MBA News
A collection of news items from MBA programs and about the business school admissions process.
Published: November 30, 2014
UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business Donors Break Record in One-Day Online Fundraiser
The University of California at Berkeley recently launched a single-day online fundraiser, and participating students from the Haas School of Business outnumbered those from any of the university’s other schools.
The Big Give, UC Berkeley's first-ever 24-hour campus-wide online fundraiser, kicked off at 9 p.m. on Wednesday, November 19th. When it ended 24 hours later, Berkeley-Haas had raised about $561,000 from 651 donors, the school reports.
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Published: November 27, 2014
New Computerized Matching Process Replaces Course Auctions at UPenn’s Wharton School
Professors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School have developed a new process for MBA course selection, one they think is more fair, less stressful and less time-consuming than traditional course auctions, the Financial Times reports. Called Course Match, the new system involves a single round of bidding by students, after which 10 high-powered servers spend 12 hours running algorithms to allocate courses.
Wharton professors decided four or five years ago that the auction system then in place wasn’t working as they had intended it to. Some students (especially former financial traders) were fairing really well in the auction system, in which class seats were allocated like shares issues. But others were getting inferior schedules. The process was also stressful and time intensive, requiring students to predict the bidding strategies of their peers and go through eight rounds of bidding.
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Published: November 25, 2014
Columbia Business School Shares Updates on J-Term Admits, Regular Decision Interview Invites
Columbia Business School (CBS) has completed its Early Decision and J-term application review and will welcome approximately 200 new students as part of its January intake, the CBS Admission Committee announced earlier this week. Of those, roughly half come to CBS from international locations.
After taking a week’s hiatus from reviewing Regular Decision applications, the Adcom will pick up where it left off after the Thanksgiving holiday and expects to release the first interview invitations during the first week of December.
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Published: November 24, 2014
Chicago Booth School of Business Partners with U of I College of Engineering
A new partnership between the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the University of Illinois (U of I) College of Engineering promises to spur entrepreneurship by allowing top MBA and engineering students to combine their talents and expertise on joint startup ventures, Crain’s Chicago Business reported last month.
Previously, Chicago Booth MBA students hoping to pursue entrepreneurial ventures requiring engineering know-how were at a disadvantage because the University of Chicago Booth has no engineering school. U of I’s College of Engineering, located in Urbana-Champaign, is one of the 10 best engineering schools in the country – making the partnership with top-ranked Chicago Booth a natural fit. The collaboration is one the schools hope will prove mutually beneficial.
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Published: November 23, 2014
Indian School of Business to Award 10 Merit-Based Full Tuition-Fee Waivers
As part of a new initiative this year, Indian School of Business (ISB) is offering 10 full tuition-fee waivers to the school's top 10 applicants this admissions season. These full waivers – valued at INR 2 million (roughly $66,000) – complement a range of other merit scholarships the school awards to applicants based on leadership potential, past academic performance and personal attributes.
No application is necessary for these new full tuition-fee waivers. Simply complete the ISB application. The Admissions Committee will select the recipients based on its evaluation of all of the candidates. The top 10 candidates, as measured by a combination of academic strength, leadership potential, work experience and other attributes, will be awarded the full tuition-fee waivers. Recipients will be notified of this decision at the time of admission.
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Published: November 20, 2014
CMU’s Tepper School of Business Celebrates Global Entrepreneurship Week 2014
It’s been a busy week at the Tepper School of Business and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) overall, where students have been partaking in a global celebration of innovation and entrepreneurship.
Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) 2014 began on November 17th and will continue through November 23rd. Observed in 140 countries worldwide, GEW was launched in 2008 to inspire “people everywhere through local, national and global activities designed to help them take the next step in their entrepreneurial journey.”
At Tepper and CMU, the week has included a series of campus-wide events designed to showcase and support the school’s thriving entrepreneurial spirit. Proceedings have included everything from fireside chats and open office hours with venture capitalists to an elevator pitch competition and a startup job fair. Throughout the week, CMU campus experts in new business creation, along with stakeholders in venture capital and community development, have delivered lectures and workshops for aspiring innovators and entrepreneurs.
