Matthew Korman
Chicago Booth, Northwestern Kellogg Top Economist 2018 Rankings
The newest Economist best MBA rankings for full-time programs is officially out, with two Chicago schools topping the list. The University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management sit at number one and two for 2018. This new ranking is only a modest shift from 2017, when the schools were also first and second, albeit in reverse order. Harvard Business School, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and Stanford Graduate School of Business all maintained the same ranks as 2017; 3rd, 4th, and 5th overall. The University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business rose five places—that’s after jumping nine spots last year in the... Read more »
MIT Sloan Tackles Nike’s Kaepernick Gamble
Shortly after sports manufacturing giant Nike decided to bring on the continually controversial Colin Kaepernick as part of a recent advertising campaign, conversation surrounding the company exploded. For many, the move came off as a huge gamble. But professors at MIT Sloan School of Management argue that it was all about brand authenticity. “It’s hall-of-fame-level type advertising,” Senior Lecturer and Research Scientist Renée Gosline said in a recent piece published by the MIT Sloan Newsroom. “Not to mention the signal it sends given the current climate.” “People think branding or marketing is to sell the most amount of products to the greatest number of... Read more »
20 Cities Make Amazon HQ2 Shortlist—What It Could Mean for MBA Students
When Amazon announced plans to construct a second headquarters, 238 North American cities began tripping over themselves to court the e-commerce behemoth, pulling out all the stops in hopes of advancing to the next round of consideration. New York City’s mayoral office lit up the Empire State building with Amazon’s glowing orange hue in a symbolic gesture, while cities like Chicago took even more extreme measures, such as proposing laws that could funnel income taxes directly back to the company. After much speculation, here is the official Amazon HQ2 shortlist: Unsurprisingly, most of the cities that made the cut were among the largest in... Read more »
Barack Obama to Speak at MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference
Former U.S. President Barack Obama will be among the honorary speakers at this year’s MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, the school announced earlier this week. The 12th annual event will take place at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center February 23rd and 24th. Alongside Obama, the highly publicized conference will feature some of the biggest names in the sports industry, including former Microsoft CEO and Los Angeles Clippers Owner Steve Ballmer, Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred, National Hockey League Commissioner Gary Bettman, National Basketball League Commissioner Adam Silver, and former and professional athletes like Steve Nash, Alex Rodriguez, and Seattle... Read more »
MBA ApplyWire Spotlight: A Future In Banking
MBA applicants are figuring out their target schools for Round 1 and sharing their plans on ApplyWire, Clear Admit’s latest tool to aid in your admissions process. This week, we take a closer look at one candidate trying to find their preferred path in the banking industry with 10 schools on their radar, including: U. Chicago Booth, Dartmouth/Tuck, IESE, Cornell/Johnson, UT Austin/McCombs, UCLA Anderson, UVA/Darden, NYU/Stern, Michigan/Ross, and the London Business School. With a direct path in mind, the candidate highlighted their consulting and asset management background, deciding between social finance at at bulge bracket financial institution or an impact investor. The first... Read more »
MBA ApplyWire Spotlight: Applying to Business School for Brand Management
This week’s MBA ApplyWire Spotlight takes a look at a particularly unique applicant, with a background heavy in nonprofit experience. This candidate has set their sights on six potential business schools: Cornell / Johnson, Dartmouth / Tuck, Duke / Fuqua, Georgetown / McDonough, NYU Stern and UCLA Anderson. Read on for more details about the candidate’s background. Even with so many potential target schools, the first responses suggested an even wider pool of destinations. Another community member offered their own M7 suggestion, making a strong pitch for applying to Harvard Business School. The original poster’s expectations were carefully reserved, but due to some welcoming motivation from the... Read more »
Ross Professors Tackle Trump Era Policies
In the new e-book Economics and Policy in the Age of Trump, University of Michigan Ross School of Business Professors Kyle Handley, Thomas Buchmueller, and Nirupama Rao detail the first policy changes of the early Trump presidency. The authors highlight three of the most pronounced aspects of the Trump administration and its agenda: rhetoric, healthcare, and tax reform. Handley, who co-wrote his section with University of Maryland Professor Nuno Limão, notes that the president’s protectionist-style stances on trade are meaningful–even if he does not act on his promises. Dismantling NAFTA, for example, was a key talking point during the election... Read more »
Duke’s Fuqua School of Business in Kazakhstan: Extends Nazarbayev University Partnership
Durham, North Carolina, and Astana, Kazakhstan, may not be uniformly similar as cities, but each do share a unique bond—one that will now last until 2022. The Duke University Fuqua School of Business recently announced that it will be extending its partnership with Nazarbayev University and the Nazarbayev Graduate School of Business (NUGSB). Both schools have been strategic partners since 2012, just two years after the Kazakhstani university opened. Robert Olinger, director of business development in Kazakhstan, joined a team of Fuqua faculty to instruct how to build a business school in Asia at the start of the project. “The... Read more »
Darden Professor Finds Women Still Aren’t Snagging Enough High-Level Boardroom Roles
On the surface, doubling the number of women in professional board rooms seems like an impressive accomplishment. In 1999, Ernst & Young found that around 11 percent of Fortune 500 board members were women. Eighteen years later, the figure has nearly doubled—to just under 20 percent. Yes, it’s an improvement—but there’s still room to grow, both in the number of women boardroom members and the responsibilities they hold. University of Virginia Darden School of Business Marketing Professor Kimberly A. Whitler and former Procter & Gamble Co. executive Deb Henretta looked into this issue. “We felt all the focus was on getting... Read more »
Johnson Women in Tech to Host Upcoming NYC Conference
