MBA News
A collection of news items from MBA programs and about the business school admissions process.
Published: March 10, 2015
Stanford GSB Edges Out HBS, Wharton in 2016 U.S. News & World Report Rankings
Stanford’s Graduate School of Business took the number one spot in the latest U.S. News & World Report rankings of the nation’s best MBA programs, released yesterday, knocking Harvard Business School (HBS) to second and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School to third. Last year, the three powerhouse schools tied for first place, but slight differences on core metrics caused HBS and Wharton to slip this year.
U.S. News uses multiple core measurements to compile its rankings, with the greatest weight given to quality assessments by deans and MBA directors at peer schools and corporate recruiter survey scores. Wharton’s scores slipped in both these regards, as well as in average pay for its MBA graduates, precipitating its drop this year in the rankings.
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UPenn’s Wharton School Names Insider as New Director of MBA Admissions
The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School has named a new director of admissions, the school announced to students last week. Frank DeVecchis will work closely with existing Deputy Vice Dean of Wharton MBA Admissions, Financial Aid and Career Services Maryellen Reilly Lamb to oversee the entire application process, from recruitment through matriculation.
DeVecchis knows the Wharton MBA program like few others. He joins the Admissions team from Wharton’s MBA Program Office, where he served most recently as director of MBA Academic Operations. In this role, he led all operations and daily management of the MBA program, including successfully implementing Wharton’s new Course Match course registration program. He also advised more than 800 students during his tenure as the senior member of the MBA academic advising team and helped plan and implement Wharton’s three-week orientation for incoming students.
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Who Makes a Good Applicant to Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management?
With the Round 3 deadline for applications to the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University just a few days away, are you busy putting the finishing touches on your application? Maybe you are just beginning to consider applying in the year ahead. In either case, if Johnson at Cornell is on your radar, read on to learn more about just what the school is looking for in its applicants.
We recently spoke with Eddie Asbie, Associate Director of Admissions and Financial Aid, who joined Johnson in 2013 to help develop the Two-year MBA in Ithaca class. In our interview, Asbie took time to share some of what makes a good applicant in the eyes of the Johnson Admissions Committee, beyond the obvious solid entrance exam scores and strong academics that are par for the course with a top-tier Ivy League school.
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IESE Becomes Latest Business School to Ink Deal with Prodigy Finance for International MBA Loans
Spain’s IESE Business School has reached an agreement with U.K.‒based Prodigy Finance that will enable it to offer a new loan to international MBA and Global Executive MBA (GEMBA) students to help them finance their studies, the school announced this week. In other words, financing an IESE education just became much easier for students who live outside of Spain.
The new deal expands IESE’s existing loans and scholarships, which help students cover tuition fees and living costs. International students, though, have faced hurdles because existing loan programs offered by IESE have required co-signers.
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Consulting Projects Take Tuck School of Business Students around the Globe
MBA students at the Tuck School of Business have been putting what they learn in the classroom to work in the field as part of a global onsite consulting program that debuted in 1997. To date, they have completed more than 194 projects in more than 50 countries, the school reports.
The program, called Tuck OnSite Global Consulting, or OnSite for short, is available as an elective to second-year MBA students. As part of the experiential learning opportunity, MBAs hone their skills by providing professional quality consulting services to worldwide clients. The clients benefit, too – OnSite provides a cost-effective solution for corporations, nonprofits and governments for which time, money or manpower is in short supply.
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Harvard Business School Names New Innovation Lab Director
If Harvard Business School (HBS) is in your cross hairs, and if innovation and entrepreneurial pursuits are what rev you up, you may be interested to learn that Harvard’s innovation lab will soon have a new commander in chief. Jodi Goldstein, a long-time investor and entrepreneur, will become Harvard i-lab’s new Evans Family Foundation Managing Director beginning this June, responsible for leading the university-wide facility that brings students, faculty, alumni and the community together for team-based and other entrepreneurial activities.
