative bargain on this list of top 25 schools comes by way of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The total MBA price tag: $195,380, the only school below $200,000.

Plenty of income left behind

The cost of earning an MBA has escalated as many students' pre-MBA salaries are quite high. Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management says that students who enrolled at the school this fall left jobs that paid them an average of $73,960 a year. At Berkeley's Haas School of Business, the school said its students had earned $66,345 annually before enrolling in its MBA program this year. And at Duke's Fuqua, the school said its newest MBA candidates had been making $64,087 a year.

In some cases, the "average" figures fall below the median numbers reported by the schools. At the Haas School, for example, the median is $68,000 a year, versus a $66,345 average.

Many of the top business schools recently reported these figures to Bloomberg BusinessWeek, along with their recommended student budgets. A student budget includes tuition, required fees, books and case study materials, as well as room and board. In some cases, schools declined to provide data on the forgone pay of their latest students. Poets&Quants estimated their numbers based on previously disclosed pre-MBA salary data.

Harvard MBAs leave most on the table

Harvard Business School MBA students had earned the most money before heading off to Cambridge, Mass.: an estimated $90,400 a year. Of the top 25 U.S. business schools, 23 have students who earned in excess of $50,000 a year before enrolling in their full-time MBA programs.

It's relatively rare to see the forgone pay numbers of MBA students, but those numbers also are an important measure of the quality of students at a business school. The larger the salary, the more likely it is that the candidate left a meaningful job in a demanding environment. In any case, applicants to the top MBA programs have to give up a lot when they decide to go to an elite graduate school.

How have these numbers changed over the years? Some 10 years ago, an MBA student at Kellogg left a job that paid $65,000 a year versus today's average of $73,960. Back then, the two-year recommended budget for the degree came to $105,066, compared to $162,458 today. The total bill for a Kellogg MBA was $235,066 10 years ago. Today, it's $310,378.

And the reward? Kellogg MBAs graduating in 2001 pulled down median starting salaries of $90,000 and median starting bonuses of $25,000 each. MBAs in Kellogg's class of 2011 reported median salaries of $110,000 and signing bonuses of $20,000 each. So over the past 10 years, the total cost of getting a Kellogg MBA has risen by 32%, while the starting salary and bonus has increased by 13%.

The comparison looks even less enticing against the 54% rise in the recommended student budget over the past 10 years. The bottom line: What an MBA now spends to get the degree has increased more than four times the post-degree starting salary in the past 10 years. It's yet another look at the diminishing returns of the degree.

It's not merely the fact that the costs of an MBA have far outpaced inflation. A stagnant economy has also kept both pre-MBA and post-MBA compensation down.

$1.4 Million Grant Gives Boost to UCLA Anderson Program New funding will bring health literacy to more low-income families

2011-11-18T21:38:00.000-08:00

Article

LOS ANGELES, Nov 18, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Amid reports that an increasing number of Americans are living below the poverty level, UCLA/Johnson & Johnson Health Care Institute (HCI) is expanding its efforts to help low-income families.

The HCI, in partnership with the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), along with several other partners, was chosen by the Department of Health and Human Services' Administration for Children and Families (ACF) to establish a center of excellence for Head Start to serve the nation. HCI will receive $1.4 million dollars out of the $12 million grant over four years for its role in the Office of Head Start National Center for Health.

HCI plans to expand its work in health literacy, educating teachers, parents and children on a range of health care topics. These activities will include live training sessions, customized simplified multi-lingual handouts for families on topics ranging from prenatal education for a healthy pregnancy, management of common childhood illnesses, good oral health practices, accident prevention in the home, and nutrition, training manuals for staff and teachers, and technical assistance to Head Start agencies to help them meet low literacy needs for health promotion for the vulnerable populations they serve.

"These funds come at a time when our nation still seeks ways to improve health literacy and control health care costs," says UCLA Anderson Senior Associate Dean Alfred E. Osborne. "This will provide more families with the appropriate tools and skills to empower them in their health decision making, and the net benefits will follow -- not just for common childhood ailments, but also in nutrition to fight childhood obesity and diabetes, improved oral health status and prenatal health education."

This health literacy program was developed by Dr. Ariella Herman, UCLA Anderson senior lecturer and HCI research director, and the HCI team. Together they created a series of low-literacy learning materials, manuals and protocols supporting this education process to enhance the fundamental skills of health literacy.

"People often do not recognize the importance of health literacy, which makes a coalition like this so important," says Herman. "The combination of renowned partners in the medical field with management expertise from the Anderson School brings extraordinary opportunity to improve the health of children and families in Head Start, with implementation of strong health education and prevention programs.

"Just knowing the appropriate response for concerns arising during pregnancy, when a child is sick, or how to provide one's family with a healthy diet on a limited budget can be powerful; this low-cost dose of prevention is important for improving health and is what the new legislation of the Affordable Care Act calls for," she adds.

The 2010 HHS National Action Plan to Improve Health Literacy recognized the significance of health literacy in the nation's health agenda. "It is the currency for everything we do," said Howard K. Koh, MD, MPH, Assistant Secretary for Health for the US Department of Health and Human Services in the National Action Plan to Improve Health Literacy, Forward 2010.

To date, Herman estimates 50,000 families in the U.S. have benefited from HCI's work over the past decade. With this new grant, HCI is preparing to double that number nationally in the next four years.

"Health knowledge and awareness is one thing, but the successful implementation of behavioral change in Head Start agencies and families is quite another," says Conrad Person, Johnson & Johnson's director of corporate contribution. "J&J is delighted with the impact and influence of Dr. Herman's research and is pleased to see this effort continued on a larger scale with the establishment of a National Center for Health."

"UCLA is known for its public mission and service to communities," says UCLA Anderson Dean Judy Olian. "Dr. Herman's application of management principles to health education achieves powerful impact by addressing societal challenges through business theory and advanced practices. That's what we do at UCLA Anderson."

About UCLA Anderson School of Management

Celebrating 75 years of Business Beyond Usual, UCLA Anderson School of Management is among the leading business schools in the world. UCLA Anderson faculty members are globally renowned for their teaching excellence and research in advancing management thinking. Each year, UCLA Anderson provides a distinctive approach to management education to more than 1,800 students enrolled in its MBA, Fully-Employed MBA, Executive MBA, Global Executive MBA for Asia Pacific, Global Executive MBA for the Americas, Master of Financial Engineering, doctoral and executive education programs. Combining selective admissions, varied and innovative learning programs, and a world-wide network of 37,000 alumni, UCLA Anderson develops and prepares global leaders.

SOURCE: UCLA Anderson School of Management

Top Part-Time MBA Programs of 2011

2011-11-10T20:22:00.000-08:00

Regional Competition Heats Up

By Louis Lavelle

In the two years since Bloomberg Businessweek last ranked the nation's top part-time MBA programs, it would appear there's been little change in the established order. In five of the six regions, the No. 1 school remains the same, with only the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business becoming a new No. 1 in the Midwest, ousting the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

But just below the No. 1 schools, a transformation is under way. Villanova surged from No. 9 to No. 2 in the Mid-Atlantic region, putting it within a hair's breadth of No. 1 Carnegie Mellon. Chicago Booth moved up two spots in the Midwest, while Georgia State did the same in the South. Babson, unranked in 2009 because of a low rate of response to our ranking survey, made a startling debut at No. 2 in the Northeast. In the Southwest, the University of Denver advanced to No. 5 from No. 8. And in the West, the University of Nevada, Reno, is now at No. 2, moving up three spots and nipping at the heels of No. 1 UCLA.

In the slides that follow, we list the top five schools in each region. To see the complete list for each region, use our interactive graphic. To learn more about individual programs, check out their online profiles, use our comparator tool, or take a virtual school tour. And for a detailed explanation of our methodology, read our FAQ.

GMAT scores, work experience, class size and completion rates are self-reported by schools. Grads reporting salary increase, average salary increase, and information on career goals are based on students responding to the ranking survey and do not represent the entire class. NA=not available. NR=not ranked.

Join the discussion on the Bloomberg Businessweek Business School Forums, visit us onFacebook, and follow @BWbschools on Twitter.

MBA Applications Down says BusinessWeek

2011-11-07T19:47:00.001-08:00

MBA Applications Down

By Alison Damast

The gangbuster growth of business school applications during the recession appears to be a thing of the past for two-year full-time MBA programs. This year, application volume was down at 21 of the top 30 full-time MBA programs, according to data collected by Bloomberg Businessweek. The decline in applications is a trend that appears to be accelerating, with eight additional schools reporting declines in application volume this year over 2010. Applications were down at seven of the top 10 business schools, including the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, Harvard Business School, and Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management.

Stanford saw the biggest dip in application volume of the top 10 schools, with 586 fewer applications this year, an 8 percent decline from 2010. Still, some of the top 30 schools managed to buck the downward trend. Dartmouth University's Tuck School of Business, University of Michigan's Ross School of Business and University of California, Los Angeles'Anderson School of Management, reported substantial increases in applications, with each school receiving more than 200 applications over last year's total.

The downward spiral in application volume at the top 30 schools is mirrored in the business school world at large: 67 percent of two-year full-time MBA programs surveyed by the Graduate Management Admission Counil (GMAC) reported a decrease in applications this year, up from 47 percent in 2010. A skittish economy, coupled with candidates unwilling to leave their jobs, may be causing some to hold off applying to business school, GMAC noted in its latest survey of application trends. "The impact of economic uncertainty on admissions trends for full-time MBA programs may still be underway," GMAC said in the report.

The smaller pipeline of MBA applications this year meant that getting into some of the top business schools has become easier. Two-thirds of the top 30 business schools admitted a larger percentage of applicants this year, up from one-third the year before. The University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management had the biggest slip in selectivity of the top 30 schools, admitting nearly 41 percent of students, up from 30 percent in 2010. More typical were the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business and Brigham Young University's Marriott School of Management, both of which saw selectivity slip five percentage points. Even Stanford, the most selective of the top 30 business schools, became slightly easier to get into, accepting 7 percent of all applicants, up one percentage point from 2010.

The following list provides a more comprehensive picture of how application trends shook out at each of the top 30 schools, with a breakdown of application volume, selectivity, and yield or the percentage of accepted applicants who ultimately enroll. The University of Pennsylvania'sWharton School, where applications fell more than 5 percent this year, to 6,442, declined to supply selectivity and yield figures and is not included in this slide show. The schools are listed from least selective to most selective.

Tuck apps rise

2011-11-07T19:42:00.001-08:00

I never went here, but if I had a choice.... I would have gone to Tuck.

Tuck apps rise despite nat’l drop

By Noah Reichblum

Published on Monday, October 24, 2011

In a year that saw the volume of applications to full-time MBA programs decrease by nearly 10 percent nationwide, the Tuck School of Business bucked the trend, and was instead one of three top-10 MBA programs to experience an increase in the number of applications, according to Bloomberg Businessweek.

Over two-thirds of MBA programs nationwide surveyed by the Graduate Management Admission Council reported a decrease in the number of applications they received in the 2011 admissions cycle, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. This is a dramatic change from 2010, when only 47 percent of full-time MBA programs saw a drop in their application numbers. Tuck received over 200 more applications this fall compared to last year, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. Tuck received 2,528 applications for the current freshman class, 20 percent of whom were accepted, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. Tuck Dean Paul Danos said the increase in applications is due to the school’s world-class reputation, high job placement rate for graduates and the natural cycle of application numbers.

Tuck continues to attract prospective students due to “a reputation for having a very good placement track record and a learning experience that some people really like,” Danos said, citing the fact that 97 percent of alumni in last year’s graduating class are currently employed.

After seeing other schools’ statistics, Danos said he was surprised that the application numbers for Tuck — a small school of roughly 500 students — increased.

“I was expecting to have pretty much a steady state,” he said. “These things cycle. One year we might get less applications and sometimes we’ll do better than most.”

The increase in applications also comes during tough economic times, a sign that students believe a Tuck education is worth both the financial and time investments, Danos said.

Danos said there is always a need for “highly talented” people who have an MBA degree, even when the economy is suffering. Internationally-focused schools like Tuck, which “have a portfolio of places [graduates] can go to,” continue to place students in jobs abroad regardless of the state of the national economy, Danos said. The Economist recently ranked Tuck the number one full-time MBA program in an international assessment of business schools.

Even though Tuck’s application and admissions numbers remained unscathed this year, Danos said that admission numbers could decrease next year as a result of the continued stagnant economy.

“If economic times continue, I think over time it’s going to affect everything — all programs, including Tuck,” he said.

Vibhuti Nayar Tu’12 said the strength of Tuck’s community makes it such a popular program. After interacting with various community members throughout the application process, Nayar realized that Tuck was her number one choice, she said.

“Tuck offered one of the strongest skill sets,” she said. “When I spoke to current students, I got a sense that the school is warm and people look out for you.”

Kate Head Tu’13 said she applied to business school after working at a non-profit for three years in order to ease the career transition. After applying to three MBA programs, she chose to attend Tuck after discussions with admissions officers convinced her that Tuck alumni are “value-added.” Head said the strong Tuck alumni network is important in a business job market that is often “about who you know.”

Nayar and Head agreed that the small size of Tuck was one of the school’s most appealing aspects. The tight-knit community encourages students to work closely together in study groups, a skill that recruiters look for in MBA graduates, she said.

The national decrease in applications has raised the admission rates for many graduate programs, Bloomberg Businessweek reported. Of the top 30 business schools, 21 have seen higher admission rates than last year, according to Bloomberg Businessweek.

Danos said that while extremely selective schools can afford to receive fewer applications, less competitive graduate programs are hurt by a smaller pool of applicants.

Despite current admissions numbers and worrisome prospects for future admissions rates, Tuck will continue to focus primarily on providing a high-quality education, Danos said.

“Over time, we’ve pushed to have a higher quality of experience, a high quality student body and a larger and deeper faculty,” he said. “We have to stick to this high quality of education, regardless of the application numbers.”

MBA Admissions 2.0: Technology Makes Inroads

2011-11-07T19:38:00.000-08:00

Finally, they are getting it! Yes! - David

Business schools are turning to technology to get a better read on applicants. Paper still has a place, but so do video, PowerPoint, and Twitter

By Francesca Di Meglio

Business school applications are going high tech. Slowly, the 2.0 version of MBA admissions is arriving. Utilizing everything from social media to video, business schools are seeking new ways to get to know applicants. The goal, say admissions committee members, is to discover the true personality of the people they are considering for their classes.

Members of the admissions committees at top business schools were getting tired of reading the same old traditional essays, which had become perfunctory and overly edited, according to an e-mail written by Kurt Ahlm, associate dean of student recruitment and admissions, at University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, one of the first schools to bring technology into the application by requiring a PowerPoint presentation since 2007.

“Traditional essays were too familiar, and applicants had access to hundreds of essay-writing books, websites, and consultants. We wanted to get at something that was more authentic, get an answer that was thoughtful, strategic, and added some depth,” he writes. “Our culture embraces the challenge of making sense out of the unfamiliar, and we wanted to introduce an exercise that would capture that.”

Booth asks applicants to answer an open-ended question that encourages them to share something other than what they have already mentioned about themselves elsewhere in the application, and to do so in no more than four pages on a PowerPoint presentation. Although there are guidelines, applicants are limited only by their creativity in what they churn out.

“The choices applicants make to create meaningful content in this exercise are as revealing as the content itself,” writes Ahlm. “We learn how a person thinks, what he values, and how he perceives his fit with Booth.” He adds that the exercise is “as much about strategic decision-making as it is about graphics and prose.”

BEYOND POWERPOINT

The use of technology at Booth and elsewhere is part of a broader rethink of the application process that’s taking place at such schools as the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Columbia Business School, and the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. At all three schools, changes to the traditional application essay or other aspects of the application process are giving admissions teams new insights into the personalities and qualifications of applicants and effectively diminishing the role of admissions consultants, who have become increasingly influential in business school admissions.

Other business schools are looking for similar results with their technology-driven additions to the application. In 2010, New York University’s Stern School of Business began having applicants submit one of the application essays—asking candidates to share something about themselves in a creative way—using a USB drive, DVD, or CD. Musically inclined applicants sent CDs that included a selection of their songs, others created short movies in the form of documentaries and parodies, and still others created virtual photo albums that took viewers through their life with music or narration. The school was so pleased with the applicants’ creativity that it plans to continue with these electronic submissions, says Isser Gallogly, assistant dean of MBA admissions at Stern.

“It gives them a chance to show us how they’re unique and different and how they’ll fit into the community,” says Gallogly, who adds that these submissions serve as a nice talking point in the admissions interview as well.

TWITTER-LENGTH ESSAYS

While traditional essays had applicants writing at length and with much detail, less is more with these high-tech enhancements. The University of Iowa’s Tippie School of Management recently had applicants answer one essay question in the form it would take as a tweet on Twitter. Although they did not have to broadcast their response on Twitter, it had to be 140 characters or less. Because this was a pilot program, they could still opt to write a traditional essay instead.

Whoever sent in the best Twitter-like response would win a full-tuition financial award package, valued at more than $37,000. The question was, “What makes you an exceptional Tippie Full-Time MBA candidate and future MBA hire? Creativity Encouraged.” The school received 58 entries, and a 33-year-old Texas applicant won the free ride. Delighted with how this first attempt at using social media went, the school plans to integrate it into the application and award two full scholarships next year—one each for the best Twitter-like response from a domestic and an international student, says Lydia Fine, associate director of recruiting and admissions at Tippie.

Despite the brevity, the admissions committee could learn a lot from the applicants’ tweets, says Fine. “It helps them boil down their main selling points,” she adds. And MBA candidates could add links to separate Web pages, videos, and blogs that would inform the school even more about the person’s personality, interests, and creativity, adds Colleen Downie, senior assistant dean of Tippie.

The use of social media is not the only way schools are seeking to acquaint themselves better with applicants. Video is another way to understand students beyond their written words. Mycollegei, a company that facilitates videotaping and screening for admissions committees, has several business schools as clients, including the USC Marshall School of Business and Penn State’s Smeal College of Business.

Schools send applicants an e-mail requesting them to answer additional questions using this video service, and the applicants then tape their responses. The service archives the videos for viewing only by the admissions committee. Although some schools use these videos for any applicant who wants to add another dimension to his or her application, the majority reserve the service for those who cannot participate in a face-to-face admissions interview, says Bill Barnett, president and chief executive of mycollegei in Los Angeles. “The videos can show who candidates are above and beyond a piece of paper,” he adds.

REVIVING “PERSONALITY”

High-tech additions, says Barnett, are a part of the natural evolution of today’s applications. “Technology is becoming more popular in admissions, not just because it is more practical and convenient, but also because students were raised with it,” he says.

Still, not everyone has had success including technology in business school applications. For instance, 2008-09 applicants to the UCLA Anderson School of Management had the choice of answering essays in either a written or an audio form. After prospective students around the world indicated that they experienced difficulties with the audio technology, the school decided to revert to traditional written essays in 2011, writes Robert Weiler, assistant dean of career initiatives at Anderson, in an e-mail.

Although business schools might face stumbling blocks when first incorporating technology into the application, they seem to be embracing the possibilities. In fact, Tippie’s Fine says it’s inevitable. “There’s a trend toward bringing personality back into the application,” she says. “You have to go beyond the résumé, because that’s what employers are doing.”

Join the discussion on the Bloomberg Businessweek Business School Forum, visit us on Facebook, and follow @BWbschools on Twitter.

Di Meglio is a reporter for Businessweek.com in Fort Lee, N.J.

GMAC Quant 12th Edition released

2009-04-29T00:51:00.000-07:00

I was just browsing around Amazon ordering some headphones and noticed this 12th edition had been released March 23. It's a good book and the starting point any GMAT taker should be using. The last version didn't quite get to the difficulty of the actual GMAT. I felt that it fell short from the 630 range on up. I hope this ones more comprehensive.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0470449748/ref=s9_newr_co_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=left-2&pf_rd_r=0KFT6322C6JZR2SN4PR7&pf_rd_t=3201&pf_rd_p=471804691&pf_rd_i=typ01

UCLA Anderson now asking for audio MBA Apps for essays

2009-04-28T10:24:00.000-07:00

A word in your ear
By Della Bradshaw

Published: April 26 2009 22:24 | Last updated: April 26 2009 22:24

Intense competition to get into the best business schools has meant that many applicants now resort to essay-writing agencies in order to hoodwink admissions directors into letting them in. It is a practice that most admissions folk abhor, but few have had any idea about how to get genuine submissions.

At the Anderson school at UCLA, applicants this year were asked to submit their essays in audio format. Although the scheme was voluntary, some 70 per cent of applicants for the class of 2011 chose to record their essays rather than submit them in a text format, says Mae Jennifer Shores, admissions director. Perhaps surprisingly, the submissions were “ethnic, gender and country neutral”, she says, with international applicants just as eager to submit audio clips as their US peers.

The audio clips have been useful on a number of fronts, says Ms Shores: they show how well the applicants can communicate, how well they have grasped the use of English and how they perform under pressure. Also they demonstrate how creative students can be: some added music – either commercially produced or self-generated.

It also enabled some students to demonstrate a sense of humour. “It was a joy for us,” says Ms Shores.

The questions the applicants addressed were the same for the written essay or the audio version. The most popular question for applicants related to what the term “entrepreneurial spirit” meant to them, followed by a question on the most troubling global issues.

