MBA News
A collection of news items from MBA programs and about the business school admissions process.
Published: February 7, 2016
Executives with an MBA: 5 Success Stories
This story has been republished in its entirety from its original source, metromba.com.
Recently, MBA programs have received a lot of criticism. Many business leaders and experts have claimed that the necessity of an MBA to achieve success is a myth. However, while there are examples of successful people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg, who didn’t complete university, there are also many examples of compelling executives with an MBA.
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Published: February 4, 2016
Fridays from the Frontline: Kellogg MBAs Gear Up for Super Bowl Ad Review
It’s time for the Super Bowl—and at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, that means it’s also time for the Super Bowl Ad Review. Brands spend more than $2 billion each year to advertise their products through Super Bowl commercials, some more effectively than others. For the 12th year running, Kellogg marketing students will apply their unique framework for evaluating an ad’s brand-building potential as part of the 2016 Kellogg Super Bowl Ad Review.
As the players take the field on Sunday, more than 50 Kellogg MBA students will team up with marketing professors Tim Calkins and Derek Rucker to determine the winners and the losers in the battle of the brands. They’ll us the ADPLAN framework to evaluate each ad according to six critical criteria: Attention, Distinction, Positioning, Linkage, Amplifications and Net Equity.
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Published: February 4, 2016
Published: February 3, 2016
LiveWire Analysis Reveals Strength of Rejected HBS Round 2 Applicants
Harvard Business School (HBS) sent out the second and final wave of interview invites for Round 2 candidates yesterday. A quick analysis of the status updates received on MBA LiveWire in the past 24 hours suggests that the rejected HBS applicants are incredibly impressive. Of the 114 candidates who shared a status of rejection, the average GMAT was 722 and the average GPA was 3.51. Of course, lessons from the MBA LiveWire data in Round 1 tell us that those making the cut for interviews and ultimately admission do not look terribly different where the raw statistics
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Published: February 2, 2016
It’s D Day at Harvard Business School for Round 2 Applicants
Today’s the day that Round 2 applicants at Harvard Business School who haven’t already received an interview invitation will learn their fate. With just minutes to go until the scheduled 12 noon notification, we know anxiety is high!
HBS Managing Director of Admissions and Financial Aid Dee Leopold is on record saying that the timing of an interview invitation—whether as part of last week’s first wave or today’s second wave—is not a reflection of your candidacy. That said, she didn’t address applicant speculation about the significance of interview invite timing head on this year.
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Published: February 1, 2016
Tuck Students Attend December’s Paris COP21, Bring Climate Talks Back to Campus
Four MBA students from Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business sat front and center for the climate talks in Paris (COP 21) that grabbed the world’s attention in December. Now those students are back on campus sharing what they learned with their classmates.
In fact, students from Tuck have attended five of the past seven climate summits—in Copenhagen, Cancún, Doha and Warsaw in addition to Paris’s COP21—with Professor Anant Sundaram. “Honestly, it continues to surprise me that more schools don’t do this,” he says. But to his knowledge, Tuck is alone in having MBA students attend. He suspects part of it is inertia—the United Nations doesn’t make it easy to take part, requiring that those who want to attend formally apply for non-governmental organization (NGO) observer status. Additionally, only a handful of slots are awarded to each NGO, and he suspects that they have gone to students outside of the business schools at places like Harvard, Columbia or Yale.
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Published: February 1, 2016
Innovative Fund Gives Columbia Business School MBA Students Hands-On Value Investing Experience
Where should you go to business school if you want to pursue value investing? A new student-led fund at Columbia Business School (CBS)—established with a $1.25 million donation by investment guru Thomas Russo—makes the New York City MBA program a good bet.
Value investing—the philosophy favored by Warren Buffett, among others, of buying undervalued assets and then exercising patience as their long-term fundamentals reveal greater value—can be hard for MBA students to grasp in a tangible way in the two short years they spend in business school. Indeed, most academic research suggests that value investing works best over the long run.
Russo, a student of Buffett’s, wants to help groom the next generation of value investors, and so he’s created the 5x5x5 Student Value Investment Fund to give MBA students the real-world experience he believes is required.
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Published: January 31, 2016
UCLA Anderson School of Management Launches Venture Accelerator
This post has been republished in its entirety from its original source, metromba.com.