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Published: November 18, 2014
London Business School Incubator Welcomes Eleven New Start Ups
London Business School (LBS) has selected 11 MBA entrepreneurs to join its Incubator program, where they will receive a year of support in launching their new business ventures, the school announced earlier this month. The Incubator is an initiative of the school’s Deloitte Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
The Incubator’s one-year support package includes an injection of cash for each of the 11 graduate entrepreneurs, as well as office space, professional support from Deloitte, Landor Associates and LBS alumni, access to training and workshops and an invitation to attend the Enterprise 100 members-only Annual Dinner, an event where entrepreneurs will get the network with angel investors, showcase their businesses and receive advice on crafting their business pitches.
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Published: November 17, 2014
INSEAD Launches Emerging Markets Institute on Singapore Campus
INSEAD has launched a new think tank focused on emerging markets, the school announced earlier this month. Developed in partnership with the Singapore Economic Development Board (SEDB), the Emerging Markets Institute (EMI) will be housed on INSEAD’s Asia campus in Singapore.
The new research institute is designed to leverage INSEAD’s intellectual capital and global reputation – the school also features campuses in France and Abu Dhabi – as well as Singapore’s spirit of innovation and foresight to find solutions to the challenges facing emerging economies.
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Published: November 13, 2014
Yale School of Management Hosts Inaugural Low Carbon Case Competition
The Yale School of Management (SOM) today is welcoming student teams from around the world for its inaugural National Low Carbon Institutional Investing Case Competition, the first of its kind in the United States. The event was planned by a Yale SOM student group in collaboration with the school’s International Center for Finance.
Competing teams will be challenged to devise a strategy to help a hypothetical university lower the carbon intensity of its investment portfolio – and in so doing help address the risks of climate change on the university’s endowment and society as a whole.
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Published: November 12, 2014
David Petraeus Speaks to Veteran MBA Students at USC Marshall School of Business
Retired four-star general and former CIA Director David Petraeus spoke to students in the Master of Business for Veterans (MBV) program at the USC Marshall School of Business late last week, sharing his views on strategic leadership at is applies to business.
Fifty active-duty military members and veterans make up Marshall’s one-year MBV program, now in its second year. The MBV program caters to current and former military who want to build foundational management skills while also learning how to transfer the management and leadership experience gained through their service to the private sector.
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Published: November 11, 2014
Demystifying the Mysterious World of Business School Rankings
It’s not every day that MBA rankings end up trending on Facebook, and yet yesterday that’s exactly what happened. When Bloomberg BusinessWeek released its biennial ranking of full-time MBA programs, the results shocked many and created quite a buzz. According to Bloomberg BW’s most recent calculations, Duke’s Fuqua School of Business has stolen the number one spot, knocking Harvard Business School out of the top five for the first time in history.
Just how did Bloomberg BW decide which programs rose to the top and which fell from grace? As it turns out, the Martin J. Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University just a few weeks ago released an infographic that provides a clear and concise overview showcasing the rankings methodologies employed by five major publications: Bloomberg BW, along with U.S. News & World Report, the Financial Times, the Economist and Forbes.
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Published: November 10, 2014
Duke’s Fuqua School of Business Tops Latest Bloomberg BusinessWeek Ranking
Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business shot to the top of Bloomberg Businessweek’s biennial ranking of full-time MBA programs, released today, up from No. 6 two years ago. In the process, the North Carolina school unseated the reigning University of Chicago Booth School of Business and pushed Harvard Business School (HBS) out of the top five for the first time in the history of the rankings.
The formula Bloomberg BW employs to arrive at its rankings is as follows: 45 percent of the score is based on how recruiters rate MBA hires from the school, another 45 percent is determined by how graduating MBAs judge their program and the remaining 10 percent is based on faculty productivity, as measured by a tally of research published in leading journals.
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Published: November 9, 2014
U.S. GMAT Percentile Scores Drop as Asia-Pacific Test Takers Dominate Quant Section
Increasing numbers of prospective business school applicants from Asia-Pacific countries such as India and China are taking the GMAT and outperforming U.S. students on the quantitative portion of the exam, according to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal. As a result, though U.S. students’ raw scores have remained consistent over the past several years, their percentile ranking has slipped as more higher-scoring international applicants take the exam.