Ms Shores says the Anderson school may choose to make the audio clips compulsory next year, or alternatively it may consider using video clips instead.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009

US News & World Report release 2009 Business School Overall and Categorical rankings

2009-04-27T08:57:00.001-07:00

Overall Business School 2009 Ranking
Rank 1 Harvard University Boston, MA 1,801 Full-time: $43,800 per year
Rank 2 Stanford University Stanford, CA 740 Full-time: $48,921 per year
Rank 3 Northwestern University (Kellogg) Evanston, IL Full-time:1,254 $46,791
Rank 3 University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) Philadelphia, PA Full-time: 1,611 $44,480
Rank 5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan) Cambridge, MA Full-time:788 $46,784
Rank 5 University of Chicago (Booth) Chicago, IL Full-time: 1,144 $47,260 per year
Rank 7 University of California--Berkeley (Haas) Berkeley, CA full-time:500 $30,925 per year
Rank 8 Dartmouth College (Tuck) Hanover, NH Full-time: 506 $45,600 per year
Rank 9 Columbia University New York, NY Full-time: 1,234 $46,476 per year
Rank 10 Yale University New Haven, CT Full-time: 382 $43,700 per year
Rank 11 New York University (Stern) New York, NY Full-time: 841 $41,800 per year
Rank 12 Duke University (Fuqua) Durham, NC Full-time: 875 $44,100 per year
Rank 13 University of Michigan--Ann Arbor (Ross) Ann Arbor, MI full-time:843 $40,250
Rank 14 University of California--Los Angeles (Anderson) LA, CA full-time:731 $33,295
Rank 15 Carnegie Mellon University (Tepper) Pittsburgh, PA Full-time:392 $47,800
Rank 15 University of Virginia (Darden) Charlottesville, VA full-time:644 $40,398 per year
Rank 17 Cornell University (Johnson) Ithaca, NY Full-time:593 $44,950
Rank 18 University of Texas--Austin (McCombs) Austin, TX full-time:540 $24,200
Rank 19 Georgetown University (McDonough) Washington, DC Full-time:522 $39,984
Rank 20 University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill (Kenan-Flagler) Chapel Hill, NC full-time: 562 $19,525
Rank 20 University of Southern California (Marshall) LA, CA Full-time:426 $41,248
Rank 22 Emory University (Goizueta) Atlanta, GA Full-time:373 $41,013
Rank 22 Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA full-time:154 $7,724
Rank 22 Indiana University--Bloomington (Kelley) Bloomington, IN full-time:474 $18,978
Rank 22 Washington University in St. Louis (Olin) St. Louis, MO full-time: 294 $40,500

Best Business Schools Specialty Rankings: Accounting
1 University of Texas--Austin (McCombs) Austin, TX
2 University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) Philadelphia, PA
3 University of Illinois--Urbana-Champaign Champaign, IL
4 University of Chicago (Booth) Chicago, IL
5 University of Michigan--Ann Arbor (Ross) Ann Arbor, MI
6 University of Southern California (Marshall) Los Angeles, CA
7 Stanford University Stanford, CA
8 Brigham Young University (Marriott) Provo, UT
9 New York University (Stern) New York, NY
10 Indiana University--Bloomington (Kelley) Bloomington, IN

Best Business Schools Specialty Rankings: Information Systems
1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan) Cambridge, MA
2 Carnegie Mellon University (Tepper) Pittsburgh, PA
3 University of Texas--Austin (McCombs) Austin, TX
4 University of Arizona (Eller) Tucson, AZ
4 University of Minnesota--Twin Cities (Carlson) Minneapolis, MN
6 University of Maryland--College Park (Smith) College Park, MD
7 New York University (Stern) New York, NY
8 Stanford University Stanford, CA
9 University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) Philadelphia, PA
10 Georgia State University (Robinson) Atlanta, GA

Best Business Schools Specialty Rankings: Management
1 Harvard University Boston, MA
2 Stanford University Stanford, CA
3 Northwestern University (Kellogg) Evanston, IL
4 University of Michigan--Ann Arbor (Ross) Ann Arbor, MI
5 University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) Philadelphia, PA
6 Dartmouth College (Tuck) Hanover, NH
7 Duke University (Fuqua) Durham, NC
8 University of Virginia (Darden) Charlottesville, VA
9 University of California--Berkeley (Haas) Berkeley, CA
10 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan) Cambridge, MA

Best Business Schools Specialty Rankings: Nonprofit
1 Yale University New Haven, CT
2 Stanford University Stanford, CA
3 University of California--Berkeley (Haas) Berkeley, CA
4 Northwestern University (Kellogg) Evanston, IL
5 University of Michigan--Ann Arbor (Ross) Ann Arbor, MI
6 Duke University (Fuqua) Durham, NC
7 University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) Philadelphia, PA
8 Columbia University New York, NY
9 New York University (Stern) New York, NY

Best Business Schools Specialty Rankings: Production / Operations
1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan) Cambridge, MA
2 Carnegie Mellon University (Tepper) Pittsburgh, PA
3 Stanford University Stanford, CA
3 University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) Philadelphia, PA
5 University of Michigan--Ann Arbor (Ross) Ann Arbor, MI
6 Purdue University--West Lafayette (Krannert) West Lafayette, IN
7 Northwestern University (Kellogg) Evanston, IL
8 Harvard University Boston, MA
9 Columbia University New York, NY
10 University of California--Los Angeles (Anderson) Los Angeles, CA

Best Business Schools Specialty Rankings: Entrepreneurship
1 Babson College (Olin) Babson Park, MA
2 Stanford University Stanford, CA
3 Harvard University Boston, MA
3 University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) Philadelphia, PA
5 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan) Cambridge, MA
6 University of Southern California (Marshall) Los Angeles, CA
7 University of California--Berkeley (Haas) Berkeley, CA
8 Indiana University--Bloomington (Kelley) Bloomington, IN
8 University of Texas--Austin (McCombs) Austin, TX
10 University of Arizona (Eller) Tucson, AZ

Best Business Schools Specialty Rankings: Finance
1 University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) Philadelphia, PA
2 University of Chicago (Booth) Chicago, IL
3 New York University (Stern) New York, NY
4 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan) Cambridge, MA
5 Stanford University Stanford, CA
6 Columbia University New York, NY
7 University of California--Los Angeles (Anderson) Los Angeles, CA
8 University of California--Berkeley (Haas) Berkeley, CA
9 Harvard University Boston, MA
10 Northwestern University (Kellogg) Evanston, IL

Best Business Schools Specialty Rankings: Executive MBA
1 Northwestern University (Kellogg) Evanston, IL
2 University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) Philadelphia, PA
3 University of Chicago (Booth) Chicago, IL
4 Duke University (Fuqua) Durham, NC
5 Columbia University New York, NY
6 University of California--Berkeley (Haas) Berkeley, CA
7 New York University (Stern) New York, NY
8 University of Michigan--Ann Arbor (Ross) Ann Arbor, MI
9 University of California--Los Angeles (Anderson) Los Angeles, CA
10 University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill (Kenan-Flagler) Chapel Hill, NC

Best Business Schools Specialty Rankings: International
1 Thunderbird School of Global Management Glendale, AZ
2 University of South Carolina (Moore) Columbia, SC
3 University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) Philadelphia, PA
4 University of Michigan--Ann Arbor (Ross) Ann Arbor, MI
5 Columbia University New York, NY
6 Duke University (Fuqua) Durham, NC
6 New York University (Stern) New York, NY
8 Harvard University Boston, MA
9 University of Southern California (Marshall) Los Angeles, CA
10 University of California--Berkeley (Haas) Berkeley, CA

Best Business Schools Specialty Rankings: Marketing
1 Northwestern University (Kellogg) Evanston, IL
2 University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) Philadelphia, PA
3 Duke University (Fuqua) Durham, NC
4 Stanford University Stanford, CA
5 Harvard University Boston, MA
6 University of Michigan--Ann Arbor (Ross) Ann Arbor, MI
7 University of Chicago (Booth) Chicago, IL
8 Columbia University New York, NY
9 University of California--Berkeley (Haas) Berkeley, CA
10 University of Texas--Austin (McCombs) Austin, TX

Best Business Schools Specialty Rankings: Part-time MBA
1 New York University (Stern) New York, NY
2 University of Chicago (Booth) Chicago, IL
3 Northwestern University (Kellogg) Evanston, IL
4 University of California--Los Angeles (Anderson) Los Angeles, CA
5 University of Southern California (Marshall) Los Angeles, CA
6 University of California--Berkeley (Haas) Berkeley, CA
7 Georgia State University (Robinson) Atlanta, GA
8 University of Michigan--Ann Arbor (Ross) Ann Arbor, MI
9 DePaul University (Kellstadt) Chicago, IL
10 Santa Clara University (Leavey) Santa Clara, CA

Best Business Schools Specialty Rankings: Supply Chain / Logistics
1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan) Cambridge, MA
2 Michigan State University (Broad) East Lansing, MI
3 Carnegie Mellon University (Tepper) Pittsburgh, PA
4 Stanford University Stanford, CA
5 Arizona State University (Carey) Tempe, AZ
6 Pennsylvania State University--University Park (Smeal) University Park, PA
7 Ohio State University (Fisher) Columbus, OH
8 University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) Philadelphia, PA
9 University of Tennessee--Knoxville Knoxville, TN
10 Northwestern University (Kellogg) Evanston, IL
10 Purdue University--West Lafayette (Krannert) West Lafayette, IN

Economist MBA News - GMAT Changing

2009-04-22T10:22:00.000-07:00

Testing times

The GMAT—the contentious entrance exam required by most important business schools—is set for an upgrade. Dubbed the “Next Generation GMAT”, the test's administrator, the Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC), says it is responding to changes in the business school market, such as an increase in specialised masters programmes and more variations on the traditional MBA. Few firm details of what the new exam will look like are yet available—the GMAC is set to go through a lengthy consultation process with schools, with the new test to be launched in 2013—but it may look to address some of the criticisms that are often levelled at it.

Despite being the de facto entrance exam for business schools across the world, the GMAT is only available in (American) English and has often been accused of a cultural bias towards Western students. Furthermore, breaches of security, such as last year's cheating scandal (see article) and the problem of professional test-takers sitting the exam for prospective students, are also sure to feature in the GMAC's deliberations.

Meanwhile, the GMAC has announced that it has brokered a deal with “a leading international bank” to provide at least $500m in loans to international students. The organisation says that international students have been especially hard-hit by the financial crisis as they are not eligible for federal loans and some big lenders have become reluctant to advance credit. The loans will initially be open to students in about 40 business schools in America and Europe, beginning with the 2009-10 academic year.

On the cases

INSEAD and London Business School were winners at the annual European Case Awards in early March. The awards, which honour the best management case studies—a teaching technique pioneered by Harvard Business School—are bestowed by ecch, which describes itself as “a non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting and facilitating case study based learning in management education and development.” The top honour went to four INSEAD professors—W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne, Ben Bensaou and Matt Williamson—for their study of Cirque du Soleil, a Canadian performing troupe.

All told, INSEAD picked up four awards, while London won in three categories. According to ecch, this year's cases concentrated on some of the areas hit hardest by the downturn, including the banking sector—cases of how not to do things, perhaps.

Concentrating minds

The University of Chicago's Booth Graduate School of Business has announced the addition of “concentrations” to its executive MBA curriculum. Students can now add a concentration in finance, marketing or strategy by adding a week of coursework (and paying an additional week of tuition) to the 21-month programme. The school is touting the concentrations as a way for students to signal to prospective employers that they have “in-depth knowledge” of a particular area. Although Booth offers its executive MBA programmes on three campuses—in Chicago, London, and Singapore—students would have to come to the Chicago campus for the concentration classes.

An emerging trend

In Spain, IESE at the University of Navarra has announced the creation of a new “Chair of Emerging Markets”, to be led by Alfredo Pastor, a professor of economics at the school. IESE said it was launching the chair in response to what it sees as poor understanding of such markets by European companies, and an overly-cautious response to them despite their potential. As such, the new chair aims to “foster research and encourage a constant and vivid exchange of knowledge and ideas about emerging markets for the benefit of companies and their managers.” It will do so via research, events and, eventually, the creation of courses on emerging markets.

Port of call

London Business School has some reason to feel grateful to off-the-beaten-path travellers. In early March, Tony and Maureen Wheeler, founders of the Lonely Planet series of travel guides, announced a gift to the school to endow a chair in entrepreneurship. Mr Wheeler received a master's degree from the school in 1972. LBS did not disclose the exact sum of the gift but described it as “multimillion pound.” Rajesh Chandy, who specialises in entrepreneurship and innovation in emerging markets, will be the first professor to hold the Wheeler Chair.

Executive stress

Heading south from Regent's Park, the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) has announced a foray into the once-lucrative world of executive education. Despite fears that corporate training budgets are being hit hard by the recession, LSE is banking that offering programmes dealing with today's gloomy business environment will buck the trend. Short courses, including “Banking in an Age of Turbulence” and “What’s Wrong With the EU and How to Fix It” are being offered as part of its “Executive Summer School”, which will run in June and July. The venture is further evidence that LSE is looking to compete head-to-head with traditional business schools. The school already offers an MBA in partnership with New York University’s Stern School of Business and HEC School of Management, Paris.

Barring the golden doors

The value of an American-earned MBA may be dropping for foreign students. In early March Bank of America confessed to having withdrawn job offers for MBA graduates who would need H1-B visas, reserved for highly-skilled workers, to work in finance jobs. The reason? Any institution wanting to receive money from the Troubled Assets Relief Programme cannot apply for H1-B visas if it has recently made workers redundant—two provisions that apply to a good many American banks. Glenn Hubbard, the dean of Columbia Business School, called the provision “absolutely terrible” in an address to students. One-third of Columbia's MBA class of 2009 came from abroad.

Credit where due?

Despite recent bad press, MBA degrees must still be a mark of prestige, if the actions of Dave Bing, a former basketball star and entrepreneur competing in Detroit's mayoral election, scheduled for May, are anything to go by. Mr Bing, who received the most votes in the mayoral primary in February, has been forced to admit he did not receive an MBA from Kettering University (previously known as the General Motors Institute), as he had claimed in a promotional video for the National Basketball Administration. “I felt I had an MBA for the work I had done in the industry I was in,” he told the Associated Press. Mr Bing does hold an economics degree from Syracuse University, but he also admitted he had received it in 1995, not 1966 as previously stated.

GMAC News for April 2009

2009-04-22T10:06:00.000-07:00

Across the United States, more than 1,500 MBA students, faculty, and supporters will participate in dozens of community service projects this month as part of TeamMBA Month.

> Read press release

> Go to TeamMBA Web site

European Business Schools Attract More GMAT Score Reports

The number of GMAT score reports sent by students from around the world to business schools in Europe is on the rise, according to GMAC's new European Geographic Trend Report. Schools in Europe are also attracting an expanding share of score reports sent by European citizens who take the GMAT.

> Listen to podcast (2:35):

> Download report (451 KB PDF)

India and China Lead the Way

As GMAT Volume Surges in Asia

Led by India and China, Asia accounts for a fast-growing share of GMAT testing activity around the world, according to the newly released GMAC Asian Geographic Trend Report. The region also is generating--and receiving--an increasing number of score reports from people who take the exam.

> Listen to podcast (3:00):

> Download report (716 KB PDF)

> More News

Websites Play Key Role When Prospective

MBAs Select Schools

> Read article in Graduate Management News

> Download report (355 KB PDF)

New Loan Program Helps International Students

> Read press release

Article from WSJ: With Jobs Tight, M.B.A.s Head for Home

2009-04-22T09:35:00.000-07:00

By ALINA DIZIK

After working in public accounting for three years, Joe Fusco, wanted to become an investment banker. So he invested more than $70,000 and two years into an M.B.A.

But as he prepares to graduate from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana next month, Mr. Fusco, 27 years old, hasn't had any luck landing a position in finance. The only solution he has is to go back to his accounting roots. "It's a tough pill to swallow, but I've come to the conclusion that I can't sit and wait and cross my fingers," he says.

The majority of students at top business schools attend the programs as a way to boost their skills to change careers. This year, making that happen has turned into a nearly impossible task. And that means a significant number of soon-to-be grads who entered school back in 2007 are being forced back to their pre-M.B.A. careers in the hopes of finding a job.

"Career switchers are getting hit the hardest," says Kristen Lynas, associate director of career management at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business. Those looking to switch fields make up the majority of each incoming class at the school, she adds. "When the market is hot, employers are more willing to take the risk ... [now] employers tend to go with the safe choice."

Sean Kelly

Steve Canale, manager of recruiting and staffing services at General Electric Co., in Fairfield, Conn., says that with so many applicants, previous experience is getting a bigger emphasis when the company weeds out candidates. "That's the sweet spot -- people who have industry expertise in the industries that we're strong in," says Mr. Canale, who hires about 120 M.B.A. students each year for a sales and marketing program.

In past years, GE would have been more open to M.B.A.s who were less of a match. But applications for the program grew 30% this year and Mr. Canale was able to be more experience-selective, he says.

With firms like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns -- which used to bring on upward of 800 M.B.A.s combined every year -- now defunct, and fewer finance jobs around, more business-school graduates are leaning on their experience to get them in the door. For example, the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business has typically placed 50% of its M.B.A. alumni in finance, most at large investment banks. This year, students in all majors have been turning back to their previous fields to find work, says Char Bennington, Chicago's senior associate director of career management. Ms. Bennington says other industries, like consulting and marketing, are also hiring fewer people and looking for experience.

After Johnson & Johnson didn't extend an offer to Jareer Oweimrin, a second-year M.B.A. at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who worked as a strategic marketing intern with the company, Mr. Oweimrin is putting his plans to get a health-care marketing role on hold for the time being. He is now trying to capitalize on his background in pharmaceutical sales and is in talks about returning to a sales job at a former employer, a major drug maker. He hopes such a move will eventually help him move into marketing. "The motto here [at school] is 'take what you've got,'" says Mr. Oweimrin, who spent about $70,000 on his degree. "You can't be as picky as you want to be."

Even consulting firms -- known for hiring career switchers -- are looking for M.B.A.s with previous experience to hire.

Brianne Shally, 29, who graduates from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management this spring, says she feels safer going back to a consulting job in Chicago for Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, her previous employer, rather than make a career change. "I have a proven track record, if it comes down to names on a board" for a layoff or hiring, says Ms. Shally. She says consulting jobs haven't been easy to land for fellow classmates, though. This year, she says, firms "were not willing to take a risk on students who did not have previous consulting experience."

Patricia Phillips, executive director of career management at University of Rochester's Simon Graduate School of Business, says students are beginning to recognize that these days, it could take two or three career moves to make a switch.

That's how Abhishek Sunkersett is approaching his first post-M.B.A. job. Instead of landing a job in strategy consulting or finance, Mr. Sunkersett, 28, a second-year student at the University of Texas-Austin McCombs School of Business, says his engineering background and technical experience working in the Mumbai office of Deloitte helped land him a position at the Chicago office of Infosys Technologies Ltd., an Indian information-technology services vendor. For now, Mr. Sunkersett says he'll focus on consulting projects involving technology, with hopes of pursuing more strategy-related projects in the firm. "My experience was a big advantage," says Mr. Sunkersett.

But the idea of returning to an old career has some soon-to-be grads questioning the value of their degrees. A traditional post-M.B.A. position increases a degree-holder's salary by 74% according to an annual survey from the Graduate Management Admissions Council.

Besides being unable to use his newly honed marketing skills, Mr. Oweimrin, says he is worried that he'll be earning the same as he did as a pharmaceutical rep -- about $60,000 -- instead of the $100,000 marketing job he expected to land after the M.B.A. program.

And Mr. Fusco says he is less certain his investment in the degree was worthwhile. Many of the auditing positions that he is finding don't require a graduate business degree. "These are positions that I was pretty qualified for even pre-M.B.A," he says.

Write to Alina Dizik at alina.dizik@dowjones.com

Kellogg looks at expansion in India

2009-04-22T09:29:00.000-07:00

Lauren Kelleher

Issue date: 4/22/09 Section: Campus

For Anita Suresh, an Indian MBA student in the Kellogg School of Management, India is more than just a place to call home.

Suresh and other Indian students in Kellogg are looking to their homeland's emergent industries and growing middle class of consumers as a fresh source of entrepreneurial opportunity, the second-year graduate student said.

"India is becoming more than just a body shop," she said. "It's more than just a place for raw skills, but for innovation."

Speakers at Saturday's 15th annual Kellogg India Business Conference, "Riding the Elephant: Sharing India's Success," addressed the potential for innovation in India's emerging markets, said Sayali Karanjkar, one of the event's co-chairs. About 500 Kellogg students, faculty and alumni attended the event, held at the Donald P. Jacobs Center.

The event also marked the launch of India@Kellogg, a publication featuring work and research from Kellogg students, faculty and alumni. The journal brings together the different perspectives of people in the Indian business world and provides networking opportunities for students and alumni, said Suresh, one of the journal's editors.

"There is such a strong representation (of Indian students) at Kellogg," she said. "It just made sense to gather insights in one place, be it research or visions they have for India."

According to Suresh, there are about 100 Indian students in her year at Kellogg, about 50 of which are international students. Last year, Kellogg increased admissions efforts to get Indian students to come to Northwestern, Suresh said.

However, it was far from Kellogg's first effort at outreach in the country.

Kellogg, along with the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, serves as an associate school of the Indian School of Business. Kellogg Deans Dipak Jain and Donald Jacobs are on the board of ISB.

NU's efforts to establish an international presence became manifest when the university opened the doors of its Qatar campus in 2008. India could be the next country to which NU extends its global reach, President Henry Bienen told The Daily in a recent interview.

"I am excited by the idea of doing something in India and always have been," he said.

Bienen, who will be visiting India this month on his way back from a trip to Qatar, said he will be engaging in "conversations" during his stay. He added there is interest from the business and journalism programs in India to expand NU's presence.

Anant Garg, co-chair of the India Business Conference, said he would not be surprised to see the university explore its options for setting up another international campus in India.

"Kellogg is already present there," the second-year MBA student said. "Kellogg faculty goes there to teach - and not just Indian faculty. For Northwestern to develop a presence there is a logical next step."

But setting up satellite learning would be more cost-effective than building a physical center, said Garg, referencing one of the conference's keynote speakers, C.K. Prahalad.

"For India, the best option would be to take the power of the Northwestern brand and its professors and leverage it to an even wider audience," he said.

lkelleher@u.northwestern.edu

Article from NYTimes: Business Grads Look Beyond Wall Street

2009-04-22T01:12:00.000-07:00

Note: In the future, articles that I find will have full postings of original articles. I'm doing this because I fear that the sources I obtain articles from will be gone soon. I no longer have the confidence to assume that newspapers here today will be here next year. Every newspaper is in the midst of major cutbacks and many are closing down.

Posted: April 20, 2009, 6:39 am By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

Riana Paige, an undergraduate senior at the Wharton School of Business, had a high-paying internship at JPMorgan Chase last summer and was disappointed when she did not receive an offer for a full-time job after graduation. Now she is pursuing a job teaching in Dubai, or working for a wine importer.

Daniel Miller, a Wharton senior who was an intern last summer at a boutique private equity firm in Manhattan, became so discouraged by his search for jobs in finance that he began thinking about becoming a rabbi.

Jessica Levy, also a senior at Wharton, the nation’s most prestigious undergraduate business program, was stunned when her supervisor at UBS told her that although she had done a terrific job as an intern, the bank could not offer her a job after graduation. Her dreams of investment banking quashed, she recently took the Foreign Service exam and is vying for a job at the State Department.

“A lot of my peers, we’re exploring things that we used to not even think of as an option,” Ms. Levy told The New York Times. “A finance major who was minoring in music was suddenly looking into opening a jazz club. All of a sudden, I saw that a lot of Wharton people were interesting.”