On Monday, January 25th, the UCLA Anderson School of Management made a great stride in entrepreneurship education through its launch of the Anderson Venture Accelerator Program.
The program will provide a venue for collaboration between students and professionals, and it will serve as an incubator for innovation not only at the university, but in the global marketplace as well.
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Published: January 29, 2016
UCI Merage School of Business Alumna Offers Pledge for Growing Campus
The Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine (UCI Merage School of Business) recently announced a $1.5 million dollar pledge from Kristen S. Monson, an alumna of the college. Monson’s gift will go toward naming the Grand Terrace in the Merage School’s new building. Dean Eric Spangenberg said, “Kristen’s significant investment is exciting for all of us in the Merage School… Her gift represents the single largest philanthropic commitment to date toward our new building; it is particularly noteworthy to come from a member of the strong alumni network established by the
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Published: January 28, 2016
Consulting Career Prep at NYU’s Stern School of Business
This post has been republished in its entirety from its original source, metromba.com.
If you want to earn an MBA with the end goal of pursuing a consulting career, New York University’s Stern School of Business should be on your radar. Stern had 28 percent of its 2015 graduates accept jobs in the consulting field. Furthermore, eight prominent consulting firms hired three or more graduates from the Stern School each in 2014. Consulting employers include the Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey & Company and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
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Published: January 28, 2016
Fridays from the Frontline: Yale SOM MBA Student Tests His Mettle on Shark Tank
This week in Fridays from the Frontline we’re featuring an exclusive interview with Shaan Patel, a 26-year-old, second-year MBA student at Yale School of Management (SOM) who tonight will appear on ABC’s Shark Tank. Patel, who is taking a two-year leave of absence from medical school to get his MBA, also runs a company on the side that helps high school students prepare for the SAT and ACT college entrance exams. The Las Vegas native launched the company—called 2400 Expert SAT Prep—to teach others the strategies that helped him achieve his own perfect 2400 SAT score.
In the interview that follows, he shares how business school prepared him for Shark Tank and why he thinks the MBA is a valuable path for entrepreneurs. He also offers tips for business school students who want to try their hand at getting on the show. (Even thought he had to wait in line for nine hours for the casting call—missing a pitch competition taking place back on campus as a result—he thinks it was worth it.)
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Published: January 27, 2016
$10 Million Alumni Gift to Expand, Rename Wharton Leadership Program
Believing firmly that leadership can be both taught and learned, Wharton alumna Anne Welsh McNulty (MBA ’79) has pledged $10 million to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania to expand its efforts to train leaders who impact the world. In recognition of this generous gift, the Wharton Leadership Program, launched 20 years ago, will be renamed the Anne and John McNulty Leadership Program.
McNulty met her late husband John (MBA ’79) well before they were classmates at Wharton. They both grew up in Philadelphia and were sweethearts at Cardinal O'Hara High School. But it was Wharton that would train them to become leaders. Before his sudden death of a heart attack in 2005, John rose through the ranks at Goldman Sachs to become partner, then co-head of the asset management division and ultimately to lead the creation of its investment management division. Anne, previously a managing director at Goldman and a senior executive of its hedge fund strategies group, today is the co-founder and managing partner of JBK Partners, an investment management firm and private philanthropic foundation.
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Published: January 26, 2016
HBS Launches New Competition to Improve Precision Medicine Clinical Trials
$1.5 billion and more than a decade of trials—that’s what it takes for a typical precision medical therapy to gain FDA approval. The Health Care Initiative at Harvard Business School (HBS), an alliance of MBA students, alumni, faculty and practitioners, is hoping to drastically reduce both the time and expense of getting innovative therapies to market with a new competition designed to reimagine the clinical trials process.
Precision medicine, a growing movement in patient care, allows scientists and physicians to use genomic and other information to understand diseases based on their biological mechanisms, enabling them to precisely diagnose and develop tailored treatments. The Precision Trials Challenge, announced today, invites ideas from the medical, science, business and patient communities for ways to reinvent the clinical trials process. The goals? More rapid innovation, better targeted medicine and more effective treatments.
