MBA News
A collection of news items from MBA programs and about the business school admissions process.
Published: October 7, 2013
UPenn’s Wharton School Sees Uptick in Round One Applicant Volume
The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School saw an increase this year in the number of applications submitted by its Round One deadline last week, according to the deputy vice dean for admissions, financial aid and career management. “If you believe that application volume is an indicator of the relevance of an MBA program, then I am pleased to announce that our Round One numbers are up,” wrote Deputy Vice Dean Maryellen Lamb in a post to the Wharton MBA Admissions blog yesterday. She did not disclose how much Round One application volume increased.
Lamb’s comment referred to a Wall Street Journal article last week that questioned whether four years of declining application volume to the Philadelphia school might be an indicator that it had fallen from its long-held position as one of the most elite MBA programs in the world. Wharton’s Director of Admissions Ankur Kumar also announced last week that she was leaving her position to pursue other opportunities effective October 4th. Lamb, who was promoted earlier this year from her position as director of MBA Career Management to the role of deputy vice dean overseeing admissions, financial aid and career management, will lead the admissions department following Kumar’s departure.
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Published: October 6, 2013
Duke’s Fuqua School of Business Unveils New Energy Finance Concentration, Sustainability Courses
The Fuqua School of Business at Duke University last month announced its launch of a new concentration in energy finance, as well as two new courses focused on sustainability.
The new energy finance concentration, which comes as an addition to the school’s existing concentration in energy and environment, will allow MBA students to explore issues like project finance, markets and trading, corporate finance and risk management in greater depth, while also providing them with the fundamentals of global energy markets. With its launch, Fuqua has become the only MBA program in the BusinessWeek 10 top-ranked schools to offer such an energy finance focus.
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Published: October 3, 2013
INSEAD Appoints Interim Dean Ilian Mihov to Permanent Role
Leading international business school INSEAD this week appointed Professor Ilian Mihov as its official dean. Mihov, who is currently interim dean of the school, will be INSEAD’s first dean to be based in Asia, though he will travel frequently between INSEAD’s three campuses in Fontainebleau, France; Singapore and Abu Dhabi to engage the school’s entire global community. A newly appointed deputy dean and full academic and administrative team will ensure that INSEAD’s presence in Europe – its home for the past 53 years – will remain strong.
“We are fortunate that our predecessors foresaw the rise of globalization and established a school destined to be the pioneer in the internationalization of business and education,” Mihov said in a statement. He pledged in his new role to uphold the values of the school’s founders, nurture its intellectual environment, support innovation in teaching and increase the school’s reputation.
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Published: October 2, 2013
MIT Sloan Launches New Healthcare Certificate Program
With dissension over the Affordable Care Act fueling a government shutdown, MIT Sloan School of Management has chosen an apropos time to launch a new certificate program addressing U.S. healthcare challenges. Of course, the concerns that led to the program’s creation – including the fact that the nation’s healthcare spending is escalating at a rate far exceeding inflation even as access to care lags behind most other developed nations – aren’t new.
The Healthcare Certificate program, launched October 1st, will help formalize a range of activities around healthcare and health management already taking place at the school. Students pursuing the certificate will take core courses on healthcare delivery in the United States, the economics of healthcare and general medical science. After completing these required courses, they can select from several elective courses. Participating students will also all be required to enroll in an action learning lab, such as the school’s new Healthcare Lab (H-Lab), an intensive, team-based project course that includes on-site work at a U.S. health organization.
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Published: October 2, 2013
Clear Admit Career Services Director Q&A: Stephen Rakas of the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University
Stephen Rakas has been in career services with the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon for the past 10 years and in his current role as executive director of the Career Opportunities Center (COC) since 2011. His previous experience includes four years in career services with the University of Pittsburgh and an additional decade of experience in general management and sales in industries ranging from healthcare to high-end retail.
“I discovered earlier in my career that serving as a conduit between the academic and business environments was a strong match with my skills and interests,” he told us. “I’m passionate about higher education, and the opportunity to help students transition their academic achievements into the world of work is very rewarding.”
Check out the interview below, in which he describes the comprehensive Base Camp Orientation all Tepper students undergo before classes even begin, explains why all the members of the COC team devote time both to counseling students and to maintaining relationships with employers and more.
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Published: October 1, 2013
Admissions Director Ankur Kumar Resigns from UPenn’s Wharton School
The admissions director at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School will leave her post this Friday, October 4th, according to an email sent by Wharton Dean Tom Robertson to the school’s faculty and staff this morning. The Wall Street Journal also reported the news, noting that the school had declined its requests for comment but that according to several sources Kumar informed her staff of her decision last week.
