MBA News
A collection of news items from MBA programs and about the business school admissions process.
Stanford Graduate School of Business Webinar Offers Tips for Applicants to New MS Computer Science/MBA Joint Degree
The Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) announced this past spring that it will offer a new MS Computer Science (MSCS)/MBA joint degree program, and a recent webinar provides tips for prospective applicants looking to learn more about the program and its application requirements.
The webinar begins with Mary Oleksy, who oversees the joint and dual degree programs for the GSB, outlining some basics. “The purpose of this degree program is going to be to provide an opportunity for computer scientists to develop necessary skills to be managers and entrepreneurs, and for technologically inclined business students to gain a solid background in Computer Science by combining these two degrees into a really focused and intentional approach,” she says.
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U.S. News Ranks 10 Full-Time MBA Programs That Lead to Highest Student Debt
As part of its Short List series, U.S. News & World Report today took a closer look at the student debt load incurred by full-time MBA students graduating from top business school programs. According to data provided by schools as part of its annual ranking, U.S. News found that full-time MBA graduates in 2012 emerged with an average of $49,619 in debt. At the 10 schools where graduates incurred the most student debt, the average per student was $97,154.
Graduates of New York University’s Stern School of Business top the list in terms of average debt. There, the average graduate has a debt load of $105,782. Six figure debt is also the norm for graduates from the University of Virginia's Darden Graduate School of Business Administration, the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, U.S. News reports.
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Cornell’s Johnson School to Offer New One-Year MBA Program in New York City
Cornell University’s Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management today announced that it will offer a one-year, full-time MBA program on a new Cornell NYC Tech campus on Manhattan’s Governors Island. The program’s first class will begin in May 2014.
“The MBA degree on the Cornell NYC Tech campus is a unique opportunity for us to continue an established history of innovating graduate business education, both in content and pedagogy,” Johnson Dean Soumitra Dutta said in a statement. “We’re creating a program that addresses the fact that technology has changed the way business is done. It’s not about adding technology courses to an existing MBA, but about developing a new education and learning experience for business leaders in the digital economy.”
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Tuition Climbs at UM’s Ross School of Business, Remains Flat in UC System
Last month, the Board of Regents at the University of Michigan approved a $1,100 increase per term for its full-time MBA program at the Ross School of Business. The tuition increase, which will take effect in the fall, represents a 4.4 percent rise for in-state students and a 4 percent rise for out-of-state students. Meanwhile, the Board of Regents for the University of California system earlier this week approved a proposal that rules out tuition hikes for that system’s graduate business schools, at least for this year.
As reported by Bloomberg BusinessWeek on June 21st, two members of the six-person board at the University of Michigan voted against the tuition hike. “The continued raising of tuition is not sustainable,” Regent Denise Ilitch said in a statement. “If we were as good at raising revenue streams as we are at raising tuition, our students would be far better off.”
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Tuck Alumni Give Record-Setting $6.3 Million in 2013
For the third year in a row, more than 70 percent of alumni contributed to the Tuck Annual Giving campaign at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, raising a record $6.3 million in the last fiscal year. The participation rate is nearly triple the average participation rate of nine peer business schools, Tuck reports. Achieving the 70 percent rate also triggered a $50,000 gift from an anonymous donor last month.
“The generosity of our alumni is unrivaled and enables us to provide a truly transformational experience to each and every one of our students,” Tuck Dean Paul Danos said in a statement. The funds raised provide about 8 percent of the school’s annual operating revenues and direct support for innovation, Tuck reports.
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Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management Adds New Courses on Big Data
Big data matters in today’s business world as never before. Recognizing this, Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management is working to establish a strong reputation in data analytics. This fall, as part of its MBA curriculum, Kellogg will offer four new courses designed to help prepare students to interpret big data and put it to work for their organizations.
"We're moving into a world where managers have to be conversant in analytics and in information technology,” Kellogg marketing professor Florian Zettelmeyer says. In particular, he notes, executives need to get better at learning how to establish analytics competence across all areas of an organization.
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Wharton School Receives Large Gift to Permanently Endow Innovation Management Institute
How can decision-makers across industries best manage the risks and rewards of innovation? Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School have been studying that subject for years, and a recent major alumni gift will permanently endow an innovation management institute where that work will continue and expand, the school announced this week.