Goldstein, who replaces outgoing Managing Director Gordon Jones, is no stranger the i-lab, Indeed, she’s been part of its management team since the lab’s 2011 launch, coming up with and implementing much of the top programming and resources it’s been able to offer. Just last year she spearheaded the Launch Lab, a business incubator for Harvard alumni, which is putting Allston, MA—where the i-lab is located—on the map as a solutions-centered hub swirling with interdisciplinary collaboration.
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Published: February 24, 2015
New Director Reinvigorates UC Berkeley Business Startup Accelerator
A Haas alumna and entrepreneur who has led several startups of her own has taken over as executive director of SkyDeck, the startup accelerator at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, the school reported this month.
Caroline Winnett, MBA ’90, who served most recently as founder and CEO of a neuroscience-inspired marketing company called BrandNeuro, met with Dean Rich Lyons because she wanted to run an accelerator program at Berkeley-Haas. Voila. She got her wish, joining as executive director of SkyDeck in November 2014.
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Published: February 22, 2015
Association of MBAs (AMBA) Director Predicts Future MBA Trends
An article in today’s Independent provided a glimpse into the future of the MBA degree as the director of a global MBA accrediting body shared his picks for the top five MBA trends of 2015. Andrew Main Wilson is CEO of the Association of MBAs (AMBA), described as an international impartial authority on postgraduate management education. In this role, he pays close attention to the ever evolving MBA. In the near future, he tells us to look for alternative funding sources for MBA studies, a wider range of specializations, more growth in entrepreneurialism, curriculum changes and flexible delivery and learning.
Citing the AMBA 2012 Salary Survey, Wilson notes that corporate sponsorship of the MBA has been and continues to fall, which has led to the development of new funding sources, such as crowd funding and peer-to-peer lending. These, he says, “are likely to increase in popularity - and are certainly going to become a trend in 2015.”
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Published: February 18, 2015
150th Birthday Gift to Cornell’s Johnson School to Support Faculty Renewal, Strengthen Ties to College of Engineering
Cornell University turns 150 this year, and to mark the occasion, an alumnus of both the Johnson Graduate School of Management and the College of Engineering, together with his wife, have made a gift to help support faculty renewal and enhanced collaboration between the business and engineering schools, Cornell announced this month.
The Eiko and Sudi Mariappa Sesquicentennial Fellowship, named for benefactors Sudi Marippa—who earned his Johnson MBA in 1986 after graduating from the College of Engineering with a BS in chemical engineering in 1982—and his wife, is designed to draw talented academics to Cornell to serve as both teachers and mentors.
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Published: February 17, 2015
USC Marshall School of Business Draws Google, Amazon Studios to Annual Evolution of Entertainment Conference
A student-led club at the University of Southern California (USC) Marshall School of Business will draw executives from Google, Amazon Studios, Electronic Arts and others to its 7th annual Evolution of Entertainment (E2) Conference later this month, the school announced.
The conference, hosted by MBA student group Business of Entertainment Association, will take place on Friday, February 27th. This year’s topic, “Convergence: Mobile, Media and Technology,” will focus on the overlap of media, technology and entertainment across all platforms. Corporate sponsors this year include Entertainment Arts, OnPrem, Warner Bros., SanDisk and Deloitte Digital.
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Published: February 16, 2015
UPenn’s Wharton School Debuts New Online Business Foundations Series, Associated MBA Scholarship
The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School has expanded its online offerings of foundational MBA courses to now include a Business Foundations Specialization series that adds a capstone project in which participants can apply what they learn to help solve real-world business issues, the school announced last week. And in another new twist, Wharton will invite top performers in the online series to apply to one of the school’s graduate programs, waiving the application fee, and will award up to five $20,000 scholarships to applicants who are admitted.
