MBA News
A collection of news items from MBA programs and about the business school admissions process.
New Courses, Boot Camps Keep Kellogg MBAs on the Cutting Edge
From the very latest in how to market consumer packaged goods (CPG) to the finer arts of persuasive data visualization, a new series of classes and boot camps at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management is giving MBA students there the tools they need to stay current in the ever-evolving world of business.
Kicking things off last month, the Kellogg Marketing Club partnered with CPG giant Kraft to offer a day-long boot camp designed for first-year students preparing for summer gigs with CPG firms. Kraft company leaders led the boot camp sessions, which covered topics ranging from channel relationships to Nielsen ratings.
“The purpose of the boot camp was to give first-year students some exposure to concepts that they will encounter in their consumer packaged goods internships, but are not necessarily covered in the first-year curriculum,” says Eric Leininger, clinical associate professor of executive education, who directs Kellogg’s Chief Marketing Officer Program.
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Why Mission Matters at MIT Sloan School of Management
Spoiler Alert co-founders Ricky Ashenfelter and Emily MalinaPhoto credit: Mimi Phan/MIT Sloan
How important is a business school’s mission statement to the experience of its students? According to recent graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Sloan School of Management, the school’s mission—to develop principled, innovative leaders who improve the world and to generate ideas that advance management practice—influenced where they chose to attend business school, the experiences they had there and the future path of their careers.
Ricky Ashenfelter knew he wanted a school in a market that had a lot of entrepreneurial ventures, which led him to focus his search on San Francisco and Boston. But more than that, he also wanted a school that valued and would offer coursework tied to energy and sustainability. That narrowed his focus further to MIT Sloan, the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and Stanford Graduate School of Business, he says.
“What I liked most about Sloan was that it was part of a larger MIT ecosystem, which was not the case for many business schools,” Ashenfelter says. And so he left his consulting job at Deloitte and headed for Boston hoping to find solutions to the problems of food waste in business supply chains.
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FIFA Corruption Scandal Serves Up Ethics Course Material for MBA Students
“Ethics and integrity are essential in the world of sport and are topics that have continued to gain importance for FIFA and the football community in recent years." These words, spoken by former Fédération Internationale de Football (FIFA) President Joseph “Sepp” Blatter in August of last year, ring somewhat hollow today. At the time, the international governing body for soccer that he then led was preparing to host the first-ever World Summit on Ethics in Sports in Belgium. "We therefore welcome the opportunity to host this special summit and look forward to a fruitful debate among international experts on these important topics,” Blatter continued.
Maybe he missed the conference? Apparently, he either didn’t listen to the international experts or he thought that what they had to say somehow didn’t apply to his own organization. Earlier this week, Blatter announced that he would resign as president of FIFA following the indictment by the United States government of several current and former FIFA officials and sports marketing officials for bribery, fraud and money laundering.
As devastating as the unfolding scandal has proven for Blatter and FIFA’s reputation, there are valuable lessons to be learned, and professors at several leading business schools fully expect to use the FIFA case to teach their MBA students.
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Rainforest Alliance President Joins NYU Stern to Head New Sustainable Business Center
Resolving to better train business leaders to take on the environmental and human challenges facing the world, New York University (NYU) Stern School of Business today announced that it will ring in 2016 by launching a new Center for Sustainability Business. Environmental activist and steward Tensie Whelan, currently the president of the Rainforest Alliance, will join the Stern faculty to establish and lead the new center in January 2016.
Whelan, who earned her bachelor’s degree from NYU in 1980, returns to her alma mater with more than 25 years of experience confronting environmental and sustainability issues at the local, national and international level. She helped grow the Rainforest Alliance’s budget from $4.5 million to $50 million, recruiting 5,000 companies in more than 60 countries to transform their engagement with sustainability through partnership with the organization.
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HBS Alumnus Gives Largest Gift in University’s History to School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
An alumnus of the Harvard Business School (HBS) today made the largest gift in Harvard University’s history—a $400 million endowment that will support the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). The gift, from billionaire hedge fund manager John A. Paulson (MBA ’80), will help fund SEAS’s planned expansion across the river from Cambridge to Allston, where its scientists and engineers will occupy research and teaching facilities adjacent to HBS and the Harvard Innovation Lab (i-lab).