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Published: January 26, 2016
LiveWire Data Provides Insights into HBS Interview Invitation Results
With Round 2 interview invitations imminent at Harvard Business School (HBS), we decided to look back at what happened in Round 1 for a little perspective. Clear Admit LiveWire reports gave us the following insights:
Roughly one-third of Round 1 applicants to HBS who reported results on LiveWire shared that they received an invitation to interview. Among those, reported GPAs ranged from 3.0 to 3.8, with an average of 3.6. The GMAT score range was from 560 to 760, with an average score of 735. Notably, the ranges and averages were much the same for those who got a ding. (The GPA range was 3.09 to 4.4, with an average of 3.56, and the GMAT score range was 630 to 780, with an average of 735.)
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Published: January 25, 2016
HBS Round 2 Interview Invitations to Begin Rolling Out
As most anyone who applied to Harvard Business School (HBS) in Round 2 is likely aware, the first wave of interview invitations is scheduled to go out tomorrow. HBS Managing Director of Admissions and Financial Aid Dee Leopold took to her Direct from the Director blog yesterday to assure those anxiously awaiting word that things are on track.
“This post is, quite frankly, not a news flash, but more like a reminder of what we’ve said before,” she wrote, reiterating that interview invites will begin rolling out from Dillon House tomorrow at 12 noon Boston time.
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Published: January 25, 2016
Choosing a Business School for Entrepreneurship
Typing “startups are hard” into Google returns approximately 32 million results—ranging from “Startups Are Hard in 100 Different Ways” to “15 Reasons Startups Are !@#$ing Hard.” Perhaps that has a little something to do with why more and more savvy entrepreneurs are choosing top business schools as their training ground.
With expanding entrepreneurship curricula, cool campus startup accelerators and ever increasing numbers of business plan competitions—to say nothing of the all-important access to powerful networks of potential investors—the MBA is becoming the preferred path for many would-be founders.
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Published: January 24, 2016
INSEAD Knocks HBS from Top Spot in Financial Times 2016 Global MBA Rankings
INSEAD jumped three spots to claim No. 1 in the Financial Times 2016 Global MBA rankings, released today, knocking reigning Harvard Business School (HBS) to No. 2. The global business school—which features campuses in France, Singapore and Abu Dhabi—has been on an upward trajectory over the past few years, sidling from sixth to fifth to fourth, but this year marks the first time it has claimed the top spot. Incidentally, it’s also the first one-year MBA program to ever do so. HBS, for its part, held steady at No. 1 each of the past three years and has taken top honors six times since the FT’s rankings debuted in 1999.
HBS wasn’t the only school displaced by INSEAD’s upward climb. London Business School (LBS) was knocked back down to third from the second-place spot it claimed last year. The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania also backslid a spot, to fourth. And Stanford Graduate School of Business, which shared fourth with INSEAD last year, fell to fifth.
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Published: January 21, 2016
Fridays from the Frontline: Triumphant Reapplicant Gains Admission at UCLA Anderson
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Our Fridays from the Frontline contributor this week took these words to heart, reapplying in fall 2015 after an unsuccessful application process the year before. A young female Indian engineer, she had relatively strong scores and grades, but not a ton of experience under her belt. Read on to learn some of the steps she took to strengthen her application the second time around—gaining admission at UCLA Anderson.
While happy to share her story with the Clear Admit audience, she wants to remain anonymous until she actually matriculates. So until then, we’ll just refer to her as the Pull That MBA Trigger blogger.
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Published: January 20, 2016
Wharton Adds Online Specializations in Entrepreneurship, Financial Modeling
Touting its pioneering role in the massive online education space, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania this week announced that it will add two new online specializations to its series of Coursera offerings, one in entrepreneurship and another in business and financial modeling. This brings the school’s total to 16 individual online courses making up four distinct specializations, more specializations than any other business school on the Coursera platform, the school notes.
Wharton Marketing Professor Peter Fader teaching a course in the "Business Foundations" specialization
Wharton blazed a trail in 2012 as the first business school to offer a massive open online course (MOOC), and again in 2013 as the first to offer an online specialization. That specialization, “Business Foundations,” includes courses in marketing, accounting, finance and operations, which form the bedrock of a Wharton MBA. To date, more than 2.7 million students around the globe have enrolled in Wharton’s online offerings, says Anne Trumbore, director of Wharton Online.