As with the initial four courses in Wharton’s Foundation Series – Accounting, Finance, Marketing and Operations Management – the new Capstone Project component is available through online education platform Coursera. Wharton was one of the first leading business schools to present the building blocks of its MBA curriculum in online form to a world audience.
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Published: February 15, 2015
Prodigy Finance Offers No Co-Signer Loans, Helping Solve Funding Challenges Facing MBAs Studying Abroad
Studying outside of the country of your nationality or residence can present many benefits to prospective MBA applicants. See the world, improve language skills, expand horizons, learn first-hand how increasingly global the business world has become. And yet, one major hurdle can sometimes prevent ambitious, talented prospective MBA applicants from pursuing their education abroad. That pesky little detail of funding.
Traditional banks are reluctant to lend across borders because tracking and enforcement of those loans suddenly becomes more difficult. Many U.S. banks, for example, won’t lend to foreign students without a U.S. co-signer, someone local the banks can go after to recoup their debt if the borrower fails to repay.
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Published: February 9, 2015
Wharton Round 2 Applicants Await Interview Invitations
Tomorrow’s the day. If you applied to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School as part of Round 2, you will very likely be checking your email repeatedly in hopes that an invitation to interview lands in your inbox. Good luck!
Wharton uses the Team-Based Discussion (TBD) format for interviews, as it has for the past few years. In terms of logistics, those invited to interview tomorrow can choose from a range of locations around the globe, including Wharton’s campus in Philadelphia, as well as San Francisco, London, Dubai, Mumbai, Shanghai, Sao Paulo, Seoul, Singapore and Tokyo. Each TBD will include five or six applicants grouped by the order in which they sign up for various locations. And interviews will take place beginning in late February.
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Published: February 8, 2015
Johnson Graduate School of Management Upends Its Curriculum
As some leading business schools prepare to welcome new deans – Darden and Tuck spring to mind – others are choosing to revamp their MBA curriculum. The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Harvard Business School and Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management have all recast their core course offerings in recent years, and now the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University is getting in on the curriculum overhaul action.
Johnson recently went public with its redesigned curriculum, providing an overview of its main features as part of a press release earlier this month. Now in full roll-out mode to the Class of 2016, the changes are designed to place greater emphasis on collaboration, leadership and analytical skills, which the school hopes will better prepare students for today’s technology-driven global business world.
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Published: February 8, 2015
Take the 2015 MBA Applicant Survey For Your Chance to Win $500!
The Association of International Graduate Admissions Consultants (AIGAC), of which Clear Admit is a member, has just released the 2015 MBA Applicant Survey. If you respond by the end of February, you will be eligible to enter a drawing for a $500 cash reward. The cash prize will be sent by PayPal. The survey takes 10 to 15 minutes to complete, and your responses will be kept confidential.
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Published: February 4, 2015
NYU Stern School of Business Woos Top College Seniors with Generous MBA Scholarship
Though many leading business schools prefer MBA applicants who have acquired at least a few years of work experience after college, NYU Stern School of Business features a special scholarship designed specifically for exceptional college seniors who seek to pursue a full-time MBA immediately after graduation.
The William R. Berkley Scholarship Program, established in 2013, covers the full two-year tuition and fees for NYU Stern’s full-time MBA program. It also provides a housing stipend of $18,000/year and an additional $10,000/year stipend for books and other expenses. Successful entrepreneur William R. Berkley (BS 1966) created the program that bears his name with a $10 million donation. He pursued his MBA at Harvard Business School immediately after graduating from Stern and wanted to provide similar opportunities for other aspiring young students like himself.
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Published: February 1, 2015
Kellogg School of Management Releases Super Bowl Advertising Review Results
With a game that was competitive until the final 20 seconds of play, last night’s Super Bowl kept football fans on the edge of their seats. But MBA students at Kellogg’s School of Management were focused on competition of another sort: the battle for best Super Bowl ad. With almost 70 Kellogg MBA students reviewing all of the spots, McDonald’s emerged the victor, the school reports.