“John Paulson’s extraordinary gift will enable the growth and ensure the strength of engineering and applied sciences at Harvard for the benefit of generations to come,” Harvard University President Drew Faust said in a statement. “His appreciation of the importance of SEAS to faculty, students, and schools across the university has motivated a historic act of generosity that will change Harvard and enhance our impact on the world beyond.”
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Prince of Wales Challenges Prospective, Current Business School Students to Champion Sustainability
Speaking last week at London Business School (LBS), His Royal Highness (HRH) the Prince of Wales challenged current and future MBA students to demand an education that will prepare them to lead the world toward greater sustainability.
“To all those current business school students – and to those who are deciding where to study – ask yourself, is your chosen business school really going to equip you to be the kind of leader that is so badly needed for the next 50 years? Nothing less will do,” Prince Charles said.
LBS hosted the May 28th event, which was convened by the Prince's Accounting for Sustainability Project (A4S) and the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL). Speaking to an assembled audience that included deans and leading academics from business schools from around the world, HRH conceded that some progress has been made in the past two decades in terms of incorporating sustainability into mainstream accounting and finance research and teaching within business schools.
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Big Shoes to Fill at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business
Photo by Laura DeCapua
One month from today, Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business will officially welcome its new dean as Professor Matthew Slaughter succeeds 20-year veteran of the post Dean Paul Danos.
Talk about big shoes to fill. Dartmouth President Phil Hanlon called Danos “everything any institution could want in a business school dean,” and more than 50 alumni and friends contributed to a $10 million endowment to name the deanship in his honor, supporting in perpetuity all who come after him.
In a wide-ranging interview published recently by the Dartmouth Office of Public Affairs, soon-to-be-Dean Slaughter talks about what it’s like to follow in Danos’s footsteps, what he thinks prepares him for the challenge and more.
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Sustainability Takes Center Stage at Harvard Business School Commencement
Leah Ricci (left) and Allison Webster (right) stand ready to help HBS Commencement attendees dispose of materials properly
Forget crimson. The stoles and tassels worn by Harvard Business School (HBS) graduates today may have been deep red, but the school was going for green in its commencement exercises this year. As part of the day’s events—as well as those of Class Day yesterday and Reunion tomorrow—HBS graduates, alumni and guests will take part in a coordinated composting effort unlike any in the school’s history.
For the first time ever, the back-to-back celebrations this week at HBS will feature completely compostable lunch containers and utensils, which attendees will sort into designated bins for recycling, composting and trash. And because it can sometimes be hard to determine which items go into which bins—especially for novice environmentalists—HBS Green Team volunteers will staff each of the 20 sorting stations to help people know what’s what.
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Columbia Business School Admissions Director Provides Insight into 2015-16 Essays
Columbia Business School (CBS) kicked off the application cycle for the Class of 2018, sending its application live in late April, before any other leading business school. Though this year’s essay questions aren’t hugely different from last year’s, the school’s admissions director took time to share her perspective on the subtle changes with Clear Admit and offer some guidance to applicants who may be preparing to embark upon the application process.
Speaking to Clear Admit yesterday, Admissions Director Amanda Carlson turned first to the school’s first essay prompt—the “career goals/why a Columbia MBA now” question.
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Darden i.Lab Incubator Welcomes New Ventures
Tomorrow, the i.Lab Incubator at the University of Virginia (UVA)’s Darden School of Business will kick off its 10-week summer session, welcoming 23 entrepreneurs with high hopes for their fledgling businesses. In the mix this year: a matchmaking service for vacationers and owners of high-end vacation homes, a communication network to support development work in sub-Saharan Africa and an online recruiting platform geared specifically toward MBA students at top schools.