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Published: January 19, 2016
HBS Hypes Gender Initiative Launched Last Spring
Harvard Business School (HBS) today took to its MBA Voices Blog to introduce the HBS Gender Initiative to those who may not be familiar with it. Established in fall 2014, the initiative’s public launch took place in May 2015, coinciding with the release of interesting research coming out of HBS related to gender issues.
That research included a study published last spring by HBS Professor Kathleen McGinn that pinpointed advantages enjoyed by children of working mothers. Surveying 50,000 adults in 25 countries, she and her colleagues found that the daughters of working mothers completed more years of education, had higher rates of employment and were more likely both to supervise others and earn higher incomes than those of moms who stayed at home—in a staggering 24 of the 25 countries studied. Sons of working moms, while their careers were not measurably impacted, were found to contribute more time each week to childcare and housework—which research has shown to increase women’s involvement in the workforce and perhaps impact the stability of marriages.
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Published: January 18, 2016
Darden Partners with Bunker Labs DC to Support Veteran-Led Companies
Making up between seven and nine percent of the MBA class each year, military veterans are a significant part of the University of Virginia Darden School of Business fabric. “Veterans enrich our learning community,” wrote Darden Professor and Dean Emeritus Bob Bruner in a Veteran's Day blog post a few years back. “We actively seek excellent students from the ranks of the military.” That’s because like other leading business schools, Darden recognizes that many skills honed in the military—such as leadership, discipline, teamwork and decision-making—transfer seamlessly to the MBA classroom.
But why stop at the MBA classroom? As part of a pilot program launched last semester, Darden faculty, alumni and second-year MBA students have partnered with a veteran-focused business accelerator to offer entrepreneurship training to veteran-led companies in and around Washington, DC.
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Published: January 14, 2016
New MBA DecisionWire Feature Debuts on Clear Admit
For all the devoted LiveWire followers out there, we’ve got some exciting news to share. Clear Admit this week has added a new feature designed to let MBA applicants, students and alumni share more information with their peers—specifically where they decide to attend business school based on where they applied and were accepted.
This new tool, called MBA DecisionWire, provides profiles and school selection information updates in real time from your peers as they make the all-important decision of where to actually pursue their MBA. Users can filter others’ submissions by the schools applied to, admitted to and enrolled at, as well as by application year.
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Published: January 14, 2016
Fridays from the Frontlines: Kellogg MBAs Take Silicon Valley
Welcome back to Fridays from the Frontlines, where each week we feature the perspectives of current MBA applicants, students and recent alumni wherever they are in the trajectory of business school. Today we’re pleased to feature a post from Luke Murphy, a first-year MBA candidate at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, who recently led a group of fellow students on a trek to San Francisco startups. He was a good one to help organize the trip, having grown up in the Bay Area and worked there for years before business school, most recently as director of business development at Nasdaq in San Francisco. But as you’ll see in the post that follows, even he was surprised by some of what the trip revealed.
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Published: January 13, 2016
Best Bets for Banking: Business Schools That Help Land Jobs at Prestige Firms
Admittedly, the percentage of MBA students clamoring for jobs in investment banking is not what it once was. Thanks, 2008 global financial crisis. Nevertheless, the allure of exciting, highly compensated work that provides an opportunity to advance at break-neck speed in terms of both responsibility and pay still makes many a job-seeking MBA student weak in the knees.
With annual starting salaries around $125,000—to say nothing of standard bonuses and other compensation—investment banking draws a significant portion of graduating MBAs at many top schools. And it’s not just about the money. Heading into investment banking also lets you work with C-level executives right from the start, involves rubbing elbows with some of the most powerful people in business, provides a well-defined career path for those who opt to stay in the industry and offers an array of jumping off opportunities, be it with client companies or starting your own firm.
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Published: January 12, 2016
PepsiCo CEO Endows Yale SOM Deanship with Landmark Gift
PepsiCo Chairperson and CEO Indra K. Nooyi this week became the most generous lifetime benefactor in the history of her alma mater, the Yale School of Management (SOM), endowing the deanship of the school and kicking off the Fifth Decade Innovation Fund, the school announced yesterday.
“My experience at the Yale School of Management forever altered the course of my life,” the 1980 Yale SOM graduate said in a statement. “My gift to this wonderful institution pales in comparison with the gift that Yale gave me—the fundamental understanding that leadership requires an expansive worldview and a deep appreciation of the many points of intersection between business and society,” she continued.
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