An earlier gift from Wharton alumnus William L. Mack, W’61, and his wife, Phyllis, established the Mack Center for Technological Innovation in 2001, and the couple’s 2013 gift has now transformed the center into the Mack Institute for Innovation Management, Wharton announced today. William Mack, a renowned global real estate and asset manager, was the founder and chairman of AREA Property Partners and today serves as chair of the Mack-Cali Realty Corporation board of directors and the Wharton Board of Overseers.
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McDonough School of Business, Georgetown Entrepreneurship Initiative Collaborate on Summer StartUp Program
For the second year in a row, the Georgetown Entrepreneurship Initiative and the McDonough School of Business are partnering to help teams of current students and alumni kick-start business plans over the summer. Called Summer StartUp, the program is designed to help entrepreneurial students and recent alumni do just that – to spend two months over the summer developing business plans and initiative their own businesses.
McDonough and the Georgetown Entrepreneurship Initiative collaborate to give participating students working space as well as great networking opportunities and exposure to potential business investors. This year, Summer StartUp will include 15 student ventures drawn from across the university.
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Tuck School of Business Welcomes BlackRock Executive as Senior Fellow
Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business this month welcomed a top BlackRock Investment Institute executive as a senior fellow at its Center for Global Business and Government, the school announced last week. Peter Fisher, BlackRock senior director and a former top Treasury Department official, joined Tuck on July 1st. He will hold the position while continuing his work with BlackRock.
At Tuck, Fisher will work with the center to build on Tuck’s connections to experts in the private and public sectors. He will also oversee research and analysis projects conducted by MBA students on topics at the intersection of business and government, and he will expand opportunities for Tuck MBA students and alumni who are interested in areas such as financial markets, public finance and monetary policy.
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Northwestern’s Kellogg School Names New Senior Fellow for its Kellogg Markets and Customers Initiative
Sanjay Khosla, a former executive at Mondelez (Kraft) and Unilever, has been appointed as senior fellow with the Kellogg Markets and Customers Initiative (KMCI), Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management announced last week.
“To excel in today's global 21st century business environment requires deep customer insight—not only in developed nations, but also in emerging markets,” Kellogg Dean Sally Blount said in a statement. “Sanjay Khosla has decades of experience in adapting business strategies to new markets, and his accomplishments and perspective will be invaluable to both Kellogg faculty and students.”
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New $10 Million Alumni Donation Will Support Curriculum Innovation at Harvard Business School
The family of a late Harvard Business School (HBS) alumnus has donated $10 million to help support efforts already underway to innovativly redesign the second-year MBA curriculum, the school announced last week.
The donation, from the family of the late William F. Connell, a 1963 MBA graduate of HBS, will establish the Margot and William F. Connell Family MBA Program Innovation Fund, which will help support the redesign of the HBS second-year curriculum to provide MBA students with more courses, new technology applications and platforms and expanded faculty development initiatives.
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Columbia Entrepreneurs Lab Provides Free Summer Working Space to Student Teams to Collaborate on Business Ventures
Columbia Entrepreneurs Lab (CEL), a co-working space run by Columbia Business School’s Eugene Lang Entrepreneurship Center, this summer welcomes its first class of more than 20 students from across Columbia University. The student teams, which represent seven different schools, were selected to develop 13 business ventures over the summer using the lab's resources and space free of charge.
Among the ideas selected as part of the inaugural CEL class are a news agregator that monitors geographic-specific, social media traffic for trending stories, a program to bridge educational and cultural gaps between Chinese and American students and an online private tutoring marketplace.
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Oxford University’s Saïd Business School Launches Innovative Online Module to Address Global Challenges
A new online module at the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford is bringing together students in the school’s MBA and executive MBA programs with Oxford alumni and leading academic researchers to address some of the most challenging global business and policy issues. In its first year, the program has focused on global ageing.
Called GOTO (Global Opportunities, Threats: Oxford), the interactive, multimedia web platform is designed to blend curated content with in-person learning through tutorial groups and events to create plans to address the world’s biggest problems. This year, an action-oriented community of Oxford students, academics and alumni took a hard look at the changing demographics, global pinch points, patterns of consumption, environmental impact and healthcare system strain created by the long-term trend toward global ageing. GOTO will focus on a different global issue each year.