Darden’s i.Lab Incubator, or “i.Lab” was launched in 2010 by the school’s Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. A fundraising challenge championed by alumnus W. L. Lyons Brown III (MBA ’87) helped finance a new state-of-the-art facility to house the i.Lab, which opened in summer 2012. The program has since expanded to include not only Darden students but also highly qualified entrepreneurs from the larger UVA and Charlottesville communities.
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Star Sternie Recognized for Helping Promote Inclusion and Diversity within NYU’s MBA Class
Hurnyak with NYU Stern Dean Peter Henry at last night's Academic Awards and Service Recognition Reception
Rachel Hurnyak is proof positive that good things sometimes come in small packages. The petite, soft-spoken president of NYU Stern School of Business LGBTQ student group OutClass was honored by Dean Peter Henry at an awards ceremony last night for her leadership and contributions to the school’s community.
Thanks to the efforts of Hurnyak and other Sternies, the New York City business school this year introduced numerous initiatives emphasizing diversity and inclusion—part of the school’s commitment to promoting “EQ” (emotional quotient) as an integral value within graduate management education.
“I wanted to come to NYU Stern because to me it represented the type of school that would be the best and brightest in terms of diversity and inclusion,” Hurnyak said in an early-morning interview with Clear Admit yesterday before heading off to Yankee Stadium for NYU’s school-wide graduation ceremony. (She did not yet know about the award she would receive later that night.)
Hurnyak, who identifies as a member of the LGBTQ community, was less drawn by the school’s proximity to Wall Street and its investment banks and more by its location within the Village, where the LGBTQ civil rights movement began in the 1960s, she says. When she arrived, though, she found that there was still room for improvement in terms of making the school a more diverse and inclusive place where everyone—regardless of sexual orientation, race, class or gender—could feel safe and supported.
Rather than waiting for something to happen organically or one person leading the charge for change, several groups—including OutClass, the Association of Hispanic and Black Business Students and Stern Women in Business—worked collaboratively to champion greater diversity and inclusion school-wide, Hurnyak says. “Together, we succeeded at getting Stern to a much better place.”
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Insight into Indian School of Business Class of 2016
The Indian School of Business (ISB) earlier this week shared details about the students in its current Post Graduate Program in Management (PGP) class, revealing continued expansion overall, increased interest from students from nonprofit and NGO sectors and a slight dip in the representation of women.
There are 813 students in ISB’s PRG Class of 2016, with 560 students at its Hyderabad campus and 253 students at its Mohali campus. Of those, 236 are women. While this is the highest number of women in absolute terms so far in the school’s history, it represents 29 percent of the overall class, down slightly from 30 percent last year.
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Yale SOM Students, City of New Haven Launch Small Business Academy
Small local businesses in New Haven will now benefit from free consulting from Yale School of Management (SOM) MBA students thanks to a new partnership between the school and the city. Students from the Outreach Nonprofit Consulting (ONC) club at SOM worked together with the City of New Haven Small Business Service Center to launch the Small Business Academy earlier this month.
Recent SOM alumnus Boris Sigal ’14, who directs local procurement and business development for the New Haven Economic Development Corporation, helped spearhead the initiative. “As a recent graduate of SOM, I’m continuously looking for ways to increase collaboration between SOM students and New Haven's vibrant small business community,” he said in an article on the Yale SOM website.
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Employers Bullish on Hiring Recent MBA Grads, Recruiters Survey Shows
Students graduating in recent days from MBA programs across the United States and around the globe have more to celebrate than simply turning tassels, results from a corporate recruiters’ survey released today show. Indeed, employer demand for recent business school graduates tops all previous years, according to the 2015 Corporate Recruiters Survey, conducted by the Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC) in partnership with EFMD and the MBA Career Services & Employer Alliance (MBA CSEA).
Source: GMAC
An astounding 92 percent of U.S. employers surveyed report plans to hire MBA grads this year, up 12 percent over last year. Globally, numbers are also robust, if not quite as strong as the U.S. figures. Some 84 percent of employers worldwide expect to add new MBAs to their workforce this year, up from 74 percent in 2014 and just 50 percent in 2009. This bests the prior all-time high of 82 percent in 2005.