A Wharton alumna, Kumar has been a member of the admissions team for the past four years, serving since 2011 as director of admissions and financial aid. In his email announcing her departure, Dean Robertson praised Kumar for helping the school reach unprecedented female enrollment (women now number more than 40% of the student body) as well as for introducing several innovations in admissions, including the “Team Based Discussion,” a group interview format launched last year.
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Published: September 30, 2013
Clear Admit Chats with Dean Bob Bruner of UVA’s Darden School of Business
When Bob Bruner, dean of the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Virginia, casually mentioned getting together over a cup of tea in Philadelphia last month, Clear Admit jumped at the chance. It’s not every day that the dean of a top-ranked MBA program proposes meeting up – in our own city no less. It would turn out to be just a part of what makes Bruner unlike some other deans.
A member of the Darden faculty since 1982 and its dean since 2005, Bruner has long promoted Darden’s commitment to high-engagement teaching and to fostering a collaborative community-oriented ethic among its students. His efforts have won him multiple leading teaching awards at the University of Virginia and within the Commonwealth of Virginia, as well as designation as 2012 “Dean of the Year” by Forbes/CNN Money and PoetsandQuants.
Bruner has long set himself apart as a dean who blogs and tweets regularly, hoping to share his unique perspectives with a wider audience. “There are few deans that blog about their own work or the world around them or higher education,” he told us. “I think that’s a shame. I think deans have a lot to say that could inform the way all the stakeholders at business schools engage their schools and shape expectations about the schools.”
For more on what Bruner has to say – on topics ranging from gender equity and the MBA to growth in massive open online courses (MOOCs) to the ways graduate management education must adapt to and embrace globalization – read on.
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Published: September 29, 2013
Wharton Needs to Better Showcase What’s Right with Wharton
Swirling debate picked up this week in the realm of top MBA programs, fueled by a Wall Street Journal article on Friday entitled, “What’s Wrong with Wharton?” The Journal piece hinged on a notable 12 percent drop in applications to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School over the past four years. Against a backdrop of gains in application volume by several other top schools in the same time period, Wharton’s drop did seem to beg the question of what’s wrong.
The Journal article suggests that behind the falling application volume is the fact that Wharton – with its indisputable strength in finance – didn’t shift quickly enough or significantly enough in the wake of the financial crisis to attract students more drawn to post-MBA careers in fields like technology and entrepreneurship. The Journal also called attention to Wharton’s slide in several top MBA rankings: The Philadelphia school has for the past several years consistently finished behind the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Harvard Business School and Stanford Graduate School of Business rather than holding steady as one of the top three business schools in the world.
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Published: September 26, 2013
London Business School Receives $40 Million Gift, Hopes to Reach $160 Million in Five Years
Billionaire Israeli industrialist Idan Ofer has given $40 million to his alma mater, London Business School (LBS), to help fund the transformation of a historic London building into a new state-of-the-art educational facility, the school announced yesterday. The gift, made through the Batia and Idan Ofer Family Foundation, is the largest in the school’s history and kicks off a fundraising campaign LBS hopes will raise $160 million over the next five years. Ofer’s gift will help transform Old Marylebone Town Hall, acquired by LBS last year, and fund construction of a new three-story building featuring six lecture theatres, a
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Published: September 25, 2013
UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School Debuts New MBA App for Prospective Applicants
Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina this week released a new app for iPad and iPhone designed to help prospective applicants to business school evaluate whether, when and where to pursue an MBA degree.
The MBA App, available for free download in the Apple App Store, was designed to help prospective applicants navigate key “pain points” surrounding the decision to pursue an MBA, Kenan-Flagler Admissions Director Sherry Wallace said in a statement. “Our admissions team listened to the issues that prospective students pondered, and then developed useful information that helps them address those questions and provides valuable information about the process,” she continued.
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Published: September 24, 2013
Applicant Volume for Full-Time MBA Programs on the Rise
A majority of U.S. business schools reported year-over-year growth in full-time MBA applicant volume for the first time since 2009, according to new data from the Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC). For the class that started this year, the median number of applications for full-time, two-year MBA programs rose by nearly 12 percent worldwide, GMAC reports.
GMAC, which administers the GMAT entrance exam, surveyed 683 graduate programs at 328 schools worldwide for its latest Application Trends Survey, the results of which were released yesterday. Application volume increased at 50 percent of two-year programs responding to the survey, up from 43 percent a year ago. Interest in one-year MBA programs also climbed, with 49 percent of programs surveyed reporting a rise in applicant volume this year over last, as compared to 47 percent last year.
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Published: September 22, 2013
UC Berkeley Haas School of Business to Offer New and Retooled Online Classes
Following its pilot last year of a range of new online courses for its MBA students, the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley is expanding its online offerings while also reworking some of the initial courses based on feedback from students and professors.