McDonald’s spot, “Lovin’ Pays,” announced a new promotion the fast food chain will feature from now through Valentine’s Day, in which select customers will be invited to pay for their order not with money but with “lovin,’” including happy dances, calls to tell their mom they love her, etc. McDonald’s Super Bowl strategy also extended to Twitter, where the company gave away prizes to people who re-tweeted flattering messages it tweeted about fellow Super Bowl advertisers.
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Published: January 28, 2015
Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business Names New Dean to Succeed Paul Danos
Photo by Laura DeCapua
In case you missed it, Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business last week named an insider to become its 10th dean, replacing outgoing Dean Paul Danos, who steps down in June. Tuck Professor of Management and Associate Dean for Faculty Matthew Slaughter will step into the role vacated by Danos, who announced in March that he would not seek reappointment at the end of his fifth term as the school’s dean.
An expert in globalization and a scholar of international economics,Slaughter joined the Tuck faculty in 2002 and has held several key leadership roles since then. In addition to his current role as associate dean for faculty, Slaughter was also the founding faculty director of Tuck’s Center for Global Business and Government and previouly served as associate dean for the MBA program. He also served on the Council of Economic Advisers in the Executive Office of the President of the United States from 2005 to 2007.
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Published: January 27, 2015
Columbia Business School Launches New Center for Social Enterprise
The big news out of Columbia Business School (CBS) today is the creation of a new center devoted to social enterprise. A generous endowment gift from Sandra and Tony Tamer will establish the Tamer Center for Social Enterprise, which will be devoted to developing leaders focused on impacting society and the environment through management. The new center will also serve as a hub for all future social entrepreneurship activities at Columbia.
The Tamers’ gift expands CBS’s existing Social Enterprise Program, establishing the Tamer Fund for Social Ventures, which will provide seed grants of up to $25,000 to select nonprofit, for-profit or hybrid early-stage social ventures centered on social innovation and impact. It also allows for expansion of the existing Loan Assistance program, which helps alleviate the burden of repaying educational loans for MBA graduates who pursue careers in the public, nonprofit and social entrepreneurial sectors. The Tamers’ gift will expand this program, increasing the number of alumni it helps as well as the duration of the loan assistance from a maximum of five years to 10 years.
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Published: January 26, 2015
Harvard Business School to Send Out Round 2 Interview Invitations Beginning Tomorrow
As applicants to Harvard Business School (HBS) are probably well aware, Admissions Director Dee Leopold and her team are scheduled to send out the first of its Round 2 interview invitations tomorrow, Wednesday, January 28th. What about the blizzard that’s blanketing the northeastern portion of the United States, you wonder? As of yesterday, Leopold expected that invites will still go out as planned, at noon Boston time. “If we need to delay, we will let you know via this blog, a general announcement on the admissions website and also with a voicemail recording on our general phone line,” she wrote in a post to her Director’s Blog, but as of this writing, no updates.
So, some details about HBS interview invites. They will go out in two waves, one tomorrow, and a second on February 4th. Historically, HBS has sent out the bulk of its invites in the first wave. Leopold offered that her best guess is that roughly 600 applicants will receive invitations tomorrow, with another 200 or so receiving invitations next week. “I've said this before, but please don't speculate or develop theories or algorithms about first vs. second,” she urged. “It doesn't work that way. And it has nothing to do with when you submitted, where you live, or the first letter of your last name.”
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Published: January 22, 2015
MBA Entrepreneurial Grads Report Significant Payoffs
MBA entrepreneurial grads—specifically those who launched startups during or soon after business school— can expect to make as much as their peers who follow more traditional career paths not long out of school, according to survey data collected as part of the Financial Times’ 2015 business school rankings research.
Of the 7,800 MBA graduates from the world’s top 100 business schools who responded to the FT, 22 percent had launched a start-up. Within three years of graduation, the average annual income of these entrepreneurs was $134,000, compared to $132,000 across the entire sample, the FT reports.