For the last decade, a job at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley or another investment bank has been considered the most coveted prize for many of the nation’s best and brightest college students. But the implosion of Wall Street — the vaporization of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, the general humbling of investment banks — has not only shaken a generation’s ambitions, but also unleashed them, The Times’s Steven Greenhouse writes.

“There was a real herd mentality to get into investment banking,” Ms. Levy, noting that prestige, peer pressure and parents often channeled students to Wall Street, told The Times. But because of the crisis, “there was suddenly permission to pursue something you were interested in that your parents three years ago would have said absolutely no to.”

For many students at Wharton, part of the University of Pennsylvania, the Wall Street crisis has fostered a sense of relief. Some students now acknowledge that they were pursuing investment banking jobs largely to placate parents who, having invested nearly $200,000 in their children’s educations, were eager for them to earn top dollar — and some prestige too.

Of course, many students who coveted Wall Street jobs have landed them: the prestige firms that remain are doing plenty of hiring, although substantially less than in years past. And some finance majors shut out of Wall Street jobs have accepted back-up options, often lesser banks in smaller cities. But many who thirsted for big investment banking bonuses are looking at decidedly down-market alternatives, everything from Teach for America to computer engineering.

“It’s always been about the brass ring and it’s always been about the brand recognition, and for a lot of students that meant jobs at Goldman Sachs,” Emanuel Sturman, director of career services at Dartmouth College, told The Times. “It’s premature to say the bloom is off the rose totally, but I think students are starting to look at a wider array of brass rings.”

College officials say that the sweeping changes on Wall Street will affect not only finance-minded members of the class of ’09 but also tens of thousands of juniors, sophomores and freshmen, as well as future students, leading them to rethink their majors and their career goals.

After doing an internship at Goldman Sachs last summer and not being offered a full-time job there, Katie Shea, a senior at the Stern School of Business at New York University, is instead pursuing her dreams of entrepreneurship. She has founded a shoe company that designs and imports collapsible shoes that women can wear while walking to work and then stuff into their pocketbooks.

“For me, the Wall Street crisis was a blessing in disguise,” Ms. Shea told The Times.

Not everyone feels that way. For many undergraduates with their eyes on Wall Street, the financial sector crisis created panic — and confusion in their job searches. Ms. Levy says she interviewed at Lehman Brothers one day, and it filed for bankruptcy the next day.

“Over the past three years, you saw 10 to 12 kids from Wharton going to each of the top five banks,” Jeremy Cohn, a Wharton senior, told The Times. “This year there are probably zero to 2 or 3 students going to each of those banks.”

Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and other banks declined to discuss how much they have reduced job offers, The Times said. But college officials estimate the decline in financial sector job offers is 10 to 50 percent. And it is also affecting M.B.A. students.

Jana Kierstead, director of M.B.A. career services at Harvard Business School, said the number of job postings over all had declined 30 percent from last year, with a 40 percent drop among financial institutions.

“The number of firms coming to campus was relatively the same, but the number of positions they’re recruiting for has been reduced,” she told The Times.

Ms. Kierstead said 78 percent of Harvard’s second-year M.B.A. students had job offers, down from 90 percent at this time last year.

At Wharton, the number of on-campus interviews for the school’s 600 undergraduates fell 20 percent, from 13,000 last year.

Last year, starting salaries for undergraduates going to top financial firms typically ran from $55,000 to $70,000, with an $8,000 signing bonus. And their annual bonus often equaled their starting salary. This year, starting salaries are roughly the same, with signing bonuses often falling to $4,000. As for expectations of fat bonuses, they have gone the way of Bear Stearns.

Some students have grown frustrated and suspended their job search. As a result, Patricia Rose, the University of Pennsylvania’s director of career services, recently sent out a message saying: “We are hearing from some students that they are discouraged, and have stopped applying for jobs because so many other candidates are competing with them, some undoubtedly more qualified. Resist this impulse! By not applying, you are rejecting yourself.”

She reminded them, “You are attending one of the world’s finest universities.”

“So hang in there,” she concluded. “And most importantly, believe in yourself.”

While some Wharton seniors are struggling, many have done well. Jeremy Cohn, for example, has been hired by Lazard Freres’ real estate group. Mickey Ashmore, a former Goldman Sachs intern, has accepted an offer with Microsoft’s finance division. Anthony Orlando and Nanxi Ling will work for Oliver Wyman, a Manhattan consulting firm that advises floundering banks.

But Oliver Wyman has asked them to push back their start date to January.

“We’re all young; we’ll all get a job,” Mr. Ashmore told The Times. “This isn’t going to last forever.”

A job offer can, of course, make all the difference.

Daniel Miller, the student who was contemplating rabbinical school, had suspended his job search, intent on savoring his last few weeks before graduation.

“I have the next 60 years of my life to worry about work,” he told The Times. “I’m fortunate I don’t have any college debt and have a very supportive family. I can’t imagine what it’s like for someone less fortunate than me.”

But last Thursday, a real estate investment firm outside Philadelphia offered him a job. Rabbinical school can wait.

New HBS TV Show

2008-12-15T15:46:00.000-08:00

It begins this Wednesday Dec 17th at 1am ET on CNBC. The website already has a bunch of videos. It's worth checking out. Very Cool.

MGM Mirage CEO Faked His MBA

2008-11-16T09:38:00.000-08:00

Yesterday MGM Mirage's CEO of 13 years, Terrence Lanni came under fire after a Wall Street Journal investigation discovered that he never earned an MBA from the University of Southern California and abruptly "retired." Oops.

This is not what you want to find out about the man who is steering the world's largest casino-gaming company through a particularly rough patch in history. Especially as the hotel is on the brink of opening the extravagant MGM CityCenter.
According to USC, he completed some classes toward the MBA

According to USC, he completed some classes toward the MBA between 1965 and 1967 but never graduated. Lanni said he received an Honorary MBA in 1992, while USC says they have not awarded an honorary MBAs since 1933. Not only that, but Lanni's biographies prior to 1992 have all mentioned him holding an MBA.

The official word from MGM Mirage is that Lanni is retiring so he can be closer to his family who lives in California. There's also a thinly veiled reference to Lanni wanting to enjoy time with his family while he still can. The man is only 65 and has no illnesses to speak of. Anyways, questions about his MBA had "no bearing whatsoever" on his retirement. Riiiiight...

To help smooth the transition for the company, since it has some major issues to overcome like the economic downturn and completion of City Center, MGM is going to appoint Jim Murren, its current Chief Operating Officer effective November 30th.

Source

Kellogg offers a view of some recorded classes online

2008-11-14T11:52:00.000-08:00

This is a really great idea. The energy that flows from the Profs to the students really shows. Say what you will about school reputation, but I'm a HUGE fan of great teachers. Every school ought to do this. Especially for topics taught that resonate with the current times that prospective students can by energized by.

View a Class
Kellogg faculty are among the world’s finest researchers in a variety of fields, and their expertise is in high demand. Some of our professors are consultants for businesses and governments. All of them are excellent teachers. Turn off your cell phones and open your minds. Class is about to begin.

View the videos

Managerial Leadership

Professor Harry Kraemer lectures on values-based leadership and its impact on corporate success.

Technology Marketing

Professor Mohanbir Sawhney reviews the sale of IBM's PC division to the Lenovo Group Ltd. as a case study in his class. Prof. Sawhney is the McCormick Tribune Professor of Technology at Kellogg.

Entrepreneurial Finance

Professor Steven Rogers highlights a case study of Gannett Broadcasting's acquisition strategy as part of this Entrepreneurial Finance course. Prof. Rogers is also director of the Larry and Carol Levy Institute for Entrepreneurial Practice at Kellogg.

Financial Difficulties for MBA students as described in The Harbus

2008-11-14T10:29:00.000-08:00

The Credit Crisis at HBS
Financial Aid for International Students Takes a Hit
Nana Kankam (NF), Contributing Writer

As jarring and troubling as the news has been for all of us here at HBS, for international students, the perspective is peppered with shifting expectations, challenged perceptions of America, and personal worries as the tightening of the credit markets leave many students wondering how they'll finance the balance of their education. The unfolding of the current financial crisis has all of us glued to our televisions, blackberries and newspapers as we try to adjust our career choices, goals and lives in general. It seems as if every day there is more news accumulating: another firm down, another horrible day in the market, increasing talk of the global repercussions of America's mistakes.

See Full Article

John Hopkins expanding Carey Business School Part-Time to Full-Time

2008-11-14T10:28:00.000-08:00

Johns Hopkins University's Carey Business School plans to launch a full-time MBA program for graduate students in 2010. The Carey Business School, which was established last year after the School of Professional Students in Business and Education became two separate departments, currently offers most of its MBA programs on a part-time basis. "The only full-time MBA program right now is the MBA/MPH degree which is in conjunction with the Bloomberg School of Public Health," said Patrick Ercolano, the Communication Associate for the Carey Business School.

See Full Article

Time Magazine describes the road ahead for MBA's as bitter.

2008-11-14T10:26:00.000-08:00

First came the crash. Now come the ripples. At business schools around the country, 'tis the season for MBA recruiting. But for Wall Street wannabes who banked on school yielding a six-figure finance job, bitter reality is setting in. Offers from financial firms are slowing, as budgets get slashed and freezes take effect.

This year's recruiting season may feel longer, more competitive, and more painful for soon-to-be-minted MBAs than any in recent memory. Amid pervasive market uncertainty, admissions officers and students at business schools around the country say the recruiting climate has shifted noticeably, particularly in the financial sector. "Uncertainty is the buzzword," says Deanna M. Fuehne, Director of the Career Management Center at Rice University's Jones Graduate School of Management. "Consulting firms and banks are worried that clients may pull projects and deals. Company recruiters are worried about staff reductions. So it's become a game of 'wait and see.'"

See Full Article

BusinessWeek releases long awaited 2008 B-School Rankings

2008-11-14T09:36:00.000-08:00

BusinessWeek releases their B-School ranking every two years. Usually released in October, this slightly delayed release has included some great articles that review the state of MBA applications and how recent MBA grads are having a crazy time in their pursuit of financial careers. See the rank.

Or perhaps you're interested in the International B-school 2008 rankings.

The lead article for the rankings titled, "Crisis Hits the Business Schools", is a dark description of just how bad the job situation is in the finance sector for MBA grads. For example, B-Schools job postings are down by as much as 10%. With MBA Applications drastrically spiking this year and the recruiting side dropping, the MBA appears to be a difficult sweet and sour dish to be eating right now.

This must have been a very difficult topic to report on. Listen to the behind the scenes audio podcast to find out just how difficult.

MIT's Business School Dean also chimes in on the MBA outlook. Check it out.

Comment on the rankings: It's important to remember that the focus of the BusinessWeek rankings was to survey students and corporate recruiters and measures intellectual capital.

There are a few eye openers in the rankings. The following schools made it into the 1st Tier rankings: Southern Methodist (Cox), Brigham Young (Marriott), U. of Washington (Foster) and Georgia Tech.

On the other hand, Georgetown (McDonough), Michigan State (Broad), Purdue (Krannert) and Rochester (Simon) fell down into the pool of 2nd Tiers losing all sense of overall ranking.

Chicago GSB to change Name after 300 Million gift

2008-11-11T02:11:00.000-08:00

The University of Chicago's business school will get a $300 million boost to its endowment -- and a new name -- from David Booth, an investor who has tried to avoid the limelight until now.

University of Chicago

Professor Eugene Fama (left) with donor David G. Booth (right) at the donation ceremony.

The gift, among the largest donations ever to a U.S. university, comes as endowments have been hit hard by the financial meltdown, and many potential donors are tightening purse strings. The 61-year-old Mr. Booth, chief executive of the Dimensional Fund Advisors mutual fund, said Thursday that he will donate $300 million of his firm's stock to the business school, from which he graduated in 1971.

The Chicago school will change its name to the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and use the funds to hire and retain professors, and to expand its publications, said Edward Snyder, the school's dean.

The gift represents a coming-out for Mr. Booth, who is largely unknown outside the rarefied world of academic research and in finance. In the 27 years since founding Dimensional, Mr. Booth has played a behind-the-scenes role, while his now-retired partner, Rex Sinquefield, was the public face of the company.

View full article

How our U.S. Financial Crisis is affecting MBA's

2008-11-11T02:05:00.000-08:00

Interesting article on the Wall Street Journal

When Adrian Chan enrolled in an M.B.A. program at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology last year, he hoped to use the degree to jump industries, from information technology to investment banking.

Mr. Chan, who majored in finance in his M.B.A., pictured himself structuring derivatives or selling equities at a top-tier bank in his hometown of Hong Kong -- and earning a lot more than he did as a software developer in his past jobs at Amazon.com Inc., in Seattle, and Oanda Corp., in Toronto. Mr. Chan, who'll graduate in December into the worst financial-sector meltdown in recent history, is now perusing IT job ads.

"It's a much more competitive job market," he says. "The employers who are hiring want people with experience, and there's lots of experienced people who've lost their jobs and looking for work. For those of us switching careers, it's going to be much harder."

View Full Article.

Wall Street Journal releases their 1st ever EMBA Rankings

2008-11-10T19:51:00.000-08:00

Executive MBA programs are truly blossoming.

Executive M.B.A. programs make a big promise: They'll turn up-and-coming managers into full-fledged leaders, showing them how to think strategically, inspire their staff and expand the business.
So, which schools do the best job of delivering on that bold talk? That's what we set out to measure in The Wall Street Journal's first survey of executive M.B.A. programs.
PODCAST: Hear more about unorthodox teaching tactics used by executive M.B.A. programs, as improvisation guru Bob Kulhan talks with The Journal's Emily Glazer.
The Journal Report

See the complete Executive M.B.A. Rankings report.
Working with Management Research Group and Critical Insights, we asked thousands of students and hundreds of companies to rank executive M.B.A. programs in a host of categories, with a focus on how well they develop management and leadership skills. The result is a ranking of 26 schools world-wide that takes into account the rigor needed to build tomorrow's corporate leaders and C-suite executives.

Topping the list: Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, which ranked No. 1, and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, which came in No. 2. The two schools have among the largest E.M.B.A. programs, with 406 students currently enrolled in Wharton's two programs and 843 candidates in the seven Kellogg programs, including four international partnerships and a satellite campus in Miami. more...

Why Obama being President matters.

2008-11-05T17:38:00.000-08:00

Henry Louis Gates Jr of the Harvard University history department is one of the most articulate and historical thinker of our times. I have always been so impressed by his ability to tactfully articulate the emotional temperature of the African-American struggle in the U.S.. Once again, at a time when my own words cannot convey what I'm feeling today, Prof Gates succeeds. Here's an excerpt...

But we have never seen anything like this. Nothing could have prepared any of us for the eruption (and, yes, that is the word) of spontaneous celebration that manifested itself in black homes, gathering places and the streets of our communities when Sen. Barack Obama was declared President-elect Obama. From Harlem to Harvard, from Maine to Hawaii—and even Alaska—from "the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire … [to] Stone Mountain of Georgia," as Dr. King put it, each of us will always remember this moment, as will our children, whom we woke up to watch history being made. My colleagues and I laughed and shouted, whooped and hollered, hugged each other and cried. My father waited 95 years to see this day happen, and when he called as results came in, I silently thanked God for allowing him to live long enough to cast his vote for the first black man to become president. And even he still can't quite believe it!

Full Article

Interview Lessons and 1st Impression Lessons

2008-11-05T11:16:00.000-08:00

As this is not a political Blog, I will refrain from sharing who I voted for. Without question, this is indeed a moving time for our country and global allies. I was certainly moved last night and continue to be throughout this morning.

Throughout the last several weeks, I was keenly aware of how Obama, Biden, McCain and Palin represented themselves and held up under numerous interviews. MBA candidates would do well to learn from their mistakes and strengths.

1) As Palin showed us, don't open your mouth about material you have no idea about and don't try to impress your interviewer to make them think you are smarter than you are. In Palin's interview with Couric earlier this year, we see a woman who made herself look like a fool by generalizing material she had reviewed when she really hadn't. She also lost her way several times as she answered some questions. In my opinion, Palin never recovered from this disasterous interview. Don't overlook this point. Palin is an experienced public figure and she clearly walked into an interview thinking she could outwit her interviewer. (Do a search on youtube for Couric and Palin interview and you'll see the disaster I'm referring to.)

2) McCain lambasted Obama over and over again throughout the last few weeks of his campaign. He made up some negative remarks that were highly debatable and to anyone who has a brain... completely wrong. For example, he called some actions by Obama socialist traits. The bailout package that McCain signed off on is clearly a socialist action by the government. The point I'm trying to make here is that one cannot think that saying negative things about another persons actions can be a good thing when one does not know the complete background knowledge of the one interviewing you. You could look really dumb. Always be careful when talking about the actions of someone else.

3) Be an amazing and astute listener. Obama showed himself to anyone who interviewed him to be a very good listener. When asked a question, he answered the question and went on to answer the intent of the question that showed his brilliance and tact. I can't say the same thing about his debating skills as I don't always feel that he answered questions well. But I can say that his personal interviews were models that all MBA candidates would be well advised to follow.

4) Give the interviewer a clear summary of who you are. Both McCain and Obama struggled very hard the entire campaign to help people understand what they are about and how their background shows the kind of person they will be in the future. McCain did this by using the term Maverick and using his war experience. Obama did this by telling you of his community outreach and why he was compeled to do it despite his Harvard background that would have easily led him to elitest. When admission folk refer to you in the future... they will be more compeled to support you if they believe in your compeling story. A story and not a list of your achievements is far more impactful.

GMAC reacting to US based GMAT cheaters but can't go beyond that.

2008-11-01T21:14:00.000-07:00

Back in July 08, GMAC reported that they had seized a Chinese GMAT cheat resource from a Chinese immigrant named Shi. I applaud GMAC for this action, but GMAC is sorely lacking in this area when it comes to reaching outside the U.S. borders. The infamous JJ cheat docs found on many Chinese GMAT cheat sites is one example of a completely broken security of the GMAT questions and answers.

I'd really like to see GMAC reporting how they seized stuff from China or other foreign countries. GMAC cannot backup a clean security of the GMAT material and thats truly sad. I don't blame GMAC per se, but the truly corrupt owners of so many GMAT testing sites as well as some students who bring in video camera glasses or 007 level cameras attached to their hats and jackets.

Some years ago, I reported on GMAC's actions to stiffen GMAT testing security throughout Asia, but this has had little to no affect. After all that effort, all we get is, "we got Shi". Yeah so what. How about "we got Shi and the ring of 200 people involved in a dark GMAT cheating system?" Anyway, here is the source article excerpt from GMAC....

GMAC Shuts Down GMAT Cheat Site
July 2008
GMAC sued Shi for distributing copyrighted GMAT-related materials, including test questions, without GMAC’s permission. Shi, who was living in the United States at the time the suit was filed and has since returned to his native China, is also the subject of a criminal investigation by US federal law enforcement authorities with whom GMAC worked extensively.
As part of its efforts to collect on the judgment, GMAC seized assets owned or controlled by Shi, including a computer hard drive that contains information about the individuals who participated in Scoretop’s unlawful activities, either as employees or agents of Shi or as “members” of the Scoretop site. GMAC also seized the Scoretop domain name, which it now owns and controls.
GMAC is reviewing contents of the hard drive and other materials to determine if individuals have violated its testing policies through their participation in Scoretop. Violators may have their GMAT scores canceled, and business schools will be notified of those cancellations. The FAQs that follow this article provide more details.
“GMAC vigorously protects its intellectual property rights in order to protect the integrity of the GMAT exam,” said GMAC President Dave Wilson. “This case is just one example of our continued pursuit of those who fail to respect our intellectual property rights and our testing policies.”
Wilson also noted that GMAC is “committed to reporting to schools any unethical behavior that we uncover regarding our testing policy and lack of compliance with that policy by candidates for admission who are sending their scores to schools.” He says that GMAC may refer appropriate cases to law enforcement authorities for criminal investigation, as it did in this case, in addition to canceling the GMAT scores of individuals who violate GMAC testing rules.

Economist Oct 08 News about B-Schools

2008-11-01T00:24:00.000-07:00

Some noteworthy news includes:

Robert Joss, Dean of Stanford GSB stepping down in September 09. He served 10 years. Stanford GSB has already formed a search committe.

London Business School is launching a Masters in Management programme. Although teaching general management skills, the degree differs from the school's MBA programme in one significant way: while students on London's MBA have an average of nearly six years' work experience, the MIM is aimed at students recently out of their undergraduate programmes, with little exposure to the workplace.

The Wharton School of Business in Pennsylvania is creating a version of its http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/ site, aimed at high-school viewers. http://kwhs.wharton.upenn.edu/, to be launched in February 2009, is intended to introduce teenagers to business and finance concepts.

Check out the web site for more details

Future Direction of this Blog and my Status

2008-10-31T19:48:00.000-07:00

After many months, I've finally developed a compelling vision for this blog and a top level Website that I'll be calling mba360.com. My desire is to be an encourager for those thinking about the MBA as a future career track. I'll be doing this by presenting news and updates from the schools, B-School app related vendors and business professionals.

Initially I will be ramping up the MBA news on this Blog. Concurrantly, I will be building a beta website for the top level website.

Dave's status
-----------------
With regard to my Business School status and personal business experiences, I've decided to keep that relatively private. Frankly, in my conversations with various schools over the last few months I arrived at the conclusion that this resource speaks for itself in terms of its historic quality.

For now, I can share that I am a freelance IT Director/Project Manager and that I co-own and operate several Hotels. For this reason, I am comfortable saying that I empathize with the unique challenges of Corporate and Entrepreneurial America.

Are you Left Brain or Right Brain?

2008-10-31T19:07:00.000-07:00

Something for you new students out there. -Dave

Left Vs. Right
Which Side Are You On?

Take The Hemispheric Brain Dominance Test
In general the left and right hemispheres of your brain process information in different ways. We tend to process information using our dominant side. However, the learning and thinking process is enhanced when both side of the brain participate in a balanced manner. This means strengthening your less dominate hemisphere of the brain. Listed below are information processing styles that are characteristically used by your right or left brain hemisphere. Read the information below to help you understand how your brain processes information. Pay attention to your less dominant style so that you can learn how to improve it.

Linear Vs. Holistic Processing
The left side of the brain processes information in a linear manner. It processes from part to whole. It takes pieces, lines them up, and arranges them in a logical order; then it draws conclusions. The right brain however, processes from whole to parts, holistically. It starts with the answer. It sees the big picture first, not the details. If you are right-brained, you may have difficulty following a lecture unless you are given the big picture first. That is why it is absolutely necessary for a right-brained person to read an assigned chapter or background information before a lecture or to survey a chapter before reading. If an instructor doesn't consistently give an overview before he or she begins a lecture, you may need to ask at the end of class what the next lecture will be and how you can prepare for it. If you are predominantly right-brained, you may also have trouble outlining (You've probably written many papers first and outlined them latter because an outline was required). You're the student who needs to know why you are doing something. Left-brained students would do well to exercise their right-brain in such a manner.

