MBA News
A collection of news items from MBA programs and about the business school admissions process.
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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Published: October 15, 2014
UNC Kenan-Flagler Publishes New MBA Application Guide for Prospective Applicants
MBA@UNC, the online MBA program at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, has just released a new MBA application guide designed to aid prospective applicants in the admissions process. Though produced by Kenan-Flagler, the guide was designed to serve as a resource for students applying to any business school.
Through a series of online articles, MBA@UNC has compiled best practices along with tips and advice for preparing the strongest possible MBA application. Articles in the series delve into topics ranging from choosing between the GMAT and the GRE to how to secure strong letters of recommendation. You’ll also find posts devoted to strengthening your resume, writing compelling essays and acing the interview.
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Published: October 14, 2014
Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business Announces Semi-Finalists in Inaugural Rural Entrepreneurship Challenge
Entrepreneurship has certainly become a buzz word at business schools, but “rural entrepreneurship” is a term you don’t hear quite as often. Unless you’re at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, where rural entrepreneurship is currently front and center.
McDonough yesterday hosted the National Summit on Rural Entrepreneurship, which included the announcement of 10 national semi-finalists in the first-ever Rural Entrepreneurship Challenge. The challenge – a joint venture between the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF), McDonough’s Global Social Enterprise Initiative (GSEI) and the Georgetown Entrepreneurship Initiative’s Startup Hoyas – is an opportunity for individuals to showcase innovation taking place in rural regions of the United States.
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Published: October 13, 2014
Chicago Booth Releases Interview Notification Timeline
Did you apply to the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business Round One this year? Tyler Smith, an Assistant Director of Admissions at Booth, has written a post titled “Behind the Scenes of Round One,” where he provides crucial details of Booth’s admissions process for Round One applicants, including Booth’s timeline for Round One interview notifications. The Admissions Committee at Booth is currently reviewing Round One applications. Applications are read in random order and interview decisions will be made on a rolling basis. Booth will notify candidates whether they have been invited back
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Published: October 8, 2014
Yale School of Management to Host Online Career Panels for Prospective Applicants
The Yale School of Management (SOM) admissions team will kick off a new series of online events later this month designed to showcase for prospective applicants the many MBA career paths the school’s students choose to follow. The live events will each focus on a different industry and will feature relationship managers from the Career Development Office joined by current SOM students.
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Published: October 7, 2014
LinkedIn Launches New University Rankings Tool Charting Career Placement Success
LinkedIn has launched an innovative new rankings system that analyzes career and education data shared by its more than 300 million users to rank undergraduate institutions according to where their graduates land jobs. Violà! You can now use LinkedIn not only to network for jobs following graduation, but also to assess which schools will best position you for the jobs you want before you even reach the job search phase.
Using its vast troves of employment data, LinkedIn analyzes the patterns of individual career choices to define the most desirable jobs, the most desirable companies within professions and the most relevant graduates for those jobs. It then uses these data points to rank universities based on the percentage of relevant graduates who have obtained desirable jobs.
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Published: October 5, 2014
New Loan Program Launches for International MBA Students at U.S. Schools
A new pilot loan program will provide expanded options for international MBA students at a number of top programs in the United States, according to a recent report in Poestandquants. The program, offered by Prodigy Finance, will extend to international students and U.S. residents with non-permanent status who are studying at 16 top schools, including Harvard Business School, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and MIT Sloan School of Management.
Especially in recent years, banks have been reluctant to lend to students who are studying internationally. Prodigy Finance seeks to fill this need using a “community finance” model. Basically, alumni from participating schools fund loans for current students, banking on the value of a degree from their alma mater and the likelihood that future alums will repay. Interest rates on the loans vary between 6 and 12 percent, depending on the school, the individual borrower’s profile and current rates.
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Published: October 5, 2014
Admissions Director Q&A: Itziar de Ros of IESE
Itziar de Ros has been leading the charge since 2011 as MBA admissions director and president of the MBA Admissions Committee at IESE in Barcelona, Spain. She is responsible for global marketing, student selection and administration of scholarships for the IESE MBA class of 280 students.
No stranger to the school, de Ros herself obtained an IESE MBA in 2006. She worked as a marketing and sales consultant at DuPont before returning to IESE in 2007, where she held roles in admissions, marketing and communications and development before stepping into her current role.
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Published: October 1, 2014
Kellogg School of Management Launches New “Inspiring Growth” Brand Strategy
The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University wants to be known for educating leaders who inspire growth, and it’s rolling out a new brand strategy with this in mind, the school announced earlier this month. Part of a larger strategic plan launched four years ago, the new “inspiring growth” theme is intended to capture both what the school has achieved since the overarching Envision Kellogg plan was first implemented and what’s still ahead.
Kellogg Dean Sally Blount noted in a statement that while growth is a challenge faced by every organization, bigger is not always better. "Sometimes growth means pulling back to attain greater clarity and focus,” she said. Kellogg’s new brand strategy – “brave leaders inspire growth in people, organizations and markets” – is intended to spotlight this focus on developing growth-minded leaders, which Kellogg believes sets it apart from its peers.
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Published: September 30, 2014
GMAC Reports Application Volume Growth for Full-Time Two-Year MBA Programs
The number of people applying to full-time two-year MBA programs increased for the third consecutive year, according to recent data from the Graduate Management Admissions Council. GMAC’s 2014 Application Trends Survey, released earlier this week, showed that as two-year programs enjoyed application volume gains, other graduate management programs saw flattening or decreasing numbers of applicants.
The survey also revealed an increasingly global applicant pool, with GMAT testing trends showing that more students are seeking to study outside their country of citizenship. According to GMAC, these candidates make up a sizeable portion of the applicant pool for many MBA and non-MBA graduate management programs.
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