One of the three pilots offered online last year was “Power and Politics,” a popular MBA course taught by Professor Cameron Anderson. This year, the course will be offered again, but with a revamped website and platform designed to be more intuitive to use. Faster download times are also expected to improve the student experience, allowing for conversation that “mimics the in-person experience as much as possible, with back-and-forth and even spontaneous interjections,” Anderson said as part of an article on the Haas website. He noted that he got to hear from many more people as part of the online version of the class, through online class discussions and chats.
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Published: September 19, 2013
UPenn’s Wharton School Teams with Sirius XM to Launch New Business Channel
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania has partnered with Sirius XM Radio to launch a new full-time radio channel focused on business and management, the school announced earlier this week. “Business Radio Powered by the Wharton School,” as the new channel is called, will feature around-the-clock programming on a wide range of business topics, as well as a live, call-in format giving millions of listeners access to Wharton faculty, alumni and expert guests.
Expected to launch in early 2014, Business Radio will broadcast from the Wharton campus and Silicon Valley via satellite on Sirius XM channel 111, through the Sirius XM Internet Radio App on smartphones and other devices and online at siriusxm.com. Programming – targeting business owners, entrepreneurs, executives and would-be entrepreneurs – will feature Wharton professors and alumni as regular weekly hosts, as well as an array of special guests, including executives, entrepreneurs, innovators and other experts.
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Published: September 17, 2013
NYU Stern School of Business Launches New Event Series for Prospective Applicants
New York University’s Stern School of Business this month will launch a new series of events designed to connect prospective MBA applicants with Stern faculty and provide a glimpse of the Stern MBA experience.
“The Future of Business” event series will kick off on Saturday, September 28th, at 10 a.m. with a panel discussion on financial services and real estate. Three Stern professors – former investment banker Charles Murphy, Stern Center for Real Estate Finance Research Director Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, and Robert Whitelaw, chair of Stern’s finance department – will speak in a TED-talk format, after which participants will have a chance to mingle with admissions officers and students from Stern’s full-time MBA, Langone MBA for Working Professionals and Executive MBA programs.
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Published: September 16, 2013
Harvard Business School Admissions Continues Transparency Trend with Note to Round 1 Applicants
Applicants who submitted an application earlier this week as part of Harvard Business School (HBS)’s Round 1 received a prompt confirmation email direct from Dee Leopold, HBS director of admissions and financial aid. In it, Leopold continued HBS’s increasing trend toward transparency in the admissions process by spelling out in clear, down-to-earth terms just want applicants should expect from this point forward.
A senior team will begin reviewing submitted applications within a day or so of the September 16th Round 1 deadline, Leopold wrote, and this team will make decisions about who moves forward and who doesn’t.
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Published: September 15, 2013
UPenn’s Wharton School Offers Free MBA Foundation Series Classes Online
The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania has added a new series of massive open online courses (MOOCs) covering many of the fundamentals of business and management that students in Wharton’s full-time MBA program learn, taught by the same professors. The first of the Wharton MBA Foundation Series, “An Introduction to Financial Accounting,” begins today.
Three other courses make up the new series – introductory courses in operations management, marketing and corporate finance – and all are available via the free online platform Coursera. The new series complements five elective courses already on offer from Wharton via Coursera, including courses on sports business and healthcare. All nine are expected to draw students from around the world, and more than 695,000 students have so far enrolled in a Wharton course, Coursera reports.
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Published: September 12, 2013
Harvard Business School Startup HourlyNerd Raises $750,000 in Seed Funding
A startup founded by Harvard Business School (HBS) students as part of a required first-year class secured $750,000 in seed funding earlier this week, including $450,000 from angel investor and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, the Boston Business Journal reports. HourlyNerd, co-founded by Rob Biederman, Peter Maglathlin, David Connolly, Patrick Petitti and Joe Miller, is an online platform designed to connect small and mid-sized businesses with MBAs from top schools willing to provide freelance and part-time work.
The idea was born as part of HBS Professor Clayton Rose’s Field Immersion Experiences for Leadership Development (FIELD) course, an experiential learning course added as a first-year requirement as part of HBS’s recent curriculum redesign. Through the HourlyNerd platform, businesses can post descriptions of the projects they need help with, and MBAs within the network can bid on work they are interested in by indicating the hourly rate they would charge and the milestones they intend to hit. Within its database, the startup boasts roughly 900 current MBA students and recent graduates from top programs including Stanford, Tuck and Wharton.
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Published: September 10, 2013
UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business Opens New Innovation Lab
The Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley is home to a new 2,700-square-foot Innovation Lab where students can participate in more team-based and experiential learning, primarily as part of the school’s innovative leader curriculum. The new I-Lab, located inside Berkeley’s Memorial Stadium, was made possible thanks to a gift from alumnus Michael Gallagher, BS ‘67, MBA ‘68, former Haas Board chairman and retired CEO of Playtex Products. Haas Lecturer Clark Kellogg and Senior Lecturer Sara Beckman, who teach the school’s “Problem Finding Problem Solving” course, taught the first class in the new labratory space on
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Published: September 9, 2013
Shifts in Global Healthcare Increase Intersection between Medicine and the MBA
Entrepreneurship, innovation and cost cutting are increasingly important amid shifts in global healthcare systems, presenting important opportunities for business schools offering healthcare-focused MBA programs, the Financial Times reports.