Sequential Vs. Random Processing
In addition to thinking in a linear manner, the left brain processes in sequence. The left brained person is a list maker. If you are left brained, you would enjoy making master schedules and and daily planning. You complete tasks in order and take pleasure in checking them off when they are accomplished. Likewise, learning things in sequence is relatively easy for you. For example, spelling involves sequencing - if you are left-brained, you are probability a good speller. The left brain is also at work in the linear and sequential processing of math and in following directions.
By, contrast, the approach of the right-brained student is random. If you are right-brained, you may flit from one tack to another. You will get just as much done, but perhaps without having addressed priorities. An assignment may be late or incomplete, not because you weren't working but because you were working on something else. You were ready to rebel when asked to make study schedules for the week. But because of the random nature of your dominant side, you must make lists, and you must make schedules. This may be your only hope for survival in college. You should also make a special effort to read directions. Oh yes, the mention of spelling makes you cringe. Use the dictionary, carry a Franklin speller, use the spell checker on your computer. Never turn in an assignment without proofing for spelling. Because the right side of the brain is color sensitive, you might try using colors to learn sequence, making the first step green, the second blue, the last red. Or you may want to "walk" a sequence, either by physically going from place to place or by imagining it. For the first step of the sequence, you might walk to the frond door; for the second, to the kitchen; for the third, to the den, etc. Or make Step One a certain place or thing in you dorm room or study place, and Step Two another. If you consistently use the same sequence, you will find that this strategy is transferable to many tasks involving sequence.

Symbolic Vs. Concrete Processing
The left brain has no trouble processing symbols. Many academic pursuits deal with symbols-such as letters, words, and mathematical notations. The left brained person tends to be comfortable with linguistic and mathematical endeavors. Left-brained students will probably just memorize vocabulary words or math formulas. The right brain, on the other hand, wants things to be concrete. The right brain person wants to see, feel, or touch the real object. Right brain students may have had trouble learning to read using phonics. They prefer to see words in context, to see how the formula works. To use your right brain, create opportunities for hands-on activities, use something real whenever possible. You may also want to draw out a math problem or illustrate your notes.

Logical Vs. Intuitive Processing
The left brain processes in a linear, sequential, logical manner. When you process on the left side, you use information piece by piece to solve a math problem or work out a science experiment. When you read and listen, you look for the pieces so that you can draw logical conclusions. If you process primarily on the right side of the brain, you use intuition. You may know the right answer to a math problem but not be sure how you got it. You may have to start with the answer and work backwards. On a quiz, you have a gut feeling as to which answers are correct, and you are usually right. In writing, it is the left brain that pays attention to mechanics such as spelling, agreement, and punctuation. But the right side pays attention to coherence and meaning; that is, your right brain tells you it "feels" right.

Verbal Vs. Nonverbal Processing
Left brain students have little trouble expressing themselves in words. Right brain students may know what they mean, but often have trouble finding the right words. The best illustration of this is to listen to people give directions. The left brain person will say something like "From here, go west three blocks and turn north on Vine Street. Go three or four miles and then turn east onto Broad Street." The right brain person will sound something like this: "Turn right (pointing right), by the church over there (pointing again). Then you will pass a McDonalds and a Walmart. At the next light, turn right toward the BP station." So how is this relevant to planning study strategies? Right brain students need to back up everything visually. If it's not written down, they probably won't remember it. And it would be even better for right brain students to illustrate it. They need to get into the habit of making a mental video of things as they hear or read them. Right brain students need to know that it may take them longer to write a paper and the paper may need more revision before it says what they want it to say. This means allowing extra time when a writing assignment is due.

Reality-Based Vs. Fantasy-Oriented Processing
The left side of the brain deals with things the way they are-with reality. When left brain students are affected by the environment, they usually adjust to it. Not so with right brain students. They try to change the environment! Left brain people want to know the rules and follow them. In fact, if there are no rules for situations, they will probably make up rules to follow! Left brain students know the consequences of not turning in papers on time or of failing a test. But right brain students are sometimes not aware that there is anything wrong. So, if you are right brain, make sure you constantly ask for feedback and reality checks. It's too late the day before finals to ask if you can do extra credit. Keep a careful record of your assignments and tests. Visit with your professor routinely. While this fantasy orientation may seem a disadvantage, in some cases it is an advantage. The right brain student is creative. In order to learn about the digestive system, you may decide to "become a piece of food! And since emotion is processed on the right side of the brain, you will probably remember well anything you become emotionally involved in as you are trying to learn.

These are just some of the differences that exist between the left and right hemispheres, but you can see a pattern. Because left brain strategies are the ones used most often in the classroom, right brain students sometimes feel inadequate. However, you now know that you can be flexible and adapt material to the right side of your brain. Likewise, those of you who are predominantly left brain know that it would be wise to use both sides of the brain and employ some right brain strategies.

TOEFL Server Woes Frustrate Koreans

2007-03-22T20:11:00.000-07:00

TOEFL Server Woes Frustrate Koreans
By Park Chung-a Staff Reporter
Kim Hye-won, a 22-year-old university student, doubted her eyes while looking at the TOEFL registration Website on Thursday. The Republic of Korea (ROK) had been omitted _ without notice _ from the countries listed as providing the test.
She called up Korean-American Educational Commission, a domestic organization which is the representative of the U.S.-based Educational Testing Service (ETS) only to be told that South Korea has been temporarily off the list beginning Wednesday morning due to Web server instability resulting from the site being swamped by registration requests from Korea.
``I have been trying to register for the test for two weeks now and I am just sick of spending my time on the computer waiting for the places to open. And I can’t understand why ETS did not give any notice on its Website before omitting our country from the list,’’ said Kim who needs a TOEFL score to apply for her school’s exchange program with an American university.
According to an official of the commission, this is the third time this year the ETS has temporarily excluded South Korea from the list and the exclusion could last up to a week.
``We truly feel sorry for such inconvenience to our customers. However, there is not much we can do as ETS is wholly in charge of organizing the test. We did not get any notice from the ETS about the temporary omission either. All you can do is wait,’’ said the commission official who wished to remain anonymous. ``ETS has resorted to denying Koreans’ access to the Website temporarily due to people overloading its Website, which has caused instability in the Web server. Due to Koreans’ excessive connections, people from other countries suffered difficulties of access.’’
An Internet Website, Hackers Academia, one of the most popular private institutes providing courses on TOEFL, is filled with comments reflecting resentment and frustration over the lack of spaces to take the test. One cynical user even posted an article urging people to take the test in Middle East countries like Jordan, which have lots of vacant slots.
When slots open for the test some English institutes even send text messages to inform their students.
Since IBT (Internet-Based Test) was introduced in September, Koreans have been battling to register for the test due to the lack of test facilities.
Under the CBT (Computer-Based Test), more than 100,000 people could take the test each year in South Korea as test-takers were allowed to take the exam almost every day except for the weekend. However, since the introduction of IBT, it is estimated that the number has been reduced to 30,000 since testing has been limited to four times a month and there is a lack of places with proper facilities for the test. Although there are 19 test centers in the country, depending on the situation, they are sometimes closed for the test.
Demand for the test has increased since an increasing number of high schools and universities have adopted TOFEL as one of the entrance requirements. Six foreign language high schools in Seoul alone have TOEFL as one of their entrance requirements.
Taking advantage of the phenomenon, some who have succeeded registering for the test sell their slots to others who are desperate to take the test, charging high prices. Travel agencies have also been quick to offer ``TOFEL package programs,’’ including overnight trips for those who want to take TOEFL abroad.
A 26-year-old office worker Lee will go to Taiwan in April to take TOEFL on a trip arranged by a travel agency in Seoul. It costs 990,000 won and includes test fee, round-trip ticket and overnight stay.
``Since I have to apply for a training program abroad which requires TOEFL, I had no other choice. As I am an office worker, I do not have the time to wait in front of a computer to register for the test. Even if it’s expensive, I thought it’s better to take it,’’ she said.
At Agora of Daum, an Internet portal site, 1,463 people have signed up as of noon yesterday to file a petition to the Ministry of Education and Human Resources to exclude TOEFL from the entrance exams for high schools and universities.
``Excluding TOEFL from the tests required to enter high schools and universities is the only way to reduce demand for it and enable those who really need TOEFL scores to study abroad,’’ said a netizen, ID Param, who suggested collecting signatures to petition the authorities.
``The government should develop its own English ability test that can replace TOEFL. Everyone from elementary school students to salaried workers is fighting to find slots for TOEFL. Although we have been criticizing the ETS service, I am at the same time ashamed of this crazy fever over TOEFL,’’ said Param.
michelle@koreatimes.co.kr 03-22-2007 19:44

Financial Times 2007 Business School Rankings

2007-01-29T14:22:00.000-08:00

It's important to note that the Financial Times Rankings has a bias that requires consideration as one reviews the rankings. Financial Times poll measures career progression of alumni, program diversity and a school's track record in producing new ideas in management. Data for this ranking was compiled from two main sources—the business schools and the schools' alumni who graduated three years ago. A school's rank is determined by a combination of three main factors: alumni career progression and salary purchasing power; the diversity (gender and internationalization) of the school and its program; and perceptions of the school's research capabilities. -Dave

Financial Times Interactive Table Link

Financial Times 2007 Global Ranks PDF Download PDF (Right Click)

Financial Times 2007 Top American schools, PDF (Right Click)

Financial Times 2007 Top European schools, PDF (Right Click)

Financial Times 2007 Top Asia-Pacific schools,PDF (Right Click)

Financial Times 2007 Top Canadian schools,PDF (Right Click)

Financial Times 2007 Top 10s in selected categories, PDF (Right Click)

Financial Times 2007 Ranking of the rankings, PDF (Right Click)

Financial Times 2007 Graphs PDF Download (Right Click) -Salaries/Employment/Alumni/Career Progression/Entrepreneurship/School Evaluation/Current Job Title

New dawn for the MBA

ByDella Bradshaw
Published: January 29 2007 00:11

It is more than a decade since the MBA business has seen such buoyancy, with aspiring students fighting for places at top schools while recruiters scrabble to attract the most accomplished graduates. Not since the early 1990s has an increase in MBA applications coincided with a healthy job market for graduating students.

Those in charge of programmes at the top schools believe this signifies a growing international recognition of the degree. Julia Tyler, associate dean of the MBA programme at London Business School, points out that in the few years following September 2001, when banks and management consultancies did not hire, industrial recruiters discovered the value of taking on MBAs. Now these recruiters have stuck with the idea in the good times too, fuelling the job market.
In the US, Rose Martinelli, associate dean of student recruitment and admissions at the University of Chicago graduate school of business, believes applicants, too, are placing greater emphasis on the long-term value of an MBA, in spite of short-term hiccups caused by fluctuations in the economy.
“There’s a good sense of assurance in the degree ... that’s become more recognised by the applicant pool.”
Data collected for the Financial Times ranking of global MBA programme bears out these beliefs. Three years after graduation, alumni from the classes of 2001, 2002 and 2003 (the information supplied by these alumni three years after their graduation is used to compile the FT 2007 rankings) report substantial salaries and salary increases.
Though salaries reported by alumni from the class of 2002 showed a slight dip overall at top schools such as Harvard, Stanford, London Business School and Insead, this year salaries have rebounded.
Examining just the top 10 schools, the average salary three years after graduation reported by these alumni is $148,609, and the average increase from starting the MBA to three years after graduation is 127 per cent.
But this gloss could hide seismic changes. Increasingly, a gulf is emerging between the top business schools and the also-rans, between schools in different regions of the world, and between different types of programmes.
To begin with, the increase in applications may not be all it seems. Though the Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC) reports that two-thirds of business schools saw an increase in applications during the past year, they report only the number of applications, not the number of applicants. “There is not a lot of statistical data to show that there are more applicants,” says Ms Martinelli. “The competition for the top schools is increasing, so applicants are applying to four or 4.5 schools. Last year it was three.”
On the other hand the GMAC statistics may underestimate the true growth in the number of applicants, with the real boom happening in geographical areas where the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) – regarded in the US and much of Europe as the entry test for business school – is neither recognised nor required.
In the US, the number of business schools grew 10 per cent between 1999 and 2006, according to the GMAC global database, from 846 schools to 927. But these figures are dwarfed by India, where there are now more business schools than in the US: between 1999 and 2006, the number of business schools grew from 639 to 953. In China too, growth continues.
Dezsö Horváth, dean of the Schulich school of business at York University in Canada, says this can only continue. “I don’t see any decline [in demand] in Asia for the next two decades.”
However, perhaps the most startling figure is the growth in the number of MBA programmes in Europe: from 181 in 1999 to 658 in 2006. In Germany alone there are now 150 MBA programmes, most of them tiny.
So while the top schools can take their pick of the brightest, there is increasing competition between lesser schools. “There is so much new provision,” says Kai Peters, chief executive at Ashridge in the UK. “There is a real concern about what is critical mass in a programme. I really don’t know where this is heading. It’s becoming a much messier market.” Even top schools are keeping watch. “One unknown is where the competition will come from,” reports London Business School’s Ms Tyler.
What is clear is that the majority of new programmes are usually shorter than the two-year gold standard MBA taught in the US, with many offering one-year programmes.
These shorter programmes are increasingly proving their worth. In the FT rankings this year five of the top 15 schools have programmes shorter than the 20 to 24-month model.
These range from Insead, with its 10-month programme, to Ceibs in Shanghai, which runs an 18-month programme.
In Canada, the Ivey school at the University of Western Ontario re-launched its degree as a one-year programme in May 2006. As a result, female enrolment has increased from 25 to 34 per cent, says dean Carol Stephenson.
There have been other changes in the student profile. “With the one year programme we get fewer of the students who hate their jobs,” she says. “We get more of the students who are focused, who know what they want. The class dynamic is different.”
Another variable is the increasing number of student nationalities. Instituto de Empresa in Madrid, for example, has enrolled students this year from countries as far afield as Iran, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Nepal and Sierra Leone.
What is undoubtedly true is that the full-time MBA is an increasingly global product. According to GMAC, business schools have seen a rise in international applications. A small but growing trend is the increase in the number of US applicants to non-US schools. “They [American students] realise they have to be world-aware,” says Ms Tyler.
But while students are increasingly prepared to travel, there is a new realism among business schools about what it takes to be a global business school. The ever-increasing cost of an internationally-recognised faculty, plus the cost of maintaining overseas facilities, means that an endowment base is critical.
A scan of the top 10 schools in the 2007 FT rankings shows that the eight US schools on the list have an endowment of at least $200m – Harvard Business School has more than $2bn. Meanwhile, Insead has an endowment of just €78m and London Business School just £6.4m.
Not surprisingly, then, the past year has seen both Insead and LBS appoint business people rather than academics as deans. Frank Brown, dean at Insead, says increasing the size of the endowment is critical.
“The issue that I see is that we are trying to be the business school for the world. That means diversity of nationality, profession and socio-economic diversity. If Insead tries to attract a student from, say, Nigeria, in competition with a top US school, the US school is able to offer a full scholarship. Insead is not.”
In the long term he would like to be able to offer 100 full scholarships and to set up research centres in leadership, corporate responsibility and blue ocean strategy. For these, he concludes, Insead needs to raise between €75m and €100m. Many US deans will not envy him the task.

US business schools top world rankings (Guardian)
Donald MacLeod
Monday January 29, 2007

American business schools continue to dominate the Financial Times league table published today.
Top of the table for global MBA programmes for the third year running is the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton school, followed by Columbia, Harvard and Stanford. The London Business School maintains its ranking as fifth, but the French school Insead, which now has an offshoot in Singapore, is the only other European school to make it into the top 10.
The University of Cambridge's Judge school has shown a spectacular rise to 15th after lying 42nd two years ago, overtaking the Said school at the University of Oxford, which this year is at 19 after being ranked 25th in 2005.
A sign of things to come may be the arrival of the China Europe International business school (Ceibs) in the top tier of the FT table at number 11.
The Shanghai-based school benefited from the country's mushrooming economic growth to improve its scores for salary percentage increases for students three years after graduation and employment rate after three months.
Two Spanish schools, Instituto di Empresa and the Iese business school, the IMD in Switzerland and HEC Paris are also ranked in the top 20 by the FT.

BusinessWeek Article: What B-Schoolers Lust For Now

2007-01-19T02:38:00.000-08:00

Every decade, another faddish career opportunity dazzles the nation's business schools. In the 1980s, MBAs dreamed of Wall Street fortunes, swaggering their way into penthouses and private planes. During the dot-com bubble, it was about vesting swiftly and starting a foundation by age 30.

Today job lust among B-schoolers is fiercest for the gilded, clubby preserve of private equity. "Absolutely, it's become the hot job for MBAs," says Maury Hanigan, president of New York's MBA Scouting Report.
As always, MBAs chase the money. And nowhere are the pay packages more regal than in the land of private equity. First-year compensation of $300,000 for top-tier talent at a Wall Street investment bank doesn't seem too shabby--until you consider that thoroughbred MBAs joining the largest private equity shops command base salaries and bonuses as high as $450,000. Add to that, of course, the real payoff: the equity. "More equity is flowing downtream to these new hires," says Brian Korb, a partner at New York executive search firm Glocap Search, co-publisher of the 2007 Private Equity Compensation Report. "Especially for the all-stars. It's just like in sports."
There's just one hitch: There aren't as many private equity jobs out there as you might think. While many of the biggest funds will hire about 20% more B-school grads this year, says Korb, demand for such jobs outstrips supply by a factor of about five to one. And the positions typically go to those with prior experience. A taste of just how cloistered this world is: The mighty Carlyle Group sent co-founder David M. Rubenstein (BW--Jan. 15) to Harvard Business School in October to woo finance stars over dinner at a gourmet restaurant. But Carlyle's 50% jump in hiring? It amounted to a mere seven spots, says human resources manager Annie Paydar.
You wouldn't pick up on the exclusivity by visiting a B-school campus, though. From the Wharton School to the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business, it sometimes seems as if private equity is all anyone is talking and thinking about. MBA programs have always had private equity clubs. But B-schools at New York University, Dartmouth, and Columbia all report record memberships in these networking fests. At Wharton, nearly half the student body is a member of the private equity club. Conferences starring such legends as Blackstone Group chief Stephen A. Schwarzman sell out months in advance. And the schools have been falling all over themselves to add classes teaching everything from innovative dealmaking to the art of wielding "influence" within a firm.
With jobs tight and standards high, students are scrambling to prostrate themselves at the private equity altar. Many of Troy Barratt's buddies at Columbia Business School are already set with sweet deals at consulting firms and investment banks. But when they go down to New York City's meatpacking district to swig Grey Goose and go dancing, "I wave goodbye and tell them to have a good time," says Barratt, co-president of Columbia's Private Equity & Venture Capital Club. He stays behind to set up coffee dates and e-mail contacts.
At Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, six students were so desperate to snag private equity work that they passed on surfing vacations over winter break to fly to Mumbai, India, where they performed free labor for private equity firms looking for research. While there, the students knocked on doors and chatted up receptionists in the hope of getting in front of some private equity and hedge fund partners. "You have to find innovative ways to differentiate yourself," says one of the students, Shelly Rastogi.
Some see this as a leading indicator of yet another bubble. We know where the earlier stampedes to Wall Street and Silicon Valley ended. In five years, when these junior barons want to start their own funds, will the wash of money still be in private equity? Then again, what better school for a lesson in risk?

The status of Indians in US and US students going to India

2006-12-07T10:56:00.000-08:00

US students in India double
Archana Mohan / Ahmedabad December 06, 2006
B-SCHOOL: Over 1,700 American students complete their higher education in India.

How strong is the shift in focus of students towards India and China? Consider this: Over 1,700 American students completed their higher education in India — an increase of 52.7 per cent compared to the previous year. Comparatively, China, which has housed 6,389 students from the US this year has seen a jump of 34.9 per cent compared to the year before, states a recent study titled ‘Open Doors-2006’ that underlines trends during the academic year of 2005-2006.

The report is published by the Institute of International Education (IIE) — a leading not-for-profit educational and cultural exchange organisation in the US. The census is based on a survey of over 2,700 accredited U.S. institutions.

The UK yet again emerged as the favourite destination for students from the US with 32,071 students preferring to study there occupying a 15.5 per cent share in the total pie of American students studying abroad.

The other surprise gainer in the list has been Argentina whose intake of 2,013 students has resulted into an unprecedented increase of 53 per cent, the highest percentage hike among all countries.

With every institute in India looking for global collaborations and trying to increase the number of student and faculty exchange programmes, it’s little wonder that Indian international scholars studying or teaching at US campuses have seen the highest increase among all countries with 13.9 per cent followed by China with 11.6 per cent and Korea with 7.3 per cent. Indians have once again topped the list for being the leading place of origin among students studying in the US campuses.

However, there has been a dip of 4.9 per cent in the percentage of students going to the US which has most likely come about due to other emerging destinations like Australia, New Zealand and Netherlands who offer easier and more economical routes for students to apply.

“Indian students are an integral part of US education, especially our full-time MBA programme. Year after year, Indian students make up 5-8 per cent of every class. Hence, we have established the Indian Graduate Business Association (IGBA) that creates a friendly, welcoming environment for all students interested in Indian business and culture, “ says David E. Platt, Director, Centre for International Business Education and Research, McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin.

Many universities like the Montana State University have even held International weeks with India as a theme this year acknowledging the presence of Indian students on the campus.

The university which earlier had no plans to establish an India Centre is now open to collaborating with Indian universities for joint degrees as well as sending its students to India and vice versa for study internships, says Yvonne Rudman, Director for Academic & Technical Programs, Montana State University.

Incidentally, Business and Management studies are still the most preferred streams for students with 17.9 per cent pie of students opting for it.

Engineering is a close second at 15.7 per cent but the field that has seen a vast decline has been Maths and Computer science which has seen a massive percentage drop of 10.3 per cent this academic year.

The University of Southern California with a considerable Indian population along with the Columbia University have yet again emerged as the campus with the largest non-American student populations in the country.

The report states that 63.4 per cent of all the international students depend on personal loans and family funding for their education while only 25.9 per cent are funded completely or partially by a US college or university.

A dismal 2.6 per cent of students are funded by their home country.