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Ross School of Business Dean Alison Davis-Blake to Step Down Next Year
Alison Davis-Blake, the first female dean at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, will not seek another term when her current five-year term expires next year, she announced in memos to the school’s students and staff today. One of just nine female deans leading a top-tier business school in the United States, Davis-Blake said she hopes to focus on “the broader problems and opportunities facing universities.”
Appointed in July 2011 by former President Mary Sue Coleman and former Provost Phil Hanlon, Davis-Blake came to Ross from the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, where she also served as dean. “During the past decade, I have learned that I particularly enjoy working with faculty, staff and students to stabilize challenging situations and then create momentum towards extraordinary positive performance,” she wrote in an email to the Ross staff. “Together, we have created that momentum at the Ross School."
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Harvard Business School Aims to Become “Go-To Place” on Gender Issues
Harvard Business School (HBS) wants to help the world understand gender-related matters as never before—so today it launched a brand-new Gender Initiative designed to promote gender equity in the business world and society as a whole.
“Harvard Business School and its faculty have been leaders in defining the roles and functions of business, as well as effective business practice," Dean Nitin Nohria said in a statement. "With the launch of this initiative, we want to have a similar and lasting impact on the way the world understands and acts upon gender-related matters."
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CFA Credentials Complement the MBA, Do Not Substitute for It
An applied finance and economics professor at Johns Hopkins University who “guarantees” the undergrads who take his class their top choice jobs on Wall Street when they graduate advises those students to skip the MBA and obtain their chartered financial analyst (CFA) credentials instead. At Clear Admit, we’re crying foul.
Hopkins Professor James Hanke, in an interview with Business Insider, said he doesn’t think that MBA programs are worthwhile. CFA credentials, he argued, are "more rigorous" and "much better."
Hanke has been trading currencies and commodities for more than 50 years and runs his own wealth-management firm. Still, we think his comparison—of a specialized technical certification with a broader education in all things management—is absurd.
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UCLA Anderson Receives Record $100 Million Gift from Namesake’s Widow
The UCLA Anderson School of Management yesterday announced the biggest financial gift in the school’s history. The $100 million gift comes from Marion Anderson, the widow of the management school’s namesake, billionaire businessman and UCLA alumnus John Anderson. $60 million of the gift will go toward establishing an endowment for financial aid, faculty stipends and research. The remaining $40 million will go toward covering almost half of the cost for a new building projected to be built next to the current complex. In addition to being the largest gift for the business school to date, it is also
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Wharton Commencement Speaker to Share How the MBA Could Save His Life
David Fajgenbaum, MD, MSc, has been working toward his MBA as if his life depends on it. Because it does. On Sunday, in his commencement address to his classmates at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, he will share just why he believes a graduate management education can be the difference between life and death.
Fajgenbaum was diagnosed with idiopathic Multicentric Castleman disease (iMCD) in 2010, a rare and poorly understood hematologic disorder in which the immune system becomes activated and causes cells to release inflammatory proteins that ultimately shut down the body’s organs. At the time of his diagnosis, he was in his third year of medical school at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. He took a year’s leave and underwent aggressive chemotherapy, which initially was unsuccessful. Over a six-month period, he was hospitalized for four and a half months and even read his last rites. But ultimately the chemo helped put the disease into remission, and Fajgenbaum returned to complete his MD. He then proceeded straight into the MBA program at Wharton.
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Morgan Stanley Donates $2.5 Million to Columbia Business School’s New Facilities
Pop quiz: How many Columbia Business School (CBS) alumni work for Morgan Stanley? Graduates of the New York City business school make up 245 of the investment banking giant’s current employees, CBS reports, including Chairman and CEO James Gorman ’87 and Brad Evans ‘70, managing director and vice president of the firm’s investment banking department. Gorman and Evans, together with CBS Professor Meyer Feldberg ’65, also are members of the school’s Board of Overseers.
Ties between the school and the firm grew even stronger earlier this spring when Morgan Stanley donated $5.25 million toward CBS’s new Manhattanville facilities. The “transformative gift,” as a press release last week called it, will create two Morgan Stanley Suites, one in each of the new buildings now under construction. It represents the largest corporate contribution to the Manhattanville Campus to date.