“The healthcare system is about much more than just treating patients,” Steve Chick, head of INSEAD’s Healthcare Management Initiative, told the FT. “The coordination of care is critical and that’s where business schools can play a big role.”
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Published: September 8, 2013
Harvard Business School Tackles Entrenched Issues of Gender Inequity
Harvard Business School (HBS) Dean Nitin Nohria has, for the past two years, been leading a school-wide effort to foster greater success among female MBA students by making changes to the school’s curriculum, rules and social rituals, according to a recent front-page story in the New York Times.
HBS for years has seen women enter the school with the same test scores and grades as their male counterparts, only to quickly fall behind. The school has also struggled to attract and retain female professors. So in 2010, the Times reports, Harvard’ first female president, Drew Gilpin Faust, appointed Dean Nohria, who pledged to address the gender relations issue head on. Two years in, the school reports remarkable gains among women, though some of the changes implemented by the administration have met with opposition and hostility.
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Published: September 5, 2013
Wharton Start-Up Expands to Lend to MBA Students at 20 Top Schools
A company launched last fall by students at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School experienced success in its pilot phase, during which it served as a lender to Wharton MBA students and recent graduates, and so this fall will launch nationally to lend to MBA students at 20 top MBA programs in the United States, the Financial Times reports.
Wharton student David Klien is chief executive and co-founder of CommonBond, which last year lent $2.5 million to 40 MBA students and recent graduates from Wharton using funds raised primarily through crowdsourcing. Now, the start-up has raised more than $100 million through debt financing and selling equity. It will expand to offer low-interest loans to MBA students at business schools throughout the country, including Harvard Business School, Stanford Graduate School of Business, Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, Columbia Business School and others.
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Published: September 3, 2013
U Michigan Alumnus Gives an Additional $200 Million to Ross School of Business, Athletics
Real estate developer and alumnus Stephen M. Ross will give $100 million to the University of Michigan business school that already bears his name and another $100 million to U-M Athletics, the university announced today. His most recent gift is the largest in the university’s history from a single donor. With lifetime giving of $313 million, he is the third-largest donor to a United States business school.
Ross, who earned his bachelor of business administration in accounting from the University of Michigan School of Business, as well as two subsequent law degrees elsewhere, made an earlier gift of $100 million in 2004 toward construction of a new building and endowed operations for the business school. That building, which was named in Ross’s honor, was completed in 2009.
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Published: September 2, 2013
UNC Kenan-Flagler School of Business Appoints Former Dean to Serve Third Interim Dean Role
Jim Dean, former dean of UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, was appointed in May to become UNC executive vice chancellor and provost, leaving the business school in need of a leader. Dean turned to Jack Evans (pictured), asking if he would serve as interim dean.
With more than 40 years of experience at Kenan-Flagler, Evans came out of retirement to answer Dean’s call. In addition to holding the Kenan-Flagler deanship from 1979 to 1987, he served two subsequent terms as interim dean. He first came to Kenan-Flagler in 1970, as a professor of operations.
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Published: August 25, 2013
Columbia Business School Hosts Two Fall Series for Prospective Applicants
Columbia Business School will launch two on-campus event series this fall for prospective MBA applicants looking to learn more about what CBS has to offer. The first series – “Why an MBA?” – will feature a panel of CBS alumni and students sharing what led them to pursue either a full-time or executive MBA. The second “Spotlight On:” series will convene professors, alumni and current students to provide a view of CBS and its opportunities in several different areas of study. The events, which will take place on CBS’s Morningside Heights campus, are free to all, but RSVP is required.
Two “Why an MBA?” panels will be held as part of that series, each on Tuesday evenings at 6:30 p.m. in CBS’s Uris Hall. The first will be held on September 17th and the second on September 24th.
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Published: August 22, 2013
MBA Graduates from U.S. Business Schools See Rise in Wall Street Job Offers
MBA graduates from U.S. business schools this summer are landing more interviews and more job offers from Wall Street firms – particularly investment banks – than in recent years, according to the newest survey by a company that provides corporate training to Wall Street firms and business schools.
As part of its latest annual MBA Employment Survey, Training the Street (TTS) interviewed 200 students over the past few months, discovering that 19 percent of students had more than 10 first-round interviews. Another 12 percent of surveyed students had more than eight interviews in the first round, 40 percent had between four and seven interviews and 23 percent had between one and three, according to the TTS survey.
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