New B-School for John Hopkins

2006-12-07T10:53:00.000-08:00

Johns Hopkins to build business school

By Della Bradshaw

Published: December 6 2006 12:59 | Last updated: December 6 2006 12:59

Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, is to establish the Carey school of business, following a $50m gift from William Polk Carey through his W. P. Carey Foundation. The university will raise an additional $50m from other donors in order to build the school, which will begin operations on January 1.

The gift to Johns Hopkins marks Carey’s second $50 million gift in support of business education - his 2003 donation to Arizona State University established the W. P. Carey School of Business there.

The Carey School (at Johns Hopkins) intends to make its mark by educating managers with both business skills and cross-disciplinary knowledge from other departments in the university. The university already offers joint master’s/MBA programmes in biotechnology, public health and nursing. It also has an MBA programme in medical services management.

In addition the school will add a five-year BA-BS/MBA option for liberal arts and engineering majors from the university’s undergraduate programmes.

The university is launching a search in the US for a dean of the new Carey school.

Mr Carey is chairman of W. P. Carey, a New York City real estate investment firm.

Goodbye Dean Harker of Wharton

2006-12-04T23:12:00.000-08:00

..............On July 1, Harker will take charge of UD's $1.2 billion endowment, about 21,000 students, nearly 4,000 employees and a slate of initiatives that help shape Delaware's economy, education and business climate.............

See the full article

Interview Help

2006-11-28T23:29:00.000-08:00

Not sure how good this company is. I just saw this PR announcement getting flagged by my news scanners and I thought I'd post this potentially helpful service.
Ace the Interview with InterviewTRUE(TM)
Tuesday November 28, 9:02 am ET
New Product Takes the Fear Out of Interviewing; Online video solution for job seekers who want to master the interview process

BETHLEHEM, Pa., Nov. 28 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, InterviewStream(TM), the leading provider of online video practice interviewing for the campus market announces the launch of its new product called InterviewTRUE(TM) (http://www.InterviewTRUE.com). InterviewTRUE(TM) is an online video practice interviewing system developed specifically for consumers.

With just a web cam and high-speed internet access, InterviewTRUE(TM) subscribers can practice interviewing in the privacy of their own home from a library of over 1,000 questions. This online interviewing solution allows job seekers to experience an in-depth interview session before actually going on one. This opportunity to practice the interview in advance provides the individual job seeker with significant advantages over other candidates in a crowded, competitive marketplace.

InterviewTRUE(TM) not only helps alleviate the fears of interviewing, but it helps candidates feel better prepared so that their confidence level illuminates to prospective employers as well. "It's amazing how much time and effort most people put into polishing and perfecting their resume, yet then end up failing due to a mediocre interview. Job seekers should practice and prepare for the interview in order to overcome their fears and move to the top of the class," said Brian Krueger, President, CollegeGrad.com and author of "College Grad Job Hunter."

In addition to hands-on interview practice, InterviewTRUE(TM) subscribers are also privileged to expert career advice, the opportunity to participate in Professional Webinars, and FREE access to the groundbreaking "Video Snapshot" -- a complimentary web link to a 3-D video clip of the candidate that can be added to the cover letter or resume.

The company's products are revolutionary in bridging the gap between the traditional resume and the in-person interview. "The InterviewTRUE(TM) product offering is a creative, innovative solution that truly helps candidates shine during the interview process," said Randy Bitting, InterviewStream's co-founder. "Our goal is to provide sophisticated, fun, and unique tools for job seekers that will enhance their interviewing knowledge and skills with an approach that really does work!"

For a limited time, InterviewTRUE(TM) is offering a free trial to anyone who visits http://www.interviewtrue.com.

InterviewStream(TM), the parent company

InterviewStream.com is the premier provider of online video practice interviewing, using proprietary RezFuzion technology. This system sets a new standard in virtual interview assessment and screening, and was honored by Kiosk magazine as "Best New Product Introduction of the Year (2004)." Over 50% of the leading MBAs and undergraduate schools currently employ this system, including Wharton School of Business, London School of Business, Stanford Graduate School of Business, Columbia Graduate School of Business, Yale School of Management, Howard University, Emory University, Duke Fuqua School of Business, University of Maryland, Georgetown McDonough School of Business, University of Michigan and Dartmouth Tuck School of Business. Interview LLC is headquartered in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

About the Founders

Co-founders, Miles Munz and Randy Bitting, learned the hard way when graduating from college in '02 and '03 respectively, and felt confident about their ability to secure a great job on their own. No coach, no practice, and no worry. They thought that they were ready for their first interviews. However, like most jobseekers who go into an interview unprepared, they had very little success with actually landing that perfect job.

Broke and still living at home, Randy and Miles came up with a solution for the unsuccessful interview problem that they continued to face as job seekers. They created a tool that allows jobseekers to see and hear themselves online. No mirror, just a web cam and high-speed connection. Their interviewing tool was quickly adopted by hundreds of leading MBA and Undergraduate Career Centers around the world. This groundbreaking online tool has been used by serious job seekers ever since.

NYU-Stern Making it Clear that Food and DVD's as part of your app is unacceptable

2006-11-17T00:39:00.000-08:00

I've heard of boxes of cookies, movies, flowers, gift baskets and the like being sent to the admissions office from prospectives. I think this is the first time I've seen a school clearly state that this kind of stuff should not be sent. Funny!

http://w4.stern.nyu.edu/admissions/fulltime/applyingtostern.cfm?doc_id=837#Essays

All submissions become part of NYU Stern's permanent records and cannot be returned for any reason. Do not submit anything that must be played or viewed electronically (e.g. CDs, DVDs, mp3s, etc.), that is perishable (e.g. food)

Wharton Interview Decisions early

2006-11-16T11:47:00.000-08:00

**Wharton MBA Admissions Releases Decisions Early**
All decisions to release invitations to interview or deny without an interview were released at 12noon today, 16 November 06. The release was in record time - 5 hours before the official deadline. Candidates may check their status by logging onto their Wharton account.

Best wishes to all who applied to Wharton thus far! - Dave

Wharton Dean may leave for Univ. of Delaware Pres. position.

2006-11-16T10:02:00.000-08:00

It looks like Dean Harker is on the market for an upgrade from B-School Dean to running an entire school. University of Delaware people are absolutely ecstatic about the possibility of getting Dean Harker. So it looks like Wharton will be looking for another Dean soon?
----------------------

President candidate visits UD campus
By RACHEL KIPP, The News Journal
Posted Thursday, November 16, 2006
Patrick Harker

The first of a string of candidates in the running to be the University of Delaware's next president visited the campus Wednesday.

Patrick Harker, dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, spent Wednesday in Newark "so he can learn more about the university, and we can learn more about him," UD spokesman John Brennan said. "He's meeting with student leaders, various faculty groups and ... professors."

Brennan confirmed that Harker is a candidate to replace outgoing president David P. Roselle and that others being considered for the job likely will visit campus in the future. Roselle is ending his 17-year term at UD on or around May 1.

Read the rest of the article

Wharton announcing interview invitations

2006-11-13T19:41:00.000-08:00

From Wharton's Blog...

Update on Interview Invitations

Anxious about your application and the release of interview invitations? Look no further: here’s the inside scoop. The Admissions Committee is releasing decisions throughout the day, Monday through Thursday, this week (9am – 5pm, Eastern Standard Time – EST). All interview invitations or decisions to deny without an interview will be released by 5pm EST on Thursday, 16 November 06 at the latest. (For all you speculators out there, please note: releases are not made in any particular order. The number of invitations is not fixed, but based on the strength of applications.) So try and relax. We are in the home stretch.

Columbia Business School moving to a new site

2006-11-13T19:35:00.000-08:00

BREAKING: Columbia Business School Heads North
Monday, November 13, 2006, by Lockhart

Columbia University's plans for its new Manhattanville campus just got a little clearer. From a letter to Columbia Business School students excessive wealth candidates from Dean Glenn Hubbard that just leaked to Curbed:

I am pleased to announce that after carefully weighing a number of options for improving the School's facilities to match the top-notch quality of its curriculum, faculty, and student body, the School's Board of Overseers and I are entering into discussions with the University to move Columbia Business School to the University's proposed Manhattanville campus. The proposed area of development comprises approximately 17 acres and extends roughly from the south side of West 125th Street to West 133rd Street and from Broadway to Twelfth Avenue. The entire project will span 25 to 30 years, with the construction of new Business School facilities taking place in the first project phase during the next five to seven years.

A 25-to-30 year project? My God, if only there were some MBAs around to help plan this sucker! After the jump, the full memo.

Dear Students:

I am pleased to announce that after carefully weighing a number of options for improving the School's facilities to match the top-notch quality of its curriculum, faculty, and student body, the School's Board of Overseers and I are entering into discussions with the University to move Columbia Business School to the University's proposed Manhattanville campus. The proposed area of development comprises approximately 17 acres and extends roughly from the south side of West 125th Street to West 133rd Street and from Broadway to Twelfth Avenue. The entire project will span 25 to 30 years, with the construction of new Business School facilities taking place in the first project phase during the next five to seven years.

No one understands better than you do the constraints that our available space and facilities place upon all aspects of what we do. A move to Manhattanville will provide the School with an unprecedented opportunity to design a facility worthy of this fine institution. The move will also reunite all parts of the school: The MBA and EMBA programs, Executive Education, and External and Alumni Relations will once again share a common facility. In short, I believe that a move to the Manhattanville campus is the best choice for the School in terms of resources, space, and option value (perhaps even to include a residential facility), and it will allow the School to be an integral part of a transformative moment in the University's history.

If you would like to learn more about the entire scope of the University's Manhattanville project, can visit the project website at http://www.columbia.edu/cu/neighbors/pages/manplanning/index.html.

With regards,

Glenn Hubbard

Columbia's plans for the 17-acre parcel have been of much recent concern to the West Harlem business community, who sued for more details about expected eminent domain plans. No doubt this news will calm their nerves, as one naturally assumes the business school will see the opportunity to integrate real-world businesses with their classroom environment to create bold new educational opportunities like Cell Phone Retailing 101.

Advise on Applying to B-School from a B-School Student

2006-11-13T05:56:00.000-08:00

In search of a hot date

By Neil Courtis

Published: November 12 2006 15:13 | Last updated: November 12 2006 15:13

Prospective MBA students become used to lectures from alumni on the rigours of MBA study. However, neither alumni nor the schools themselves prepared me for the extraordinary rigmarole involved in applying to business school. Before crossing the threshold, business school aspirants should expect a year of lost evenings and weekends sweating over their applications.

If you want to study next autumn, you should have started your research already. Harvard and London business schools have already closed their first round of applications for 2007 study. Leading US schools will be finalising classes by the end of March.

Having spent 2006 scrambling to meet deadlines, I now see the MBA application process as a particularly tricky case study involving practical, logistical and strategic challenges.

The three core practical hurdles are transcripts, the Graduate Management Admission Test and references. My transcript – the official record of your university degree – took almost six weeks to arrive from Manchester University in the UK and only after I had submitted my applications did I realise that the registry had awarded me a degree in German and modern languages rather than the politics and philosophy I had, in fact, studied.

Next comes the GMAT, a four-hour computer-administered test of verbal and numerical skills. This requires rote learning of life-enhancing disciplines such as basic number theory, the properties of triangles and times tables up to 15. Time-poor worker bees such as myself can take a refresher course with tutors such as Manhattan Review or Kaplan, but these classes are intermittent and add weeks or even months to the application process. After my weekend of cramming, we were advised to undertake a month more practice and sit two three-hour sample tests.

Numeracy and integrity

And while worrying about GMAT, do not forget to track down some referees, ideally two people who have worked with you, like you and have the stomach to complete lengthy online questionnaires about your skills, character and potential. Woolly flummery will not do. Referees have to consider your analytical skills, numeracy and integrity. By my third application, I was wincing at the thought of asking my long-suffering mentors to write yet another online paean.

And if you want to visit the schools you might apply to, get ready for some logistical challenges. My February shortlist of five schools meant five pre-application visits. Take out a solid week to write applications. You will soon be faced with some tough choices: do you spend the weekend polishing up your maths skills to eke out another 3 per cent on the GMAT, or do you visit your fourth-choice school. And do not think that the schools are not watching. Admissions staff at top schools will expect an applicant in the same country to visit and will wonder why if you do not.

But the really hard part of the process becomes apparent when one is faced with a blank 20-page application form. It is not really the length (although top schools seem to compete over the complexity of application they can impose on you), but the personal reflection you have to undergo in order to explain why the vast expense and life disruption may be the right thing for you.

“There is a lot of soul-searching involved,” says David Simpson, senior manager of marketing and admissions at London Business School. “You have to know yourself before you can confidently talk about yourself in an application.”

For the best business schools, these forms are a marathon. IMD in Lausanne not only requires three references but also 11 different essays about your previous experience and capabilities as a global business leader of tomorrow. While business schools do not aim to dissuade applications, they definitely want to filter, argues Katty Ooms Suter, admissions and recruitment at IMD. “If you can’t handle the application, you are not going to get through the course, which is very intense. We do want to scare off people who are not right for the programme.”

The bottom line is that some business schools know they are a hot date and do not want to appear easy. Indeed, this may be why, at the top schools, it is surprisingly hard to get admissions staff on the phone. A key reason for visiting MBA fairs is to clasp the hand and claim the business card of an actual human whom you can then pester by phone and e-mail.

Soul searching

The process can become surreal. At some point you will have to explain at length, on paper and during the interview, why you should be allowed to purchase the achingly expensive MBA on offer. And when business schools ask why you want to join them, do not merely repeat their sales pitch. “We don’t just want a précis of the website,” says Mr Simpson.

However, do not be too discouraged. You will soon find yourself naturally describing your motivation for taking an MBA as a desire to “broaden your skill set” rather than anything as prosaic as wanting to “learn” stuff. And being forced into soul-searching is no bad thing. The most important and useful part of my process was to talk to MBA alumni about their experiences and subsequent careers. My final choice of school – I am starting at Insead in January – was largely determined by the unanimous enthusiasm that smart and sleek Insead graduates express for their alma mater.

And, like business itself, most elements of the application process are, to some extent, negotiable. My duff transcript did not faze the schools I applied to. And deadlines may be more flexible than they appear. Each year one or two lucky (and flexible) people on the LBS waiting list are offered a place a week before the course to fill a gap that has emerged. Even Insead has given me an extra week to prove that my French (a second language is required to start the programme) is up to scratch.

So for those starting down the MBA path I say: courage, mes amis! You have nothing to lose but your weekends.

Maximise your chances of application success

■Find referees who actually know you. A common mistake, according to Sharyn Roberts, award programmes director at the Australian Graduate School of Management, is to choose referees simply on the basis of seniority. “It is very hard to persuade applicants that we really will not be impressed by a reference from a company CEO if they have no idea what the applicant is like or how they work.”

■Be nice to the people you meet. The same people who market a school often sit on, or have influence over, admissions committees.

■Do not underestimate bureaucratic hurdles. Students who are studying abroad may require visas and these can be time-consuming to acquire. A replacement birth certificate alone can take 6-8 weeks to arrive. Plan conservatively.

■Do not underestimate how long you will need to settle in. If moving abroad, don’t expect to show up the day before classes begin.

■Be careful about help with essays. Over-studied applications can read impressively but reveal little about the applicant. Don’t over-use buzzwords.

■Include everything in your application. Business schools do not see it as their job to chase up missing elements of an application.

■Come clean about career problems. Few careers are without blemish. If you have a CV “problem” (for instance, redundancy) show how you have learned from and overcome it. Admissions staff home in on evasion.

■Visit a class. Most business schools will be happy to allow a candidate to sit in on a lecture. There is no better way of getting a flavour of the place.

■Aim high. Do not assume you will not get into a top school. Most schools like diversity and different experiences.

■Remember scholarships. More scholarships are available than you may realise (23 per cent of students at LBS now have some kind of award). Some are awarded to very distinct groups, meaning you may be one of a handful of candidates who qualify.

■Apply early.

LBS finds preferred candidate to replace Dean Laura Tyson

2006-11-06T19:03:00.000-08:00

London Business School finds replacement for Tyson
By Jenny Davey

The London Business School has selected a preferred candidate to replace Laura Tyson as Dean of the world-renowned institution.
Arrangements are being finalised in preparation for a formal announcement of the appointment in the middle of this month after a hotly contested process.

The London Business School declined to comment on the identity of the individual, but speculation centred last night on Robin Buchanan, the 53-year-old senior partner of the UK operations at Bain & Co and a director of the global business consultants. He also sits on the boards of FTSE 100 giants Shire Pharmaceuticals and Liberty International.

It is unclear whether he would relinquish roles at these companies if he secures the job at the London Business School.

He previously worked for American Express International Banking Corporation in New York, McKinsey & Company, and Deloitte & Touche, where he qualified as a chartered accountant. Mr Buchanan holds an MBA with Distinction (Baker Scholar) from Harvard Business School.

He is highly regarded and has a reputation for hating business jargon and rails against “management gobbledegook” in interviews.

A spokeswoman at the London Business School would say only that it was “making good progress” with finding a replacement for Ms Tyson and that an announcement would be made “very shortly”.

Arizona B-School adding Podcasts as a tool within Curriculum

2006-11-03T18:59:00.000-08:00

IBM to Add Podcasting to Curriculum at University of Arizona
By Eric Swedlund
The Arizona Daily Star
11/02/06 11:55 AM PT

A first-of-a-kind collaboration between IBM and the University of Arizona's management information systems department will help students master Web 2.0 technologies, including blogs, online social networking and podcasting. "These kinds of technologies, like blogs and such, are things that the next generation really uses," said Rawn Shah, community program manager at IBM developerWorks.

Business Search vs. Consumer Search: Selecting the right search engine for business can challenge even the most seasoned technology buyer. The choices are many. The decision is pivotal. This white paper provides an in-depth look at the unique business search needs of today's commercial enterprises.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) Latest News about IBM is partnering with the University of Arizona's business school on a new curriculum to put students on the leading edge of next-generation Web technology, tying entrepreneurial skills with computer savvy.

The first-of-a-kind collaboration between IBM and UA's management information systems department will help students master Web 2.0 technologies, including blogs, online social networking and podcasting.
A Natural Evolution

Businesses are looking to newer Web technologies to enable them to connect better with customers.

"It's a natural evolution of the Web," said Andrea Winkle, UA adjunct instructor and coordinator of early outreach for the MIS department. "They're going to have to learn to involve their customers more in their value chain and it's going to give those who do a competitive advantage."

The curriculum for the class, part of IBM's academic initiative, was built to combine an IBM technical expert and a classroom instructor.

"These kinds of technologies, like blogs and such, are things that the next generation really uses," said Rawn Shah, community program manager at IBM developerWorks. "The idea is we would work with the university and build its course to train students how to become community managers."

Shah and Winkle jointly teach the 40-student class, which combines traditional lectures with virtual class sessions and experiential learning that puts the technology in the students' hands for real-world experience.
An Emerging Role

"If you're running a business, you need someone to be the controlling factor on your end," Shah said. "We're trying to educate students into a new job role that's emerging."

Students will maintain weekly blogs, create individual podcasts, and groups of students will build their own "wikis" -- Web sites that allow visitors to add and edit content.

For their final project, each student will work with a separate group of students from Howenstine High Magnet School to organize micro-communities online. The students will structure the online tools according to the needs of the high schoolers, just as a business designing online tools for clients, Winkle said.

HAAS updates Class profile info for 2008

2006-11-03T08:07:00.000-08:00

I placed the 2008 and 2007 numbers side by side.

Click on pic below for larger view

BusinessWeek: Tips for applying Tuck 06 Interview with Dawna Clarke

2006-11-02T09:10:00.000-08:00

Tips for Taking on Tuck
The recently appointed head of the Dartmouth's B-school talks about the applicant, the application, and the interview

Dawna Clarke just completed her first full year as director of MBA Admissions at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, but she's no stranger to the MBA admissions arena. Clarke came to Tuck after 15 years in the admit office at the University of Virginia's Darden School—the last five as director of admissions. Prior to that, she served as associate director of admissions at University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler.

Clarke says well-developed communication and interpersonal skills are both important to recruiters and vital to success at Tuck. That's why Tuck places such a heavy emphasis on the interview component of the admissions process, she says—those so-called "soft skills" are harder to gauge from the written application.

Another plus in Clarke's book: International experience, which she says is becoming increasingly important in the recruiting process.

Clarke spoke recently to BusinessWeek.com reporter Kerry Miller. An edited excerpt of their conversation follows.

In a nutshell, who's the ideal Tuck student?

We really pride ourselves on the fact that the admissions process is not formulaic. Because we're the general management program, there's not necessarily a background that we're looking for. We want people from lots of different functional areas, geographic areas, and industries. This year, 34% of our students are international, and there are about 25 different countries represented between the first and second year. We have students from lots of different industries—from health care, education, the Peace Corps, nonprofits—it's not just people from finance and consulting.

Overall, though, we're looking for positive people who are team players and have potential to be leaders. The students we admit have strong interpersonal skills, they're bright, they have strong analytical skills, they're strong communicators, and they have a capacity to succeed in a rigorous academic program. Over the years, Tuck has gotten great feedback from recruiters about the type of people they accept as well as the type of results that they produce, and I think the school is really proud of that.

Dean Danos has been pretty firm about not wanting candidates with fewer than two years of work experience unless they're applying for the combined MD/MBA (see BusinessWeek.com, 8/7/07, "B-Schools: You Don't Have to Wait"). Is that a policy that's likely to change anytime soon?

I haven't gotten any directive on that at all. Our average age did go down this year, from 29 to 28, and it's possible that it will come down again, but we still really like to see at least two years of work experience. So I don't anticipate that that policy will change anytime soon.

Have there been any other changes this year in the demographic makeup of the class?

Well, slight changes. This year, we have the highest percentage of international students that we've ever had in Tuck's history. Women increased to 33%, which was the highest percentage of women we've had in Tuck's history as well. And we're really shooting for a better balance among our international students. We're aiming for a pretty equal balance between Latin American students...

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Own-Vanderbilt forms a 28 member business board

2006-11-02T09:07:00.000-08:00

Strategic partner for Owen

Linda Anderson

Published: November 2 2006 11:53 | Last updated: November 2 2006 11:53

The Owen Graduate School of Management has established a board of visitors to act as a strategic partner for the school at Vanderbilt University, Nashville.

The board - leading corporate executives representing a variety of industries, locations and management expertise- will offer mentoring and career opportunities for students as well as ensuring relevance in relation to the needs of national and international business communities.

Jim Bradford, dean of the school, says the board is an essential component in helping the school provide a relevant and meaningful education for the next generation of business leaders.