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HEC Paris Hosts 25th Annual MBA Tournament
Teams from 16 of the leading business schools in Europe convened last week to compete in 25 different sports as part of the 25th annual MBA Tournament (MBAT), hosted by HEC Paris. More than 1,500 MBA student athletes battled each other in everything from badminton and basketball to petanque and salsa dancing while also creating valuable new friendships and networking opportunities.
“MBAT is the meeting ground for MBA students across Europe, and new friendships and networking opportunities are at the heart of the tournament,” Bernard Garrette, HEC Paris MBA associate dean, said in a statement. “The MBAT provides the chance for students to put what they have learned in the classroom to the test on the field, creating and leading strong teams.”
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Mothers at Booth Prove That Being a Mom, Getting an MBA Can Go Hand in Hand
What’s harder than juggling the frenetic pace of classes, clubs, recruiting and studying that fills the two years of an MBA program at a top-tier school like the University of Chicago Booth School of Business? Doing it as a single mom. And yet, there are moms who do just that, and do it well.
Sofía Vargas and Natalie Wilson are co-chairs of Mothers at Booth, a student club whose name says it all. Vargas, 25, has a three-year-old daughter named Gabriela. Natalie, 28, has a five-year-old daughter Gabrielle. The two Gabbys play together often as their moms hit the books.
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University of Illinois College of Business Launches New $20,000 MOOC-Based MBA
The University of Illinois College of Business this week announced the launch of an online-only MBA degree program designed to democratize access to graduate management education, according to U. of I. College of Business Dean Larry DeBrock. Called the iMBA, it will be the first complete online graduate business degree offered in partnership with Silicon Valley educational technology company Coursera, which offers courses from many other leading MBA programs through its platform of massive open online courses (MOOCs).
The College of Business is celebrating its 100th anniversary this year, and development of this new program was designed to mark the occasion, according to DeBrock. “We’re entering the online MBA field motivated in part to find new ways to return to the tradition of great public universities making an elite education available to all,” he said in a statement.
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Published: April 30, 2015
Business School Students Join Forces to Send Relief to Nepal
Yesterday, a student at Oxford’s Saïd Business School challenged her fellow students to donate to a fundraising campaign for victims of the Nepal earthquake, pledging to personally match every dollar raised in the next seven days, up to $20,000. Today, the school is already 24 percent toward its goal, having raised $4,875.
Elsewhere around the country and the world, business school students are likewise putting their money where their mouths are. Still others are pitching in with person power and organizing know-how, helping bring much needed relief to a nation devastated by a 7.8-magnitude earthquake feared to have affected some 8 million people or more.
April Chapman, who pledged to match funds raised by the students in Saïd’s Diploma in Strategy and Innovation program, said that social media posts and emails began to fly as soon as the news broke, and her cohort immediately decided that raising an immediate financial gift would be the best way to make a difference. Chapman serves as co-chair of the World Vision Innovation Fund, a faith-based humanitarian development and relief organization serving the poor in more than 100 countries. World Vision’s staff in Nepal, along with staff mobilized from other countries, are delivering temporary shelters, food, hygiene kits, water, emergency health and protection for children, according to a release from the organization.
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Published: April 29, 2015
Harvard Business School Wants Its Business Fundamentals Course to Be Law of the Land
Harvard Business School (HBS) today announced that the online business fundamentals course it launched last year will now be available to entering students at Harvard Law School. Today’s announcement follows on the heels of an announcement yesterday that HBS would likewise make its signature online business fundamentals course, known as HBX Credential of Readiness (CORe), available to undergraduate students at nearby Amherst College, with plans in place to roll it out to additional undergraduate institutions in the future. HBX CORe has been available to Harvard College undergraduates since last year.
CORe, says HBS, uses the HBS signature case-based method to teach participants the key concepts of business. As in an HBS classroom, CORe classes require active participation and social learning. Three individual courses make up the HBX CORe core offering: Business Analytics, Economics for Managers, and Financial Accounting.
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