The lower percentile rankings can seem to suggest that U.S. student aptitude is declining, GMAC CEO Sangeet Chowfla told the Journal. Ten years ago, a raw score of 48 on the quantitative section (for which scores typically range between 0 and 51) would have yielded a ranking in the 86th percentile, whereas today the same raw score places a test-taker in just the 74th percentile.
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Published: November 4, 2014
Stanford Graduate School of Business to Launch New Ignite NYC Program
Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) is taking its Ignite program for innovators to the Big Apple, the school announced recently. It will launch its New York-based Stanford Ignite program in March 2015.
The nine-week, part-time program – aimed at participants with strong scientific, medical or technical backgrounds who don’t have advanced business degrees – was developed to help teach innovators how get their ideas to market. The New York program is one of six Ignite programs now offered in cities around the world to help expand access to Silicon Valley and Stanford’s entrepreneurship and management education.
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Published: November 3, 2014
Columbia Business School to Offer “StreetWise ‘MBA’” Curriculum for Small Neighborhood Businesses
The Columbia-Harlem Small Business Development Center at Columbia Business School (CBS) this winter will unveil a new “StreetWise ‘MBA’” curriculum designed to help neighborhood small businesses grow. The curriculum will cover topics including financial management, marketing and sales, human resources tactics, business strategy development and access to capital and new contracts.
The new program is supported by Citi Community Development, a division of global bank Citi, and uses a curriculum created by Interise, a nonprofit committed to helping underserved small businesses scale. Already in use in 36 other communities across the nation, the StreetWise MBA curriculum allows small business owners to focus on their own operations rather than study other businesses, in contrast to many other continuing education programs.
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Published: November 2, 2014
Wharton MBA Class of 2014 Career Report Reveals Record Job Offers
A whopping 98.2 percent of Wharton MBA Class of 2014 students seeking employment received full-time offers, according to a career report released today by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. That’s an improvement over last year’s 97.8 percent, which was itself the best number the school had seen in more than 10 years.
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Published: October 30, 2014
Stanford Graduate School of Business Calls It Quits for MBA Admission Blog
Don’t look for future posts on the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) MBA Admissions Blog. In a final entry earlier this week, the school announced that it was saying goodbye to its blog. All prior blog content will remain accessible through mid-December, after which prospective applicants will need to keep up with news and developments regarding Stanford MBA admissions via other means.
“Our blog has begun to resemble a Tesla at a gas station,” wrote admissions staffer Victoria Hendel De La O as part of a final post on October 29th. She attributed the decline of the blog to the school’s increasing reliance on other forms of social media to communicate updates. Indeed, posts to the Stanford MBA Admissions blog have grown increasingly infrequent over the past year – with the last post going up back in June.
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Published: October 29, 2014
Dean’s Speaker Series Draws Janet Napolitano, Biz Stone to UC Berkeley’s Haas School
Two big names will visit the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley next week to address MBA students as part of the school’s Dean’s Speaker Series. Janet Napolitano, president of the University of California system and the former United States Secretary of Homeland Security, will share leadership lessons on November 4th, and Biz Stone, co-founder and CEO of Jelly Industries and co-founder of Twitter, will talk about his experiences on November 6th.
Speaking on Election Day, Napolitano is scheduled to answer questions about the political climate in both California and the nation as a whole. She will also address the challenge of getting more young people involved in politics and public service, as well as her own leadership approach, her experiences as a female in leadership and more.
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Published: October 28, 2014
Stanford Graduate School of Business Launches New International Policy and Business Dual-Degree Program
The Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) has partnered with the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences to offer a new dual MA/MBA program for students who wish to study international policy and business, the schools announced this week. Interested candidates may apply to the new program beginning this fall.
Students who complete the three-year program will be awarded two degrees, an MBA from Stanford GSB and an MA from the Ford Dorsey Program in International Policy Studies (IPS) at the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences.