“That means combining the real-world business perspective of these accomplished individuals with the cutting-edge research and knowledge by our renowned faculty to offer a truly unique and valuable educational experience.”

Each member of the 28-strong board will serve a three-year term.

GMAC trying to make the GMAT testing centers more accessible

2006-10-30T21:54:00.000-08:00

I guess, this will add more capacity for testing near you and to add some new options for students to consider taking the GMAT. Notice how the new GMAT locations for the "BUS" will primarily target colleges and universities. This will tend towards younger candidates taking the GMAT. Notice how the testing centers aren't stopping at major coporations or industry beltways that are not as represented in the B-School demographics. Interesting! Anyway, it'll be good to see more B-School brains coming around. Too many end up going for non-Business graduate work instead of B-School. So the world loses many of these people to schools that require immediate attendance of graduate school as opposed to B-School that expects some real-world experience.
=====================================

GMAC begins a 49-STOP US National to expand GMAT access.

A mobile test center is ready to depart on a 27-state tour Tuesday in Stockton, Calif., part of a pilot project by the Graduate Management Admission Council® (GMAC®) to explore ways to make the GMAT more accessible to people interested in attending business school

The GMAT Mobile Test Center will visit 49 colleges and universities in 27 states during its seven-month, cross-country journey. Stops will include several military installations, historically black colleges and universities, and Hispanic-serving institutions. The bus begins its journey Oct. 31, 2006, at the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif. The trip is scheduled to conclude May 31, 2007, at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington.

Full Article

Duke-Fuqua new Viewbook released today 06-07

2006-10-30T21:50:00.000-08:00

Go get their new viewbook for 06-07

Webpage

B-School Trading Centers: Wow, but no substance?

2006-10-30T21:49:00.000-08:00

I still remember how impressed I was when I first saw the Ross Trading center. With the large plasma screen and the multiple TV's running overhead, it had the Trading Floor sense. Many schools have similiar rooms that cost them major bucks to setup. Many of them turn into cool web browsing desks when the the Trading Center based classes aren't running. (Which is most of the time) I think these rooms are nice, but they aren't always as useful as they seem. Tepper for example, dismantled their Trading Center to make room for other things because they didn't think it was necessary. I was at Darden recently and their dual screen trading center doesn't have the impact that I thought it should have with the curriculum as well. But, I don't fault the school. I just think that technology is surpassing the need to have these dedicated rooms.

So, when I saw this article recently in BusinesWeek, I was happy to see that the pros and cons of the trading centers were presented for all to read about it. Enjoy - dave
=====================================
Trading Spaces, B-School Edition
For many B-schools, a flashy "trading room" is the centerpiece of finance programs and a high-profile recruiting and fund-raising tool

by Kerry Miller

The stock market is making a comeback—look no further than your local B-school for proof, where campus trading rooms are becoming more popular than ever.

Trading rooms first appeared on college campuses 10 years ago, when MIT's Sloan School of Management opened its facility in early 1996. Another trading room opened at the University of Texas, Austin's McCombs School of Business just a few months later.

Since then, more than 60 business schools, both grad and undergrad, have built trading rooms. And according to the hardware and software vendors who outfit the labs, most of that growth has occurred within the past two years.
Fundraising Gold

In truth, "trading room" is a misnomer. It's really little more than a standard computer lab gussied up with dual-screen monitors, financial software, and flashing stock tickers. The goal isn't to create a campus full of day traders, but rather, to house electronic sources of financial and investment data for simulations or research—no actual trading occurs.

Trading labs are used as classrooms for finance courses in investing or futures markets, a place where students can analyze real-time and historical financial data or use software to build and test investment portfolios. At many B-schools, the labs also serve as home base for the MBA program's student-run investment fund, as well as a facility for faculty research.

Besides their primary purpose—providing hands-on learning experiences for students—schools have seen that the trading rooms are useful marketing, development, and recruitment tools. As the cost of technologies such as LCD screens and personal computers has decreased, the overall cost of building a trading room has also gone down. That means trading rooms are proving to be increasingly cost-effective ways to recruit students and faculty, and to impress corporate visitors and alumni.
Paying Attention

Several schools have also found other lucrative ways to open up their trading labs to the community. Bentley College, for one, uses its trading room to host a summer camp for high school students called Wall Street 101, introducing them not only to the exciting world of finance, but also to Bentley College. As Bentley can attest, a top-notch trading lab can also go a long way toward enhancing the reputation and prominence of a lesser-known business school.

The trading-room boom also reflects the strong job market in the finance world. Finance positions are the most in demand for 2006, according to the latest Graduate Management Admission Council's Corporate Recruiting Survey. Beverly Hadaway, director of the EDS Financial Trading and Technology Center at McCombs, says one of the original aims of the school's trading room was to attract the attention of Wall Street recruiters, an initiative which she says has been "highly successful."

More

Progress Report on Yale's Curriculum Changes from this past year

2006-10-30T15:13:00.000-08:00

NEW HAVEN -- When the name on the door is Yale, there's no room to be second class in the field of business education.

So the Ivy League university last year hired a dean with Harvard and Stanford credentials to reinvent the Yale School of Management, founded three decades ago with a goal of bridging public and private management. The new dean, 41-year-old Joel M. Podolny , started by tossing out the school's curriculum and fashioning a new one. His goal: to lift Yale into the pantheon of elite business schools that includes Harvard, Stanford, and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

"This school aspires to be in that pantheon," Podolny said in an interview. "It requires an ability to take risks, to teach outside our comfort zone. There is a deep-seated belief in this institution that our mission is so important -- to educate leaders for business and society -- that we have to set out a model that other schools will want to emulate."

Podolny, who arrived here from Harvard Business School in July 2005, immediately began working with the Yale management school faculty, students, alumni, and recruiters to remedy what most agreed was a disconnect between its MBA curriculum and how management plays out in today's business world. The result was a decision to scrap traditional courses like marketing, finance, and organizational behavior, which aligned with the "siloed" structure of businesses in an earlier era, in favor of an interdisciplinary approach that seeks to integrate the challenges and interests 21st century managers will face.

The new curriculum was unanimously approved by the faculty last March. Its centerpiece, set to be rolled out today, is a series of "organizational perspectives" courses focused on managing external constituencies like state and society, customers, investors, and competitors, along with internal constituencies such as innovators, operating executives, fund managers, and employees. Another course, which commenced last month, explores how multi discipline management careers unfold today, a subject seldom encountered in business schools.

"What happened here is we just destroyed the old curriculum and built a new structure," said Jonathan Feinstein , a professor of economics who designed and is teaching the careers course.

Podolny unveiled the new curriculum last winter in time to attract applicants. One result was a "yield rate" -- the percentage of admitted students who accept the school's offer -- of 43 percent for the class that entered in September, an increase from the 37 percent yield rate over the previous year.

Full Article

HAAS adjusts leadership aspect of their Curriculum

2006-10-26T09:28:00.000-07:00

University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business Adds New Leadership Course to MBA Core Curriculum

BERKELEY, Calif., Oct. 26 (AScribe Newswire) -- In a move closely aligned with its "Leading Through Innovation" strategy, the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business is offering a new required course that features a sweeping assessment of each MBA student's leadership skills and a roadmap for strengthening those skills.

The Haas School began offering the new leadership course to first-year full-time MBA students Oct. 23. The centerpiece of the class is a comprehensive, 360-degree assessment of each student's leadership skills, based on nine confidential evaluations completed by former bosses, co-workers, peers, and clients before the class begins.

"We are a school of innovation, and innovation requires immense leadership talent," says Professor Jennifer Chatman, one of the Haas faculty members who developed and is teaching the new course. "The school's commitment to developing successful leaders is dramatically demonstrated by this new core course."

The new course also will be taught in the Evening & Weekend core MBA program beginning in the 2007-08 academic year.
See the full article

Finanical Times: EMBA 2006 Ranking Follow-up Article

2006-10-24T09:44:00.000-07:00

EMBA ranking 2006: The world is your oyster

Della Bradshaw

Published: October 23 2006 10:38 | Last updated: October 23 2006 10:38

For many people it is probably hard to understand why Yashwant Singh, a resident of the city of Pune,160km east of Mumbai on India’s western coast, chose to study in Barcelona for his executive MBA – an MBA degree for working managers. But for Mr Singh, an executive at Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSN), India’s largest telecoms operator, the decision to enrol on the Global Executive MBA at Iese Business School was straightforward. “I was looking for an experience and for exposure in Europe, not in Asia.”

He is one of a growing number of executives prepared to put up with a 13-hour flight – the time it takes to get from Mumbai to Barcelona – to study internationally. And business schools are ensuring they can attract candidates from a distance by designing programmes that enable participants to do this. Out are midweek and weekend programmes; in are programmes where study is concentrated in blocks of one or two weeks, interspersed with online teamwork.

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Nowhere is this more true than on degrees offered jointly between two or more business schools in two or more locations.

Lyn Hoffman, programme director for the EMBA Global London Business School runs with Columbia in New York, believes the format of this dual centre programme is compelling.

“The two cities are the greatest learning laboratories and we have a serious portfolio of assignments outside the US and the UK.”

The EMBA Global entered the Financial Times EMBA rankings this year in the number two slot. Both Columbia and LBS also offer single degree programmes based in New York and London, which were ranked 11 and seven respectively.

When schools have a portfolio of EMBA degrees, the trick is to ensure the fit is right between the student and the programme, says Jaki Sitterle, managing director of executive programmes at the Stern school at New York University. NYU has a part-time MBA intended for those around the age of 30, an EMBA intended for those around the age of 35, and is one of three participants in the Trium programme, ranked for the first time this year in the number four slot.

Trium is intended for managers with an average age of 40 and was designed jointly with HEC Paris and the London School of Economics and Political Science – LSE provides the geopolitical component for the course.

According to Ms Sitterle, candidates on Trium are those who need more than a general management degree. “They need management within the geo-political context...I don’t believe there is any other programme in this space.” The focus of the programme was determined in the first discussions, says Bernard Moingeon, associate dean for executive education at HEC. “When we started we said: what are the needs of top guns in global companies...All the content focuses on the impact of globalisation on companies.”

In the five years since the Trium programme was launched the class size has doubled. In London, Ms Hoffman says she forsees a second stream of the EMBA Global being recruited – the restrictions at the moment are largely space on the LBS site.

Other joint degrees are proving equally successful. The Kellogg school at Northwestern University, which has three programmes in the top 13 in the 2006 Financial Times EMBA rankings, has pioneered the art of working with overseas schools, offering joint degrees in Frankfurt, Tel Aviv, Hong Kong and Toronto as well as single degree programmes on its home campus in Chicago and second campus in Miami.

This year for the first time the 300 students enrolled on the six programmes will study for elective, or optional, courses at any of the other five schools, and their home campus.

This year 60 per cent of the students are taking the opportunity to study at one of the other partner schools as well as studying in Evanston (Chicago). Julie Cisek Jones, assistant dean and director of EMBA programmes at Kellogg, says there has been a broad interest in studying on all the partner school campuses.

“Each campus’s coursework highlights the expertise of that campus or the nuances of doing business in that region,” she says. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology has been particular popular with those participants interested in doing business in China and Asia; the Leon Recanati school at Tel Aviv University has been a focus for entrepreneurship; and the Schulich school at York University in Canada has been popular with those interested in sustainable business.

Meanwhile, the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business prefers its the “pure Chicago” model, using its own professors to teach on its three campuses in Chicago, London and Singapore. Like the professors, the students can work on the different campuses.

The programme retained its number six slot this year in spite of the entry of the two joint degrees above it.

Even the more domestic programmes are beginning to tap into the flight culture and attract participants from overseas.

At Instituto de Empresa in Madrid, for example, the Spanish language EMBA is attracting students from Portugal and even South America.

Alongside the growing demand for an international experience on the EMBA, there is a growing demand for EMBA programmes outside the traditional homeland of the US, says Ms Hoffman at LBS.

“The number of EMBA programmes is growing every year, with most of the growth coming from Europe and South America.”

Quoting statistics from the EMBA Council, the industry organisation, she says 47 per cent of EMBA programmes were from outside the US in 2005, compared with just 29 per cent in 2003.

She argues that this statistic might underestimate the growth of new EMBA programmes in areas such as Asia which are not on the Embac radar screen.

Not surprisingly none of the top EMBA programmes come cheap.

These days it is commonplace for a top EMBA programme to cost more than $100,000. Indeed the higher up the rankings you aim, the more expensive the programme, it would seem.

The Wharton school at the University of Pennsylvania costs $136,308 if you study in Philadelphia, $145,380 if you study in San Francisco. The Columbia/LBS Global Executive MBA, by comparison, is $120,000, while Trium costs $116,900.

But what the data collected for the 2006 Financial Times ranking shows is that for many people on these programmes, this can equate to as little as six months salary.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006

Financial Times released 2006 Executive MBA Rankings

2006-10-23T15:30:00.000-07:00

London has increased its lead as the hottest city for executive MBA degrees according to the latest ranking from the Financial Times. However, the Wharton school at the University of Pennsylvania retains its number one slot in the global EMBA rankings.

According to the rankings, four out of the top seven programmes in the ranking of 85 EMBA programmes are taught wholly or partly in London. These include two programmes taught by London Business School, including the EMBA Global joint programme with Columbia in New York, one EMBA run by the University of Chicago in London and the Trium EMBA run jointly by the London School of Economics and Political Science, the Stern school at New York University and HEC Paris.

Other top cities are Hong Kong, Shanghai and New York, while the EMBA programme from Instituto de Empresa, in Madrid was ranked five.

To view the rankings and read the articles, please go to the EMBA 2006 special report and the interactive EMBA 2006 ranking.
Rank 2006 School Name Country
1 University of Pennsylvania: Wharton U.S.A.
2 Columbia/London Business School U.S.A./ U.K.
3 Kellogg/Hong Kong UST Business School China
4 Trium: HEC Paris/LSE/New York University: Stern France/ U.K./ U.S.A.
5 Instituto de Empresa Spain
6 University of Chicago GSB U.S.A./ U.K./ Singapore
7 London Business School U.K.
8 Washington University: Olin China
9 Duke University: Fuqua U.S.A.
10 Northwestern University: Kellogg U.S.A.
11 Columbia Business School U.S.A.
12 Purdue/Tias/CEU/GISMA U.S.A./ Netherlands/ Hungary/ Germany
13 Kellogg/WHU-Otto Beisheim School Germany
14 Warwick Business School U.K.
15 City University: Cass U.K.
15 Chinese University of Hong Kong China
17 Ceibs China
18 New York University: Stern U.S.A.
19 IMD Switzerland
19 Cornell University: Johnson U.S.A.

(Click on the graph below to see the full rankings.)
Download PDF of all categorical rankings

Tepper releases new Class Profile info

2006-10-19T23:03:00.000-07:00

PITTSBURGH—Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business, the nation’s No. 3 business school according to the 2006 Wall Street Journal/Harris Interactive poll of corporate recruiters, enrolled 137 new full-time MBA students this fall with an average Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) score of 696 out of a possible 800. The score reflects the fifth consecutive year of increasing test scores for the Tepper School’s incoming class. (Click here for chart.)

Overall, 28 percent of Tepper students are international, with students from 25 countries in this year’s class compared to 21 last year. Women represent about one-fifth of Tepper’s entering class and underrepresented minorities (African Americans, Hispanic Americans and Native Americans) continued at about 10 percent.

About 92 percent of incoming students held full-time jobs before entering the MBA program, and the average number of years on the job held steady at just more than four years. Included among the incoming students are a neurosurgery resident, a member of the Peace Corps who worked in Cameroon, a patent examiner and a member of the U.S. Coast Guard.

"Tepper’s focus on the intersection of technology and business teaches future leaders of any background the analytical skills for solving complex problems in an interdisciplinary and collaborative environment. That experience develops the confidence to make an immediate and strategic impact on their organizations," said John Mather, executive director of the Tepper School’s master’s programs.

This year also saw a large increase in enrollment in Tepper’s FlexTime program, offered to Pittsburgh-area students who want to earn their MBA while continuing to work. The FlexTime program has 68 new students this year compared to 55 last year — a 24 percent increase. In addition, 61 new students enrolled in Tepper’s corporate-sponsored FlexMode program, in which professors teach students at companies throughout the country via live video conferencing. Students receive the same MBA curriculum from the same instructors in each of the three methods of delivering the program (full-time, FlexTime and FlexMode).

Tepper’s innovative Master of Science in Computational Finance (MSCF) program — taught both at the Tepper School in Pittsburgh and in New York — welcomed 83 new students for 2006. The interdisciplinary MSCF degree is a 17-month program that draws its course content from four Carnegie Mellon colleges: the Mellon College of Science (math), the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (statistics), the H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management (information technology), and the Tepper School (finance). Tepper also enrolled 20 new Ph.D. candidates, representing 10 countries. Of the new doctoral candidates, eight (40 percent) are women.

Enrollment in the Tepper School’s Bachelor of Science in Business Administration program numbers 82, representing eight different countries, with an average SAT score of 1360. About 43 percent are women.

Tepper is one of 27 U.S. schools to maintain membership in the Forte Foundation, which aims to increase the number of women in business by encouraging their admission into graduate business programs. It is also one of 13 U.S. schools that belong to the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management, a 40-year-old organization that promotes diversity and inclusion in American business.
(Source)

USC-Marshall released new Essay Questions

2006-10-19T23:00:00.000-07:00

The biggest change from this last year is that Marshall went went 2 to 3 required essays. - Dave

Create an online account to get the essay documents for yourself

Essay Questions:
1) Describe in a brief essay (do not exceed 250 words per section - 750 words maximum):
a) your post-MBA short-term goals (immediately after graduation),
b) your post-MBA long-term goals (3-5 years after graduation), and
c) how your professional experience, when combined with an MBA degree, will
enable you to achieve these goals.

2) Complete one of the following three statements. Do not exceed 250 words.
a) "My most significant accomplishment to date is…"
b) "People may be surprised to learn that I…"
c) "I am considered a leader because…"

3) Answer two of the following questions. Do not exceed 500 words per question.
a) The Marshall MBA Prime Program prepares students for doing business in a global
economy. Describe a cross-cultural experience that challenged you. How did you
meet this challenge and what did you learn from this experience?
b) USC has garnered national acclaim for its emphasis on community outreach and
service. How have you impacted your community?
c) We all experience significant events or milestones that influence the course of our lives. Briefly describe such an event and how it affected you.

4) Optional Essay: Please add any additional information that you would like the
Admissions Committee to consider in evaluating your application. Do not exceed 250
words.

For Re-Applicants Only:
If you have applied within the past two years, you are required to submit only one essay.Describe any significant professional, personal, or academic growth since your last application to the USC Marshall School of Business. Discuss your specific professional goals and how the USC Marshall MBA will help you to achieve these goals. Do not
exceed 500 words.

BusinessWeek Article: Pre-MBA Math Camp with Prof Peter Regan - Good Article

2006-10-19T22:38:00.000-07:00

I was happy to see this comprehensive article released about MBAMath.com. It's the Mathcamp for Tuck for students starting school. Prof Regan has been running this for 14 years. They are always undergoing renovations in the curriculum and presentation format. The MBAMath.com website is one form that now serves students from all schools. If you're admitted to any school this year, I suggest you remember this web site.
===============================

By the time I start, I'm already behind. As I slip into a seat in the back of a very full classroom on Dartmouth's Hanover (N.H.) campus, professor Peter Regan is lecturing on bond pricing to the group of students about to enter the Tuck School of Business MBA program.

It's the second day of the Tuck pre-orientation math-refresher program, familiarly known as math camp. On Day 1, they had already gone over the basics of financial math and Excel skills. Having skipped the first class meeting, I'm at something of a loss.
Labor Week

I glance around conspiratorially, but everyone else seems to be working intently on the problem set at hand. It looks as if they actually know what they're doing. But my classmates have been business-school students for only a single day: Did they really already absorb this stuff? I quickly take stock of my aisle seat, close to the exit, just in case.

The Pre-Orientation Program (PEP) at Tuck constitutes a crash course in MBA math skills. Think introductions to spreadsheets, finance math, accounting, microeconomics, calculus, statistics, and decision science, all compressed into the week before Labor Day. Students invited to PEP often come from less-analytical backgrounds than their soon-to-be classmates, and the week is intended to get them up to speed. Open to interpretation are the questions: How are those five days defined? And are they a summer camp—or boot camp?

I joined Tuck's preenrollment program for three days, right in the middle of the week, as former marketers and air force pilots began to reinvent themselves as elite B-school students. A few years ago, at my own college graduation, a dean leaned forward over her lectern and gravely declared, "You know that recurring nightmare, the one where you're in a math exam and you've forgotten to study? It never goes away."
Read the rest of the article

BusinessWeek Article:Private-Equity firms Bringing the Next Bubble Crisis?

2006-10-19T21:59:00.000-07:00

After listening to this podcastof this weeks front cover BusinessWeek article, I was quite upset. Alarms went off in my head about how this could be a catalyst for another bubble crisis or the entering into a U.S. depression with thousands of jobs lost.

I'll just summarize the main point of this article. There are hundreds of private-equity transactions that have occured over the last few years where businesses are bought by private-equity firms. The same private-equity firms pays themself a dividend or fee for the purchase which is reasonable to some extent, but has beeen taking on horendously unethical levels. Case in point.... the p-e company that recently bought Hertz from Ford for roughly 3.5 Billion paid themself a 1 Billion dollar dividend. Crazy!!!!! Normally, much of the money comes from cash on hand or additional loans that is essentially a levy on the value of the company. How is this legal? I don't know who is more stupid here....the Bank that gives the loan, the private-equity firm that really thinks this won't have repercussions on our economy or our government for not having laws yet in this area. According to the B-Week article, they reviewed a little over a 100 transactions and found about 15% of them to have crossed the line on ethical financial management practices.

I wish I had the time to research the people who head up these private-equity firms. Many of the leaders of these firms are sure to be B-School grads. The actions of some of these private-equity firms need national attention. I'm so happy that BusinessWeek put out this article. Bravo BusinessWeek!

If I had the time, I'd make a list of the top 6-15 managers in each company that clearly show questionnable actions based on this article and then trace back which Business Schools they graduated from. I'd check on their donations back to the schools and make each Dean, Admissions Director, Career Center Director and Finance Chair aware of this article and that John XXX or Jane XXX from their school was part of the companies in question. This is a real ethics crisis issue. I hope you will take the time to read the article and/or listen to the audio of the podcast below. More importantly, I hope some of the readers of this Blog entry who have more time will do something about this.