A mere 5 percent of startup founders reported an annual salary of zero three years out, though the FT points out that survey respondents did have an option to not reveal their income level, so the data may not fully reflect the financial risk taking faced by entrepreneurial grads. That said, of the companies launched by survey participants, 84 percent did report still operating a full three years later.
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Published: January 21, 2015
Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business Innovates Its Approach to Admissions
Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business wants applicants to the school to walk away feeling good about their experience, regardless of whether they gain acceptance or ultimately enroll. To this end, the school’s admissions team, led by Associate Dean of MBA Admissions Shari Hubert, launched an innovative initiative last spring to understand the applicant’s entire journey through the admissions process—from the moment they begin to research schools right up to their arrival on campus (for those who are admitted and enroll). Their findings have already begun to reshape the Georgetown McDonough admissions process—for the better, Hubert hopes.
Hubert joined Georgetown McDonough in December 2012, coming from a career in campus recruiting for the Peace Corps, Citigroup and General Electric. “I saw a need for us as an admissions office to be more connected to our customers—prospective applicants—to understand what they were going through and how they experience us as they apply to business school,” Hubert says. An MBA applicant herself once (she holds a degree from Harvard Business School), she remembers how daunting the experience can be. “I wanted to engender goodwill no matter what the outcome,” she says. “I wanted them to walk away saying Georgetown is a wonderful institution that lives its [Jesuit] values.” Of course, she also hoped that by creating a more positive experience for applicants, the school would increase its yield.
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Published: January 20, 2015
ESADE Business School Partners with Finnish University to Offer Innovation and Entrepreneurship Programs
Spain’s ESADE Business School has formed a new international alliance with Finland’s Aalto University, a leader in the field of innovation, to expand its offerings for entrepreneurs, ESADE announced today. Aalto University President Tuula Teeri and ESADE Director General Eugenia Bieto signed an agreement outlining the new partnership this morning at ESADECREAPOLIS, the innovation center located on ESADE’s Barcelona campus.
One of Europe’s newest universities, Aalto was created in 2010 by the merger of Helsinki School of Economics, Helsinki University of Technology and the University of Art and Design Helsinki and has received widespread attention for its innovative blend of management, technology and design.
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Published: January 19, 2015
Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management Enhances Focus on Family Business
The Johnson Graduate School of Management is now home to the new Smith Family Business Initiative, which was endowed earlier this year by at $10 million gift from alumnus John Smith, MBA’ 74, and his wife, Dyan Smith. In September, Daniel Garrett Van Der Vliet joined as the new initiative’s director. Van Der Vliet seems the ideal person for the job, coming to Johnson from the University of Vermont, where he spent 14 years building a highly regarded family business program from the ground up.
The Small Family Business Initiative at Johnson will combine family business-focused courses, case competitions for both MBA and undergraduate students across Cornell and executive education non-degree courses and workshops for those involved in running family enterprises.
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Published: January 18, 2015
Global Network for Advanced Management to Offer Three Courses This Semester
The Global Network for Advanced Management (GNAM), an organization of member schools from around the world devoted to facilitating interaction and collaboration in the study of graduate management education, will offer three courses this semester to students throughout its member schools, GNAM announced. This year’s Global Network courses include two new offerings, one on disruption for leaders working in humanitarian crisis, and another on international management. A third course, on the risks and opportunities in global resource systems, originally taught last year, will be offered again this coming semester.
Global Network courses take advantage of web-based technology to connect students from schools around the globe for both class sessions and team-based project work. The set-up allows students to access the expertise of faculty while also developing key cross-cultural collaboration skills as part of their work in virtual teams. Unlike MOOCs—massive open online courses—the Global Network classes are based on a SNOC—small network online course—model and are therefore only open to students from the top business schools that are members of the GNAM.
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