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Published: October 23, 2014
UPenn’s Wharton School to Send Round 1 Interview Invitations October 31st
The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School will send invitations to interview out to Round 1 applicants on Friday, October 31st, according to a recent post on the school’s MBA Admissions Blog. Applicants who snag one of these coveted interview spots will have an opportunity to take part in Wharton’s Team-Based Discussion interviews in a range locations around the globe.
For Round 1, off-campus interviews will be held in Dubai, London, Mumbai, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore and Tokyo. Candidates can also, of course, choose to interview on campus in Philadelphia. “All invited candidates are encouraged to interview on-campus or in the off-campus location that is most convenient for you,” the MBA Admissions Team wrote on its blog.
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Published: October 22, 2014
U.S. News & World Report Ranks Business Schools by Graduates’ Indebtedness
Rankings of graduate management education programs abound, each with their own particular criteria for assessing which business schools ultimately come out on top. Separate from its overall business school rankings, U.S. News & World Report recently used data collected from schools to determine the top 10 programs from which MBA students graduate with the most debt.
The number one spot goes to Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, where full-time MBA students from the 2013 class who borrowed for business school had an average indebtedness of $108,186. Fuqua’s full-time MBA students had more debt than any of the other 86 ranked institutions, according to data submitted to U.S. News.
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Published: October 21, 2014
Majority of Business Schools Now Accept GRE, But More Applicants Stick with GMAT
A whopping 85 percent of U.S. business schools now accept the GRE as an admissions test alternative to the GMAT, according to a 2014 survey by Kaplan Test Prep. That’s up from only 24 percent of business schools who said they accepted the GRE in 2009, when Kaplan first began tracking the issue. GRE acceptance by business schools has been growing steadily year over year, Kaplan reports.
But even as more schools report accepting scores from the GRE, most MBA applicants are still choosing to submit scores from the more traditional GMAT. More than half of the admissions officers surveyed by Kaplan this year reported that only one in 10 or fewer applicants chose to submit GRE scores instead of GMAT scores, representing a slight increase from Kaplan’s past surveys.
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Published: October 20, 2014
New Light Installation Commissioned for MIT Sloan School of Management Main Building
When Building E52, the main facility for the MIT Sloan School of Management, reopens after extensive renovations in January 2016, it will feature a new light installation by artist Leo Villareal, the school announced recently.
Villareal, who last year created The Bay Lights on the San Francisco Bay Bridge West Span, was recently awarded an MIT Percent-for-Art commission to create a light installation for MIT’s Building E52. His plans for E52 include a light sculpture in the north vestibule of the building as part of a new, glass-enclosed entrance. The sculpture will feature 240 hanging LED rods – each approximately 9 feet tall with 72 individual LEDs – arranged from the ceiling in rows. As part of the work, Villareal will create a software code programming the LEDs to cycle through a randomly generated series of combinations.
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Published: October 19, 2014
UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business Awards Scholarships to Half of Full-time MBA Class
The Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley set a new record this year, awarding scholarships to a full half of its entering full-time MBA class, the school announced earlier this month. In all, Haas will provide almost $6 million in scholarship aid to students across its three MBA programs, with an average award of $26,000 for students in the full-time MBA program.
“It’s a real tipping point, and we plan to continue the trend of providing the highest level of financial support possible to help our students achieve their academic goals,” Daniel Roddick, Haas director of financial aid, said in a statement.
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Published: October 16, 2014
Bloomberg Businessweek Unveils Social Media Campaign #WhyMBA
Yesterday, Bloomberg Businessweek launched #WhyMBA, a social media campaign designed to get MBA hopefuls, students, alumni, and business leaders talking about the value of a graduate education in business. The #WhyMBA campaign is part of the run-up to the release of Bloomberg Businessweek’s full-time MBA program rankings on Tuesday, November 11. Every day until the release, Bloomberg will post daily questions on Twitter with the hashtag #WhyMBA, and track the ensuing conversation on the campaign’s website. The Business Education Editor of Bloomberg Businessweek, Francesca Levy, explains that Businessweek created the social media campaign to prompt a wider look at business education.
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