Gluttons At The Gate
Private equity are using slick new tricks to gorge on corporate assets. A story of excess.
Click the play button below to listen to the Audiocast.
Note: If you are using Internet Explorer, don't worry about the security message. Just ignore the message, the player will begin playing the audio file on your computer and will not require you to directly download it to your computer.
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BusinessWeek:Gluttons at the Gate Podcast

Three weeks after giant private-equity firm Thomas H. Lee Partners agreed to buy an 80% stake of Iowa Falls ethanol producer Hawkeye Holdings in May, Hawkeye filed registration papers with the Securities & Exchange Commission to go public. The buyout deal hadn't even closed yet, but Thomas H. Lee was already looking forward to an initial public offering expected to generate a huge profit on its $312 million investment. The firm didn't just cross its fingers and wait, however: It took $20 million from Hawkeye as an advisory fee for negotiating the buyout and a $1 million "management fee"--and will soon take about $6 million to meet its own tax obligations. All told, Thomas H. Lee will collect payments of around $27 million by yearend--despite Hawkeye's having earned just $1.5 million in the six months through June.

These are crazy times in the private-equity business. It used to be that buyout firms would spend 5 to 10 years reorganizing, rationalizing, and polishing companies they owned before filing to take them public. Thomas H. Lee couldn't have created much lasting economic value in the three weeks before the filing, but that didn't stop it from writing itself huge checks from Hawkeye's ledger. Thomas H. Lee and Hawkeye declined to comment.

Buyout firms have always been aggressive. But an ethos of instant gratification has started to spread through the business in ways that are only now coming into view. Firms are extracting record dividends within months of buying companies, often financed by loading them up with huge amounts of debt. Some are quietly going back to the till over and over to collect an array of dubious fees. Some are trying to flip their holdings back onto the public markets faster than they've ever dared before. A few are using financial engineering and bankruptcy proceedings to wrest control of companies. At the extremes, the quick-money mindset is manifesting itself in possibly illegal activity: Some private equity executives are being investigated for outright fraud.

Taken together, these trends serve as a warning that the private-equity business has entered a historic period of excess. "It feels a lot like 1999 in venture capital," says Steven N. Kaplan, finance professor at the University of Chicago. Indeed, it shares elements of both the late-1990s VC craze, in which too much money flooded into investment managers' hands, as well as the 1980s buyout binge, in which swaggering dealmakers hunted bigger and bigger prey. But the fast money--and the increasingly creative ways of getting it--set this era apart. "The deal environment is as frothy as I've ever seen it," says Michael Madden, managing partner of private equity firm BlackEagle Partners Inc. "There are still opportunities to make good returns, but you have to have a special angle to achieve them."

Like any feeding frenzy, this one began with just a few nibbles. The stock market crash of 2000-02 sent corporate valuations plummeting. Interest rates touched 40-year lows. With stocks in disarray and little yield to be gleaned from bonds, big investors such as pension funds and university endowments began putting more money in private equity. The buyout firms, benefiting from the most generous borrowing terms in memory, cranked up their dealmaking machines. They also helped resuscitate the IPO market, bringing public companies that were actually making money--a welcome change from the sketchy offerings of the dot-com days. As the market recovered, those stocks bolted out of the gate. And because buyout firms retain controlling stakes even after an IPO, their results zoomed, too, as the stocks rose. Annual returns of 20% or more have been commonplace.

The success has lured more money into private equity than ever before--a record $159 billion so far this year, compared with $41 billion in all of 2003, estimates researcher Private Equity Intelligence. The first $5 billion fund popped up in 1996; now, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, Blackstone Group, and Texas Pacific Group are each raising $15 billion funds.

And that's the main problem: There's so much money sloshing around that everyone wants a quick cut. "For the management of the company, [a buyout is] usually a windfall," says Wall Street veteran Felix G. Rohatyn, now a senior adviser at Lehman Brothers Inc. (LEH ) "For the private equity firms with cheap money and a very well structured fee schedule, it's a wonderful business. The risk is ultimately in the margins they leave themselves to deal with bad times."
Read the rest of the article here

Interview with HBS Dean: Jay Light

2006-10-19T17:20:00.000-07:00

Forty years ago, in September 1966, a young mission analyst named Jay Light left the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California and headed east to Harvard Business School. At JPL, Light used his undergraduate engineering physics training to lead a space-mission analysis team, an experience that convinced him that he needed more management skills. By his own recollection, he was virtually "clueless" about the very special place to which he was heading.

His application to the MBA Program caught the attention of Managerial Economics professor Howard Raiffa, "who pulled my application aside and asked whether I'd like to get a doctorate instead," recalls Light. After discussions during a visit to the campus, Light agreed to enter a new doctoral program in decision and control theory, a joint program between HBS and Harvard's Economics and Applied Mathematics Departments. "The underlying logic of much of decision and control theory was similar to the underlying structure of how we at JPL would design trajectories and track and control a spacecraft," says Light. "So intellectually, though this doctoral program was in a business school, it included some coursework similar to what I had been doing at JPL."

As his doctoral work progressed, Light became "more and more interested in the Business School side of the joint program." He found mentors in Raiffa and finance professor Eli Shapiro, who encouraged Light's growing fascination with markets and investment. In addition, he worked half-time with a Boston-based management consulting firm on the strategy problems of several important corporate clients. He soon decided to focus his full attention on HBS. As the first graduate of the joint doctoral program in the winter of 1969-70, he joined the HBS faculty.
[Full Article]

Stanford going younger for China applicants

2006-10-17T08:19:00.000-07:00

Full Article
BEIJING, Oct.17 -- Stanford Graduate School of Business has lowered its age requirement for Chinese applicants, and will now start receiving undergraduate applications, Oriental Morning Post said today.

Stanford's new policy was announced on Friday in Shanghai, following the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, which said a short time ago that they greatly encourage Chinese applicants with less than two years of work experience.

Seda Mansour, a vice director with the Stanford business school's recruitment office, said the school focused more on an applicants quality of work experience rather than the length of work period.

"Our school welcomes undergraduate applicants with outstanding experience," Mansour said. But they have to finish their college education before they go to Stanford.

Mansour brought the latest individualized courses to Shanghai. In the new schedule, each class has 15 students, rather than the original 40 to 50 students. The school has also hired more experienced professors, with the total number increasing by 5 percent to 10 percent.

The new course includes more international exchanges and focuses on developing students' leadership and communication skills.

Meanwhile, the school will offer scholarships equal to one third of the tuition fee and student loans for the remainder.

"The school will pay off the loans of students from developing countries as long as they go back to serve their home countries after finishing their studies in the United States," Mansour said.

(Source: Shanghai Daily)

MIT Sloan School Dean to step down

2006-10-16T20:14:00.000-07:00

Full Article
Richard Schmalensee, dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management, is to step down at the end of the academic year. A faculty member since 1977, Prof Schmalensee will return to teaching and research.

Since taking the helm in 1998, he has helped raise $220m and was the driving force behind the merger of two of the school’s programmes – the Sloan masters programme and the management of technology programme – to form the MIT Sloan Fellows programme in innovation and global leadership.

He has overseen the creation of the Global Leadership Lab and the MIT Leadership Center.

“With the new building set for ground-breaking, and a lot of positive changes in place, the end of this academic year is a natural time for transition,” Prof Schmalensee said.

“I still have a lot of work to get done between now and June 30, so I don’t really have time for any major reflection. But I do believe I’ll be leaving Sloan strong and well positioned to play a major leadership role in the next wave of innovation in management education.”

www.mitsloan.mit.edu/

Skaug becomes CCL chairman

The Center for Creative Leadership, the non-profit educational institution based in North Carolina, has named Ingar Skaug as chairman of the board of governors.

Mr Skaug, group chief executive of the shipping company Wilh. Wilhelmsen, replaces Thomas Hearn, president of Wake Forest University, North Carolina, on the CCL board.

www.ccl.org/

Business school body names chief

The Association of Business Schools, the representative body for UK business schools, has named Michael Osbaldeston as its next chairman.

Prof Osbaldeston, director of the Cranfield School of Management, will hold the position for two years. He succeeds Arthur Francis, dean of Bradford University School of Management.

www.the-abs.org.uk

MBA4Success: Campus Briefings

2006-10-16T20:11:00.000-07:00

Campus Briefings at a Glance
CEU-Budapest Appoints New Dean
CEU Business School located in the Hungarian capital of Budapest has appointed Adam Teratik, acting dean since the departure of Ferc Partos. Mr. Teratik is the former regional head of Ernst & Young professional services. He is currently focusing on a 5-year business plan to increase the capabilities and brand recognition of his institution.

"I will be examining carefully how we can ensure further efficient expansion of the school without adding too much pressure to staff and faculty."

Manchester Business School opens in Dubai
MBS Worldwide recently opened its new centre in Dubai with much success. The programme serves +100 students, who are studying on 3 MBS programmes: construction managers, finance professionals, and engineers. The MBA degree is awarded to all participants. This is the third MBA centre run by Manchester; the others are in Singapore and Hong Kong. Randa Bessio directs the Middle East region. *last-change*

Fashion & Luxury take centre stage in France and China
Contrary to common knowledge, fashion and luxury are not just about glamour and rapid earnings. This is an extremely complex business, which thrives on managing creative talent, permanent innovation, and a permanent search for capable management with vision.

Three major institutions have put together an advanced management program in Fashion & Luxury, which will start this September 2006. The institutions involved are: Tsinghua University, the Institut Francais de la Mode, and HEC-Paris. The new programme will focus on the following key areas:

Globalisation and Innovation, Product Strategy, Communication & Retail, Value Chain and Business Models, Brand management, Luxury & Fashion Culture.

The courses are to be delivered by experts from HEC-Paris, Tsinghua SEM, and IFM. Participants will be international and constitute corporate leaders and high potential managers. The programme was officially launched in April 2006 with + 200 participants from China, France, and other countries. Invited speakers were world-renowned and included the Gucci Group, LVMH, Modern Media Group amongst others.

The focus of the forth-coming programme is to better develop knowledge of current practices in international management. The partnership has the backing of major corporate groups and constituent government authorities in France and China.

Wharton Global and Spanish schools join forces
Wharton's Global Family Alliance, IESE Business School and IEF, Spain's Family Enterprise Institute have signed a four-year agreement to work together on family business research projects. These institutions have a shared commitment to promoting the importance of family business and the key role they play in the growth of the world economy.

"Combining our resources will create a formidable knowledge base that will prove beneficial not only to family firms, but to the communities in which they are invested", stated Raphael Amit, chairman of the Wharton GFA executive committee.

Tuck's Career Development Office Gets Top Marks
The class of 2005 saw average total compensation of almost $150,000 reflecting more than a 30% increase over the past two years. Across the board, companies are recruiting aggressively. This strong market demand will likely exert pressure to increase compensation. With over 600 companies recruiting, key recruiters were Apple, Novartis, and Deutsche Bank. Fifty consulting firms hired Tuck graduates and 10% of the graduates joined private equity firms and investment banks.

Tuck Career Development Office predicts that the trend is upward for those people interested in strategy consulting, investment banking, private equity and other key sectors. 96% of all graduates looking for a job had at least one offer by the summer. Similarly trends are expected according to Richard McNulty, director of the CDO for the past three years.

Smith School wins accolades for executive education
Executive Education at the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland has come of age. The programme was launched in 2001 and was recently ranked by the Financial Times and other media for its distinctive approach to designing customised management programme. The programme provides a multidisciplinary curriculum that tackles the key issues of value creation and organisational effectiveness. Ranked No.4 by the FT in the category 'value for money', the school serves leading multinationals such as Lockheed Martin, Hughes Network Systems, Northrop Grumman and others.

"Our executive education programmes are of the same calibre as our top-ranked MBA and undergraduate programme", said Howard Frank, the current dean of the school, What is also clear is the high degree of satisfaction that our corporate clients and participants feel on the return on investment, the school's involvement in creating a programme that is custom-tailed to their needs and - the highest compliment- that they can't wait to come back".'

The school has an excellent reputation and recently is gaining more international praise for its management education and research for the digital economy

Ivey features cross-enterprise leadership
The Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario has launched a new programme in Cross-Enterprise Leadership, according to Hussein Waheedi, a Canadian correspondent for Whitefield Consulting Worldwide.

"The school is a pioneer in this sector and has developed a learning approach, which is focus based, cross-functional, experiential, and action oriented. They have developed a case method, which is distinct from HBS. What I discovered from my investigations is that students are immersed in real-world problem solving where flexibility and creativity are valued.

Managers today understand that that Globalisation, Consolidation, and Technology do not fit into neat boxes with ready-made solutions. Leaders must leverage change to deliver product and service excellence. The Ivey programme trains future business leaders to do just that. By spanning an entire organisation it is possible to see how decisions are made and to take decisive action. With a top-notch faculty, potential business students should seriously evaluate one of Canada's leading MBA programmes.

Stern (NYU) turns to 'live' cases
The study of luxury retailers is hot for many prospective MBAs. The subject is glamorous and attracts many candidates who would like to work for one of the major groups such as LVMH. At Stern this year, a unique approach was implemented during one of the offered courses in business strategy. Students went onsite to investigate the mechanics of luxury retailing at Barneys, a recognisable name brand for fashion conscious New Yorkers and Americans.

What made the study worthwhile were the unique conditions of the panel exchange and the quality of the participants. MBA students had the benefit to hear from the principal actors, which included a panel of Barneys executives: Kevin Dyson, Senior Vice President; Steven Feldman, Chief Financial Officer, and Shelly Greenhaus, President, Whippoorwill Associates one of the firms credited with turning around this institution.

Deputy Dean Russell Winer moderated the discussion. A wide range of topics were addressed such as the roots of a family run organisation, overcoming bankruptcy, creating a stable financial environment, and finally, how to further exploit the brand equity.

During the discussion, Steven Feldman commented on Barneys' recent expansion to Boston: "We are extremely deliberate about where we open Barneys stores, and how many we open. It is important for us to keep the essence of Barneys and maintain the integrity of the brand".

Kevin Dyson, who has been with this institution during its trials, remarked on how important it was to keep the focus on the customer; while Shelly Greenhaus added why Barneys was an attractive acquisition.

In concert with Stern's commitment to suing New York City as a laboratory for learning, the Barneys case is one of several New York case studies the school has integrated into the curriculum. During the MBA programme, students also have the chance to study 'live' cases on the Metropolitan Opera and the Mets baseball franchise.

Conference on Emerging Markets at Darden
March 28-29, Darden will host the 5th annual conference on, "The Financing of Corporations in Emerging Markets" with the World Bank to be held at the bank's HQ in Washington, D.C.
The Issues to be highlighted are practices surrounding the financing of corporations in emerging countries such as the challenges and opportunities, which face firms to access capital on domestic and international markets. Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate, will deliver the keynote address at the March 29 luncheon. The will be opened by the current dean, Paul Bruner, a committed believer in these developments.

"Investing in emerging markets is a powerful instrument for social change", Bruner says, adding "By funding and sharing the best practices in business, we stand to improve the efficiency of investing in emerging markets. As efficiency rises, the well-being of millions trapped in poverty is bound to rise, too".

The lofty goals of the conference are geared to bring practioners and scholars together for a robust exchange of ideas and to generate serious and practical results and research on these timely issues. The following topics will be addressed at this event:

Institutions and governance
Political economy and internationalisation
Cross-listing
Capital structure
Institutional environment
To attend the conference, please contact: http://www.darden.virginia.edu/em/

Business Schools tap their inner strengths
Partnerships with other academic institutions have been the sine quo non for years. Business schools are expanding their global reach and even sharing each other's academic strengths. The Wharton-INSEAD Alliance quickly comes to mind as well as that timely dual degree programme offered by HEC and NYU Stern. A rediscovered trend is for a business school to build interdisciplinary links within its own institution. Part of the reason RSM Erasmus University is gaining much publicity lately is due to this strategic manoeuvre.
Across the Atlantic, The Sloan School of Management at MIT are old hands at this game. As Richard Schmalensee, dean at Sloan recently stated: "We're part of an incredible university. How dumb would we be not to take advantage of that?"

As most people are aware, MIT has been at the forefront in pushing diverse disciples to work together across departments. Demand from the students is keen and has the blessing of the dean. For example, the university's $50k entrepreneurship competition has been a university wide affair since it was launched in 1990. What is strange is that MIT was the exception rather than the rule. In the last 20 years, most business schools have branded themselves separately, claiming their independence from the university's to which they belong. Even Harvard and Stanford today are encouraging their students to profit from the rich resources across departments and disciplines on campus such as philosophy, law, and politics.

"Complexity of the business world is the driving force", claims Anthony Hopwood, dean of the Said Business School at Oxford, "Twenty years ago managers didn't need to know about science and technology, but now these subjects permeate every aspect of business. A modern business school has to have access to know-how on science, regulation, policy and government. Today MBAs need seamless access in a joined-up world".

Columbia's dean, Glen Hubbard with his entrepreneurial mind-set has been encouraging faculty members to increase the number of joint academic appointments with other schools in the university and boosting faculty to conduct joint research.

"I like to see research aimed at problems, not disciplines… One of the reasons that I am passionate about this is that if you want a university to come closer to the outside world, you need to come closer to other departments".

Even Harvard Business School is jumping on the bandwagon. Often accused of being insular, the business school is stepping-up its ties with other university departments. The school already offers joint degrees with the Kennedy School of Government and Law School. Since last semester, it began a dual degree programme with the Medical School. Further cooperation is now in place with the School of Education and they are currently setting up a healthcare initiative.

LBS launches Centre for Corporate Governance
This past week London business launched a Centre for Corporate Governance to lead international thinking and serve the needs of business and policy makers alike.

The new Centre is backed by Oracle, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer and Prudential, and aims to move governance practices beyond mere regulatory compliance towards providing independent research and recommendations of value to policy makers, corporations, investors and other interest groups.

Combining cross-disciplinary research designed to influence the corporate governance debate and focused on the needs of practioners, the Centre will be chaired Professor Julian Franks and be based at the School. It will examine contentious issues surrounding corporate governance, including shareholder activism, measuring CEO and board effectiveness, valuing corporate social responsibility, and the new demands on boards and how information management and systems can improve these.

BNP Paribas support Hedge Fund Centre at LBS
BNP Paribas is pleased to announce it is to fund London Business School's Centre for Hedge Fund Research and Education for three academic years to September 2008. This is the first time that BNP Paribas has funded a major initiative at London Business School.

The Centre will be renamed the BNP Paribas Hedge Fund Centre. It will continue to be led under the academic direction of Dr. Narayan Naik, Associate Professor of Finance at LBS. Since its establishment in 2001, the Centre has conducted research into the nature of risks taken by hedge funds in their trading strategies, a topic of particular interest to regulators as well as to potential investors. Among other topics, it also investigated the relationship between the ability of funds to attract new money on the one hand, and relative performance incentive fees, fund size and age, and capacity constraints on the other.

Healthcare MBA at Yale SOM
Yale School of Management has recently launched a new course for healthcare executives. The leadership in healthcare MBA combines faculty from the schools of medicine, public health and management to teach on the part-time, 22-month programme. Applicants must have a minimum of seven years' work experience. The first class begins July 2006.

Joint MBA/PhD
In addition, the school announced a joint MBA/PhD with the Yale School of Arts and Sciences. Students who follow the programme will finish in 7 years of combined studies.
"This programme allows students to combine the depth of inquiry associated with a PhD programme with the breadth of knowledge and skill development associated with an MBA", states Joel Podolny, dean of Yale SOM. The school is currently accepting applications for the academic year 2006-2007.

Financial Strategy diploma launched at Said
Said Business School is to offer a diploma in financial strategy, supported by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales.
The masters-level course will cover organizational and marketing development, international business and information management. It will represent 20 per cent of an MBA in content.

Wilson Centre for Social Entrepreneurship
Pace University in New York will soon launch the Wilson Centre for Social Entrepreneurship thanks to a generous donation by Helen and Grant Wilson of $5million. It will offer research, training and advice for non-profit organizations, and enhance Pace's entrepreneurship course offerings to future students.

Melbourne Business School offers joint legal degree
Melbourne Business School has teamed up with Melbourne Law School to deliver a new degree: the Juris Doctor/MBA. The three-year programme will be available to lawyers with civil law degrees and professionals from other business practices. The degree will provide a legal education and an opportunity to diversify managerial skills. The first intake begins in January 2006.

Copenhagen joins European MBA consortium
The European MBA consortium has welcomed Copenhagen Business School. Originally founded by Mannheim Business School in Germany, the group also includes Warwick Business School (UK), ESSEC (France).

Participants at any of the schools can move from campus to campus to get a more innovative view of European business practices. Starting next year, Copenhagen students enrolled in the European MBA programme will be entitled to spend two of their study terms with partners.

ESC Grenoble goes to Tbilisi
Grenoble Graduate School of Business in France is launching an MBA programme next month in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia. The programme has 14 participants and the organizers are hoping for more than 20 by the starting date.

In the last few years, ESC Grenoble has developed programmes with institutions in countries where it has identified a large growth potential in countries with needs for further business education such as Moldova, Russia, Malta, Serbia, Montenegro, and China. The ESC -Grenoble faculty delivers courses on site to local students.

Ashridge Business School Appoints New Representative in India
Ashridge recently announced that it has appointed Dr. Shona Purdy to represent its institution in India. Her mission will be to spread the brand awareness of how Ashridge can enhance the skills of India's future business leaders. She will be based in New Delhi.

As an associate faculty member, she is keen on her new appointment:

" Organisations are becoming more international and Ashridge is exercising a more dominant role in developing managers to the highest standards to meet today's complex business challenges. The institute offers a variety of options such as the MBA and tailored shorter programmes for executives and companies.

It is my belief that the uniqueness of the school is that we emphasize leadership and analytical management skills. Both are necessary to make things happen."

Prior to her joining Ashridge, Dr. Purdy worked for Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd. in New Delhi. Her understanding of India makes her a real plum for Ashridge in addition to her significant experience in management consulting. The wealth of her experience should help Ashridge increase the number of Indian managers the school will recruit.

Audencia Targets Professional Experience
A recent analysis of the October 2005 class shows that Audencia Nantes is attracting a more mature age group of professionals. On average, participants have at least ten years of experience. Officials at the school state this is the most 'executive' class the programme has handled since its inception in 1984.

Normal recruitment requirements stipulate that only three years of expertise is needed to be able to apply to the full-time MBA programme. Students who graduated in 2005 had on average seven years in the field before beginning their studies, thus raising the level of interaction and intellectual stimulation as well as shared experience on case work.

The 2006 Class statistics confirm this trend. Such participants would not be out of place on an executive MBA programme. In addition to experience, the profile of the new class boosts that 70% are +30 years of age; while 18% are +40 years old. According to Andrew Taylor, attracting mature candidates has been one of the principal targets of Audencia, and he is quite pleased with the results.