Later this week, students from Cornell’s SC Johnson College of Business will host a conference in New York City aimed at bringing more women into the tech industry. Johnson Women in Technology (JWiT) co-chairs and second-year MBA students Tejaswini (TJ) Marathe and Kathryn Ruth Bartlett led the organization of the JWiT Conference, which will take place on Friday, March 3rd, at the Microsoft Technology Center in midtown Manhattan. “Our theme, ‘Tech Together,’ is a call to action for men and women to support women’s success in the tech industry through partnership and mentorship,” the duo said in a press release about the event. “We believe... Read more »
Grads Praise MBA for Helping Land Jobs, Increase Pay, Expand Horizons
In a survey this past fall of 1,000 business school graduates from the Class of 2016, the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), which owns and administers the GMAT, found that the vast majority is highly satisfied with the decision to seek an MBA. For starters, more than one in four graduates surveyed (28 percent) told GMAC they joined an industry completely different from the one they considered prior to starting business school. This data point, argues GMAC, serves to highlight how a graduate management education can expand graduates’ career horizons. Reports of rising salaries and high levels of job satisfaction further support... Read more »
New Innovations Are Revamping the Tuck MBA
Leadership, a global mindset and community inclusivity. Four years ago, the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College identified these three concepts as principal tenants that would drive new innovations of its MBA program spearheaded by Associate Dean Praveen Kopalle. The tenants were identified by a task force and were based on student surveys and a study conducted by the Parthenon Group. The result of Tuck’s initiative is a series of six innovations designed to enhance the MBA program and student experience, outlined in a recent article by Tuck Senior Writer Kirk Kardashian entitled “Innovate to Educate.” In the piece that... Read more »
Major Companies Call Out Trump On Immigration Ban
Days after the Ninth Circuit Court of the United States halted President Donald Trump’s temporary ban of immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries, the aftereffects are still echoing. The executive order, the legality of which could still be decided by the Supreme Court, created a wave of protests across the United States. Alongside several universities, many of the more prominent voices in the dissent came from the country’s largest major companies, including Apple and Google. Shortly after the order was initially announced Apple CEO Tim Cook said, ”Apple would not exist without immigration, let alone thrive and innovate the way we... Read more »
Suggestive Mr. Clean Earns Kellogg Super Bowl Ad Review Top Honors
New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady and coach Bill Belichick may have taken home the most coveted awards after Super Bowl LI, but Mr. Clean was also one of the night’s biggest winners. The slightly suggestive commercial for the Procter & Gamble cleaning company beat out Bai, Febreze and Skittles in the 13th annual “Super Bowl Ad Review” at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. Lumber 84 and American Petroleum earned the lowest honors on the list for advertisements that were potentially confusing and overly long. While most of this year’s headline-grabbing advertisements were a bit more poignant, tackling themes of immigration and... Read more »
Darden Couple Finds Business in Sweat
It began as a joke. “It started out as a complete prank,” recalls Matt Loftus, speaking with UVA Today staff writer Caroline Newman. Just before joining the University of Virginia Darden School of Business in 2014, Loftus and his fiancé Kristina Zambelli had a running joke. A friend of theirs had ordered a pair of bright orange pants, which they had begun to pass around for fun photo opportunities. “To beat the joke to death, we even started an Instagram account called the Brotherhood of the Traveling Pants,” Loftus, who graduated from Darden in May 2016, explains. The idea began... Read more »
Johnson $150 M Gift Renames Cornell College of Business
Celebrating a relationship that spans four generations, SC Johnson Chairman and CEO Fisk Johnson has endowed $150 million to the Cornell University College of Business network of schools. By far the largest gift in the school’s history, it is indeed among the largest gifts ever to a leading business school. Stanford Graduate School of Business received an equivalent $150 million gift in 2011, and David Booth’s 2008 naming gift to the University of Chicago Booth School of Business currently holds the record at $300 million. Although Stephen Ross, for whom the University of Michigan Ross School of Business is named, gave $200 million, it... Read more »
Inside the Revamped Ross Admissions Process
As you navigate the MBA application process, do you ever feel like the websites, brochures and talking points for top MBA programs have blended together? Indeed, it has become more important than ever for schools to rely on innovative ways to differentiate themselves. At the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, the carefully curated process of admissions is ever evolving. Director of Admissions Soojin Kwon is known for putting a particularly personal fingerprint on the process, posting videos and written messages to a behind-the-scenes blog throughout the year. In a recent interview, Kwon, who joined Ross admissions... Read more »
Trump Appoints Controversial UC Irvine Professor Peter Navarro
Peter Navarro, a professor of economics at UC Irvine’s Paul Merage School of Business and one of the nation’s harshest critics of China, has just earned a seat on President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet. As a professor with the business school for more than 20 years, Navarro penned nine books, most of which unmistakably mark China as a threat to the United States and the world at large. Several of his published works include The Coming China Wars, Death by China: Confronting the Dragon—A Global Call to Action and Crouching Tiger: What China’s Militarism Means for the World. Death By China was also... Read more »
Black Friday 2016 MBA Guide: Laptops
Earlier this year, we took a look at “The Right Laptops For MBA Students.” But, as it is with most large purchases, the market tends to change very quickly. Plus with the holiday season ready to go into full swing, it’s a pretty good time to go shopping again. Here are some of this year’s best deals on laptops perfect for MBA students. There are several important distinctions students must recognize before committing to a purchase. First, will your new computer function for both work and personal use? What is your budget? And what are the most vital components when... Read more »