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UCLA Anderson School of Management to Become Financially Self-Supporting
Beginning with the 2014-15 academic year, the UCLA Anderson School of Management will no longer rely on state funding but will instead be completely self-supporting, the school reported last week. University of California President Mark Yudof approved the school’s proposed status change for its full-time MBA program on June 24th, ending a three-year review process.
The decision is expected to make it easier for the school to fund-raise with its alumni and philanthropic donors, to make tuition fees more predictable and to give the school greater flexibility in faculty assignments, according to UCLA Anderson Dean Judy Olian, who has led the campaign to win self-supporting status for the school.
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Some Master’s Degree Students Now Eligible for Harvard Business School’s 2+2 Program
Harvard Business School (HBS) today announced that it has expanded the eligibility requirements of its 2+2 Program to include not only college students but also candidates who have gone directly to a master’s degree program after their undergraduate study.
The 2+2 Program at HBS is a deferred admissions process originally designed for college students who want to secure a future spot in the HBS MBA class. Candidates admitted to the 2+2 Program will have a place reserved for them at HBS, which they can assume after completing two years of work in the public, private or nonprofit sector. With today’s change, the program is now also open to current students in full-time master’s programs who proceeded directly from college to their current master's degree program, according to HBS Dean of Admissions Dee Leopold.
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Clear Admit’s Stacey Oyler Discusses Finding the Right MBA Fit with Bloomberg BusinessWeek
In a recent article about finding the right fit in a business school program, Bloomberg BusinessWeek turned to Clear Admit Senior Admissions Counselor Stacey Oyler for some guidance.
Oyler, who worked in admissions for Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business and as a recruiter for McKinsey before joining Clear Admit, encouraged prospective applicants not to let a school’s rank in the various MBA rankings overshadow other important considerations. A top-ranked school can help catch recruiters’ eyes, but the school also needs to be the best match for what you want to do, Oyler told Bloomberg BW. “It’s two years and a significant financial investment,” she said. “So take the time to think about fit just as much as rank and reputation.”
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Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business Joins Consortium for Graduate Study in Management
The Consortium for Graduate Study in Management, a nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing diversity in business school and the corporate world, announced this week that Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business has joined as its newest member school, bringing the total number of member schools to a record 18.
McDonough is the first new business school to join the Consortium since 2010. The Consortium recruits new member schools selectively, believing that by partnering with only the top MBA programs in the country is the best way to help its members and fellows succeed while providing its corporate partners with access to the most promising candidates.
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Six Yale SOM Students Selected for Yale Entrepreneurial Institute Fellowships
Five current MBA students and one recent graduate of the Yale School of Management (SOM) have been selected through a competitive process to be among this summer’s fellows at the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute (YEI), the school announced earlier this month. To date, the YEI Summer Fellowship – open to students and teams throughout the university – has accelerated more than 70 Yale student business ventures, which have raised $60.5 million in outside financing and created more than 210 new jobs.
Not only will this year’s six SOM students get to spend the summer developing their ventures at the YEI, they also will benefit from financial support, a work space, mentoring, entrepreneur-led workshops and opportunities to network with potential investors. Selected teams receive stipends from YEI for the summer of up to $20,000 per team, which supports living expenses and initial start-up costs, access to legal, accounting and marketing corporate partners and more.
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UC Berkeley-Haas Graduates Enjoy Strong Employment Opportunities
Early employment data shows that MBA graduates from the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley are landing top jobs and top salaries, the school reports.
The firms hiring the most Haas graduates this year include McKinsey & Co., Google, JPMorgan, Kaiser and Amazon, and salaries and signing bonuses are continuing an upward climb. Other tip hiring firms include Deloitte Consulting, Samsung, Bain, Adobe, Microsoft and Zynga.
But traditional MBA sectors are not the only ones seeing strong hiring, according to Lisa Feldman, executive director of the Career Management Group. “Real estate is a strong area for us this year, and we are also seeing a strong class of entrepreneurs,” she said in an article on the Haas website. “In addition to the entrepreneurs themselves, we have a growing number of students exploring the impact they might have in smaller organizations and seeking experience with early-stage startups,” she added.