International students have also been on the rise. The current ratio is 2:1 in favour of non-French professionals. Recent participants include members from Russia, Chile, Iran, and the Philippines. The school's recent accreditation should also boost the attractiveness of the MBA programme.

One explanation for the make-up of this year's intake is Audencia MBA's stress on business development. The programme aims primarily to equip managers with the tools and knowledge needed to act as in-company entrepreneurs capable of setting up and running business activity within new countries or markets.

Bidault at the helm of ESMT
The European School of Management and Technology appointed Francis Bidault to head its new MBA programme. EMST will welcome its first MBA cohorts in January 2006 in Berlin.

The school was founded in 2002 by 25 leading German companies and associates with the aim of building an outstanding first class business school in Germany. Francis Bidault is formerly from the Theseus International Institute in France.

Audencia Nantes Internationalises Further
Audencia Nantes is one of Europe's fastest growing business schools and is now beginning to receive the acclaim that it deserves. It is proving itself adept at pulling itself out of the traditional pack of French business schools, and putting itself on track to become one of the leading MBA programmes in Europe.

As part of its mission apart from academic excellence, Audencia has just signed agreements with City University (London) and Hong Kong and Korea University Business School (Seoul). The Association of MBAs, AACSB, and Equis accredit the programme. For MBA candidates contemplating study in France and seek a school with 67 overseas partnerships, Audencia Nantes deserves serious consideration.

Babson and HEC strike a deal
HEC Paris and Babson College announced a strategic partnership. The partnership will involve faculty exchange, student collaboration, and research projects. Since both schools are major players in delivering courses on entrepreneurship, this can only boost the depth of HEC in entrepreneurship, particularly in Europe.

Babson College has been one of the key recognized leaders in entrepreneurship in the USA. Within the Executive Education division, the two schools will establish joint-courses, and probably put into play distance-learning models to increase their cross-Atlantic partnership.

IEDC-Bled receives accreditation
Slovenia's IEDC-Bled School of Management was awarded the the UK based accreditation by the Association of MBAs. The current dean, Dancia Puig, is pleased recognizing that this will now allow the school to further internationalise its MBA program and begin to attract more qualified candidates from Eastern and Central Europe.

HEC Bolsters European Ties
The Associate Dean of HEC-Paris, Michel Raimbault helped to form a consortium with four of Europe's leading business schools. He states, "These are more than just joint-degree programmes. Students spend the first year of their Masters within their original institution. On completing the programs, students will receive two Masters of Science degrees from HEC and the other university.
The programme officially begins in September 2005. Twenty selected HEC students will be able to choose from 4 partners: Erasmus (Rotterdam), ESADE (Barcelona, Madrid), St. Gallen (Switzerland), and Bocconi (Milan). Selection will be based on academic performance, motivation, and linguistic skills. In return, HEC will receive students from each partner institution.

The double degree programmes are designed to give students deeper hands-on multicultural experience and allow them to select two majors. "Holding two degrees from some of Europe's elite academic institutions is clearly an advantage." said Michel Raimbault.

New Opportunity for Hong Kong Students
Starting in 2007, the University of Hong Kong will send up to 60 MBA students per year in a collaborative exchange programme to London. HKU students will be entitled to take electives for a 10-week period at London Business School. HKU students will complete the core programme however, in China.
www.london.edu
www.hku.hk

Building Leadership Skills
The Centre for Excellence in Leadership, a college for managers in the learning and skill sector in the UK, has developed a leadership qualities framework, which is unique in education.
www.centreforexcellence.org.uk

Oxford Executive MBA Celebrates
This month saw a second intake of students at the school's new management degree programme. Internationalism is fundamental to the programme, which consists of 14 one-week modules taught over 21 months. Students will be taught at the Said Business School, although residentially based at Templeton.

Half the students in the new intake come from countries beyond Europe, including the USA, Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia. The Oxford Executive MBA has been designed to build management competence generally with particular emphasis on entrepreneurship and finance. Through its modular structure it aims to achieve the intensity of a full-time MBA but without massive interruption to participants working and family lives.
Contact: emba-enquiries@sbs.ox.ac.uk

Audencia Nantes Launches Executive MBA
Audencia Nantes School of Management unveiled its executive MBA programme this month. Completing its MBA portfolio, the 18-month part-time programme will be taught in Nantes on alternative Fridays and Saturdays. Participants will undertake a real project set by their company so that their knowledge can be applied, as it is required.
www.audencia.com

IESE programme incorporates more flexibility
Feedback last year propelled IESE Business School in Spain to revamp its advanced management program. New programme strengths now include flexibility, coaching, and soft skills. Personal coaching allows participants to pair with an IESE professor to gauge progress.
The advantage of these improvements allows participants to further develop softer leadership skills such as trust and genuine communication skills.
www.iese.edu

Ashridge launches new international management development programme
In conjunction with the European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD), Ashridge has started a new programme entitled, LINK (Learning - Innovation - Networking - Knowledge). The LINK programme focuses on practical needs of those people with responsibility for their organisations' management development. Run as part of the Ashridge open programme portfolio, it will start in May 2005.

Eric Cornuel, director general of EFMD, chose Ashridge for its excellence in three core areas of executive education, consulting, and research. Participants will be introduced to the standards, principles and best practice 'building blocks' of management development.

Phil Anderson, Ashridge Programme Director concludes: "The role of management development is pivotal in organizations. The LINK programme provides the people responsible for this important strategic resource with the tools and expertise to apply the latest management development thinking and learning."

The programme is due to run September 20-22, 2005.

Europe Needs More Entrepreneurship
More needs to be done if Europe is to meet the objectives set out by the Lisbon European Council Objective of making the region 'the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world'.

Even though entrepreneurship education has grown 61% over the last years, a recent report sponsored by the European Foundation for Management Development states that this subject remains primarily an elective. In addition, networks between faculty teaching entrepreneurship across Europe are limited.

Recommendations include the formalisation of entrepreneurship in the curriculum and establishing better links with business and entrepreneurs.

"European universities must play a key role in promoting entrepreneurship and innovation, helping students learn not just how to start, but also how to grow enterprises and across national boundaries", according to EFER founder, Bert Twaalfhoven.
www.efmd.be
www.efer.nl

Increasing MBA recruiting

2006-10-16T09:21:00.000-07:00

Clock Ticks, Bonus Ebbs for Recruits

By LOUISE STORY
Published: October 13, 2006

Some companies trying to attract M.B.A. students have been playing a version of beat the clock: offering bonuses that decline in value or disappear unless the student accepts the job by a certain date.

Mike Mergen for The New York Times
Stuart Chaffee attends Wharton.
Think of it as early admissions in the corporate recruitment world. The declining bonuses are a tactic this year largely in the finance and consulting industries, although other companies are using it as well.

The bonuses offered to the most promising summer interns, as much as $45,000 in some cases, will be cut in half or will be withdrawn if the students do not accept the job offers by an early deadline, typically the middle of October.

The clock is ticking. The students must decide if they sign on with their summer employer or skip the bonus, leaving them free to participate in on-campus interviews this fall.

“Given how competitive the recruiting environment is right now, we are seeing more of it than we saw three years ago,” said Sheryle Dirks, assistant dean and director of career management at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, where the number of companies signed up to recruit on campus is up 25 percent this fall. “It’s a good time to be looking for a job as an M.B.A.”

For the students who are certain they would like to work for their summer employer, the bonuses — sometimes also called incentive bonuses — are welcome. But for the students who are unsure, the bonuses add stress to their decision making.

“To all of us walking out of here with significant debt, $20,000 makes a big deal toward a comfortable second-year experience,” said Stuart Chaffee, a second-year student at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Mr. Chaffee worked at a consulting firm this summer that did not include declining bonuses in its job offers, which has made his decisions less stressful than it has been for others.

Many business schools ban so-called exploding job offers that require candidates to accept the job on the spot or lose the offer completely. Declining bonuses, however, are usually allowed because, though the bonus decreases or goes away, the job offer stays on the table.

Harvard Business School, on the other hand, does not allow declining bonuses.

“H.B.S. believes, and I agree, that students should not be making employment decisions based on undue pressure,” said Jana Pompadur Kierstead, director of M.B.A. career services at Harvard. “We don’t believe it makes for good decisions in the long run.”

Companies were reluctant to discuss declining bonuses and would not say how successful the bonuses are in luring students to make an early commitment.

“It gets into recruiting, which is, you know, a competitive sport, so to speak,” said John Campbell, a spokesman for Mercer Management Consulting, which offers the declining bonuses to students it wants to hire. “It’s a very competitive world out there for top students.”

Microsoft, another company that offers declining bonuses, said they were nothing unusual. “To attract the greatest talent, the company offers competitive salaries, sign-on bonuses and a strong benefits package," said Lou Gellos, a company spokesman.

Kraft has offered the bonuses for a couple of years. “It helps us manage our recruiting activity and staffing needs,” said Charlie Simpson, a spokesman for Kraft.

Companies that do not offer such bonuses criticized them as stressful for students and disruptive to the hiring market.

“In the last year or so, the M.B.A. market has started to shift from a second-year market to a first-year market,” said Julie Billingsley, a principal and manager of human resources at ZS Associates, a consulting firm. “There are fewer and fewer students looking during their second year. A lot of students take their summer offer.”

October traditionally has been peak recruiting season for many business jobs, but some business schools are finding that many students already have jobs by that time. At the Tuck Business School at Dartmouth College, for example, 80 percent of the students received job offers from their summer employers this year. Tuck expects that about 60 percent of those students will accept those offers, said Richard J. McNulty, director of career development at Tuck.

Other career directors and students at business schools say the declining bonuses make sense because they provide companies with greater knowledge about how many people they will need to recruit.

“The early-decision incentive bonus is really quite fair,” said Cibel Castillo, a second-year student at Wharton. “They give the student the equivalent amount that a company would spend if they had to come on campus and interview other candidates for that same intern’s position.”

Ms. Castillo added that the people she knew who accepted the bonuses probably would have accepted those jobs in any case — without the bonus.

One classmate, Grant Allen, said many of his friends believed that the money did not factor into their decisions. “The market’s hot, people know they have lots of options and they want to figure out what those options are,” Mr. Allen said. “They’re not being wooed away by 10 or 15 grand.”

New leader at INSEAD - Frank Brown

2006-10-16T09:19:00.000-07:00

Business schools choose deans like sports clubs select managers. Directional changes are meant to inspire new blood and vision, while harnessing the existing strengths catapult the institution to new heights in the rankings, enrollment and the fund raising sweepstakes.

This past summer the American accountant Frank Brown took over at INSEAD replacing Gabriel Hawawini, a product of the French education system. The greatest difference between Frank Brown and his predecessors is that he is a businessman and not an academic. In certain circles this is blasphemy. Mr. Brown does not have a doctoral degree beloved by the academic world and dare I say it, it does not have the treasured MBA degree.

What he does have, and a sure fire incentive to entrepreneurs is chutzpah and 26 years working in the commercial centre, most recently at PriceWaterhouseCoopers $3.5bn Advisory Services operating unit. He sees his corporate expertise essential to improve the INSEAD organisation and the process within the school. Anybody who has worked with such institutions as PwC, know that people at his level don't mess around and really mean business. Academics are just academics. This is not a pejorative statement but a point of fact that people in the field know to be true.

INSEAD will need to use his skills, particularly because they operate in Fontainebleau and Singapore and now to be the Middle East. As he states, "my role is connecting the dots". His attitude is contagious and exudes a 'steam ahead' attitude and has a clear global picture of what he wants INSAED to become.

"I'm really smitten with the place itself, the enthusiasm, the entrepreneurial spirit. You get the impression there is nothing you can't do if you put your mind to it. What do I wan t this place to be know for? The one thing that screams to me is leadership."

Mr. Brown's concept of leadership has been forged in the field of business practice not academia. He will therefore have a much more muscular approach. It should be anchored in a practical corporate setting.

"To me leadership means developing other people, leading by example. It 's about sharing authority, and accepting responsibility. One of the highest misnomers in leadership is that it is given. It isn't. It is earned.

Furthermore, Mr. Brown would like to distinguish two different brands: the MBA programme as an entity and the INSEAD brand as a separate entity.

"If you look at the MBA, what does it qualify for you? What happens over the past decade is that it has become less of a requirement. What we have to demonstrate is that it develops the next generation of leaders."

The corporate branding of INSEAD will require another strategy. Mr. Brown understands this and will use his strength to better promote the school in the USA where he believes the qualities of this internationally focused school are largely unknown. American corporations are basically unaware of INSEAD's diversity and that it graduates 900 professionals every year as much as HBS and Wharton combined.

He stipulates that promotion should be 'through word of mouth not a $50m advertising budget. Word of mouth is best. We have to talk to people, the right people. It's hard work. However, we've not had a person with broad business experience trying to do that. It happened to be something I enjoy doing. We've just to focus on doing more of the same."

Mr. Brown is also keen to further promote. He believes that firms planning to enter the Chinese market should see INSEAD deep expertise in Asian economies as a resource and a bridge. Promoting executive education at INSEAD is particularly significant as this short non-degree programmes account for up to 45% of the business school's revenues.

For anyone who has doubts on his abilities, they should think twice. First, he has bee with the school since 2000 in an advisory role. He has been on the Board since 2005 and understands the culture and strengths of his institution. He has already re-organised the top management team. Now he is embarking on fundraising. He acknowledges that this is more challenging in Europe than in the USA.

"We have a lot of alumni in Europe who have been very generous, but the difference between Europe and USA is that giving is not a natural European reflex."

At the moment INSEAD has raised $88.7m, which give s the school an annual income of +$3m. The best way to raise money, he says is to 'appeal to the heartstrings".

All and all, it will be exciting to see which direction Mr. Brown takes this noble academic institution in its relentless drive to expand the scope, power, and influence of one of Europe's leading business schools.

Demand for MBA's in London Growing

2006-10-16T09:18:00.000-07:00

London has always been a mecca for the business world's most talented MBA graduates, and recent trends indicate that graduates feel that there are superb opportunities citing to colleagues that the 'streets are paved with gold'. London has always scored high in preference among MBA graduates. Particularly in finance, larger numbers are targeting the City with its fast-paced lifestyle and telephone number salaries. For example, starting salaries for recent graduates of London Business School going into finance have reported $102k + signing bonuses. IESE Business School in Barcelona has released similar statistics: $ 125k. According to Alex Herrara, director of career services at IESE, "For us London is giving the highest salaries".

Penny Bradley Williams, head of professional assessment at WCW spoke out at the firm's Paris offices to a concerned group of new applicants: "When we ascertain what future candidates are seeking, we have seen a quantum leap in the number of people who want to further build their careers in London. When asked why, the answer is loud and clear: high salaries and opportunities. Certain people will even choose an MBA programme on the basis of where it is located because it implies strong local networks and connections. London is not just a European centre for business it is one of global capitals."

South of Paris at INSEAD, Claire Lecoq said: "This has also been a spectacular year for recruitment". As the director for MBA career services she knows: "It has been an incredible year for recruitment, particularly in finance, which increased by 10%, driven by London."

The investment banking sector has always been a major draw for MBAs Alison Trauttmansdorf, head of graduate recruitment at Goldman Sachs confirmed reports received from across the industry: "MBA hiring is up on average in the industry by 30-59 per cent in comparison with last year". Although Goldman recruits for all its major European bases, London by far, leads the pack.

Fei Long, a WCW correspondent reported from London that "the MBA is one of the few times in the life of professionals, when they can truly change the course of their life. For many people finance is a golden opportunity. It gives graduates a salary most people can only dream of while at the same time opens other career options down the line. People thrive on the challenge and the energy usually chooses finance and management consultancy.

Another interesting trend is the interest that a number of American graduates, who wants to live and work in London. At Columbia Business School in New York, the career services department reported that London is a favourite of graduates. Regina Resnick, at Columbia stated that the European market is driven by an upsurge in investment banking recruitment. There has also been a return to management consulting. At a recent consulting forum at the school 22 firms attended trying to attract interested parties.

Sheryle Dirks at Duke University's Fuqua School of Management supports this trend: "Much is driven by the resurgence in consultancy. The median salary for those graduating from Duke and moving into consulting is $110k although some alumni are earning $135k.

At Bain & Company, David Sanderson, head of global recruiting says Bain increased its recruitment of MBAs by 20% last year and expects to do the same again this year. This means that management consulting is aggressively recruiting more. If this seems like a return to the glory period of 1996-2000, it certainly appears that way.

In line with this development is another aspect from the 'glory days': Students are now becoming more choosy and turning down offers until they can secure something, which best corresponds to their real career objectives.

"Students are feeling a little more confident and walking away from jobs that are not a fit", says Diane Morgan, head of careers at LBS. Salary increases are apparent on both sides of the Atlantic.

Even better news for new MBAs and future candidates is the greater range of jobs on offer. While finance and management consulting have re-established themselves as the leaders, there is also increased interest in industry. Firms such as Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are favourites. The firms have sex appeal among the graduates and are heavily recruiting across campuses in the USA.

As Fei Long stipulated in London, "Now is really the best time to apply to one of the top MBA programmes in many years".
Full Article

Where to go? Ask the recruiters

2006-10-16T08:40:00.000-07:00

(CNN) -- The main objective of most people studying for an MBA is to improve their job prospects.

So, when deciding which business school to target, who better to ask than the recruiters?

That is the rationale behind the newly-released Wall Street Journal/Harris Interactive ranking of business schools, which is compiled on the ratings of more than 4,000 corporate MBA recruiters.

As well as ranking schools, the survey provides a series of other nuggets of information for students and institutions alike -- for example that recruiters see honesty as the most important leadership characteristic, followed by accomplishing goals, working in a team and inspiring others.

"Our study provides schools with an in-depth understanding of recruiter perceptions towards business school talent, and the characteristics they consider most important when hiring graduates," said Beth Forbes of Harris.

"Over the six years that we've conducted the business schools study, we have seen many schools use the results to help them strengthen their position in the marketplace."

The study puts some familiar heavyweight names at the top of the list, but also highlights the sterling work done in some lesser-known institutions.

The survey gives three separate rankings -- for national US business schools, regional US schools and international ones.

Of the 19 national MBA programs assessed -- many of which share the same blue chip recruiters in the eastern United States -- University of Michigan's Ross School of Business in Ann Arbor, Michigan, ranked top again.

Michigan edged out fellow top five members Dartmouth College, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia University and Berkeley, thanks to recruiters' top ratings for its students' ability to work well within teams, analytical and problem-solving skills and their overall well-roundedness.

The program was also praised for an emphasis on practical experience, meaning employers are confident Michigan graduates can connect theory with practice.
Closer to home

The separate ranking of 51 regional schools, which assessed feedback from recruiters who generally work within a network of schools that are geographically close, threw up some lesser-known names.

Top spot went to Thunderbird's Garvin School of Management in Glendale, Arizona, with students highly rated for international knowledge and experience, well-roundedness, ability to work well within teams, strategic thinking and work ethic.

The next four spots were taken respectively by Ohio State University, Brigham Young University in Utah, Purdue University in Indiana and Michigan State.

On average, the regional programs tend to receive more positive ratings than national schools, and also, unsurprisingly, enjoy generally closer relationships with their recruiters.

A total of 24 international schools were assessed by recruiters; nine from the United States, nine in Europe, three Canadian and three Latin American.

ESADE, in Barcelona Spain, was ranked first, receiving praise for its socially responsible ethos among other things. Its students come from around 30 countries, only a quarter of them from Spain.

The next four spots were taken by the Swiss-based IMD, Mexico's IPADE, London Business School and then Thunderbird again, which packs students from 50 countries into its campus.

The poll saw 4,125 MBA recruiters who hire full-time business school graduates rate schools with which they had recent experience. In all , more than 5,500 ratings were received, and schools needed a minimum of 20 to feature in a list.

Another highlight on how top business schools woo younger students

2006-10-16T08:37:00.000-07:00

Top business schools woo younger students
von Rebecca Knight (Boston)
Competition from law and public policy drives MBA programmes to relax expectations of work experience. Applications to full-time MBA programmes plummeted during the late-1990s internet boom.

Top US business schools are recruiting younger, less experienced candidates in an effort to boost applications and head off competition for the best students from other graduate programmes such as law and public policy. In an attempt to lure new students, leading business schools - including Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago and Wharton - have moved away from the unofficial admissions prerequisite of four years' work experience and instead have set their sights on recent college graduates and so-called "early career" professionals with only a couple years of work under their belt.

"There has been an assumption that to apply to an MBA programme with less than five years' work experience was a waste of time, and that's not true any more," said Rosemaria Martinelli, associate dean of student recruitment and admissions at University of Chicago School of Business. "Schools want to attract the right students when they're ready."

Applications to full-time MBA programmes plummeted during the late-1990s internet boom. While applications have rebounded over the past couple of years, they are still not at the levels they were prior to the technology bubble, according to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, the industry body. Meanwhile, applications to law schools have risen 16 per cent in the past five years, according to the Law School Admission Council. Applications to public policy schools have also increased. Both these graduate programmes tend to require less work experience and are therefore inclined to admit a large portion of new graduates.

Business school admissions officers said the new drive to attract younger students was in part the result of a realisation that they had inadvertently limited their applicant pool by requiring several years' work experience. Talented students who might otherwise have gone to business school instead opted for a law or policy degree because they were intimidated by the expectation of work experience. Admissions officers also said they had become more mindful of the various age-related life choices that young people - particularly woman - faced.

Questions about when to go full throttle on a career and when to start a family are all part of the graduate school equation, according to Thomas Caleel, the director of admissions and financial aid at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. "We've come to understand that it's a much different life choice for a woman to get her MBA at age 23 versus 28," he said.

So far, efforts to attract younger students are paying off. The incoming crop of students at leading US business schools is younger and less professionally seasoned than in years past. At Stanford, for instance, the average number of years' work experience for the incoming class is 3.8 years, compared with an average of five years in 2001. About a dozen students in the class of 370 are straight from university. At MIT's Sloan School of Business, the average age of MBA candidates has been steady at 28 for many years but this year fell to 27. At Wharton, where there had been a de facto admissions policy of no fewer than four years' work experience, 3 per cent of this year's class of 800 students have less than two years' work experience.

The class also has 10 students who are new college graduates. Harvard Business School has also had success in encouraging younger applicants by doing away with the $235 standard application fee. At the University of Chicago, roughly 10 per cent of the incoming class have less than three years' work experience under their belt, compared with 2 per cent five years ago. "I'd like to get it up to 20 per cent," said Ms Martinelli