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Alumni Gift Helps Fund Loan Assistance Program for Columbia Business School MBAs Who Pursue Jobs in Public, Nonprofit Sectors and More
Columbia Business School (CBS) has a trio of alumni to thank for filling the coffers of its loan assistance fund, a program that helps alleviate the financial burden of repaying education loans for MBA graduates who pursue work in the public and nonprofit sectors. Elizabeth B. Strickler ’86 and Mark T. Gallogly ’86 have made a generous gift to establish a new fund named in honor of Ms. Strickler’s mother, Ellen B. Strickler ’78, the school announced earlier this month.
The Ellen B. Strickler ’78 Loan Assistance Fund is designed to encourage MBA graduates to seek out work in public and nonprofit sectors, as well as with microfinance organizations, low-profit limited liability companies (L3C) and social ventures that focus on low income communities or create significant public good. Each are areas with many unmet needs that CBS grads can address, but they pay much lower salaries than private industry. The fund will be run by the CBS Social Enterprise Program (SEP).
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Co-Founder Eliot Ingram Named CEO of Clear Admit
Clear Admit is pleased to announce that co-founder Eliot Ingram has assumed the role of CEO. He succeeds former CEO Graham Richmond, who recently launched Southwark Consulting, a firm that advises graduate admissions offices on enrollment best practices. “I look forward to taking over full leadership of Clear Admit and positioning the firm for its next round of growth,” said Ingram. Ingram has served as a senior admissions counselor and the firm’s CFO since he founded the company with Richmond in late 2001. Clear Admit, a leader in the MBA admissions space for more than a decade, provides guidance –
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UC Berkeley Haas Partners with MIT Sloan on Energy Efficiency Research Project
Researchers at the Haas School of Management at the University of California at Berkeley are teaming up with researchers at the MIT Sloan School of Management to take a closer look at energy-efficiency policies and regulations around the globe to determine whether they are realizing their full potential, the schools announced this week.
The project, called E2e, is an interdisciplinary collaboration between the two schools designed to find the best way to go from using a large amount of energy (“E”) to a small of amount of energy (“e”). Participating experts will include engineers, economists and others, and the initiative is led by Catherine Wolfram, associate professor and co-director of the Energy Institute at Haas, Michael Greenstone, a professor of environmental economics at MIT, and Christopher Knittel, co-director of the MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR).
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Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business Hosts Young Women’s International Leadership Summit
Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business this week welcomes a group of outstanding young women leaders from around the globe to its campus as part of a week-long leadership summit, the school announced this week.
Twenty-six young women between the ages of 15 and 23 are taking part in the iLive2Lead (iL2L) 2013 Young Women’s International Leadership Summit on McDonough’s Washington, DC, campus. The women, who come from 21 different countries, will learn leadership skills and develop entrepreneurship action plans as part of the event, which is sponsored by McDonough’s Office of Executive Education.
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Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business Confers First MBA/MPH Joint Degrees
Two members of the graduating Class of 2013 at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business earned not only an MBA while there but also a master’s degree in public health (MPH). Kate Head and Catherine Augustyn were the first recipients of the new joint degree, which Tuck now offers in partnership with The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice (TDI).
The new program is designed for students who want to combine Tuck’s comprehensive MBA program with TDI’s deep dive into health policy and clinical practice issues. “The combination of those two programs we thought would be a really terrific marriage,” Paul B. Gardent, an adjunct professor of business administration at Tuck and director of the joint degree program, said as part of an article published in Tuck’s online newsroom. The joint degree program is an outgrowth of the Health Care Initiative, an effort launched in 2008 to expand healthcare-focused courses and career resources at Tuck.
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MIT Sloan Finance Professors to Fundraise for Center for Finance and Policy
Finance professors at MIT Sloan School of Management will conduct a series of high-level seminars in London and Shanghai as part of efforts to raise funds for a new center that will examine the intersection between finance and government, the Financial Times reports today. To date, MIT has raised almost half of the $10 million needed for the center, according to the FT.
The MIT Center for Finance and Policy is intended to serve as a hub of research and financial analysis of public policy issues, bringing together top thinkers and spurring collaboration between government, the private sector and academia. “Finance is one field where academia and business are very close,” Sloan Deputy Dean S.P. Kothari told the FT. The center will take a cross-disciplinary approach to tackling the government challenges facing finance and banking, resulting in research that will have implications for every household, Kothari added.
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