U.S. News Best Graduate Schools Rankings Coming March 12

U.S. News  2014 edition of the Best Graduate Schools Rankings will be published March 12 covering graduate programs in business, law, education, engineering, and medicine

Highlights of the rankings will be published in theBest Graduate Schools 2014 printed guidebook, on sale April 9, 2013. The most comprehensive version of the upcoming Best Graduate Schools, including all the extended rankings and complete data, will be available online only through the subscription-based U.S. News Graduate School Compass.

There will be rankings in the five largest professional graduate school disciplines: business, law, education,engineering, and medicine, as well as the various specialties associated with each of those five broad disciplines.

The 2014 edition changes the law school rankings methodology used to compute placement rates for 2011 J.D. graduates employed at graduation and nine months after graduation. There were also changes in admissions selectivity in the full-time and part-time MBA rankings.

For the 2014 edition, new peer assessment surveys were conducted and new rankings will be published online for social sciences and humanities Ph.D. programs in economics, English, history, political science, psychology, and sociology, as well as for master's programs in library and information studies.

Prospective students can use the Best Graduate Schools rankings and other data to make comparisons of concrete factors such as student-faculty ratios; research expenditures; acceptance rates; undergraduate grade point averages; average scores on the GRE,LSAT, and GMAT; and placement success upon graduation.

Source: U.S. News  

$2.5 Million Gift Establishes Operations Research Professorship at Tepper School of Business

The gift by alumnus Adris Zoltners has endowed the inaugural Andris. A. Zoltners Professorship of Business at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) Tepper School of Business focused on operations.

Zoltners earned a Ph.D. in operations research at Carnegie Mellon in 1973, founded and co-chairs a global pharmaceutical and biotech sales and marketing consulting firm, ZS Associates, and has served on the faculty of Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management for more than 30 years. 

Hundreds of companies have turned to Zoltners for his expertise in sales force strategy, effectiveness, size, structure, deployment and compensation.

Source: CMU Tepper 

New Wharton, HBS Research Shows Last Interviewee of the Day is the Worst

A research paper co-authored by Wharton operations and information management professor Uri Simonsohn, shows MBA candidates interviewed at the end of the day are more likely to be rejected than those interviewed earlier. 

On a five-point scale, with five being the best possible score, a similarly qualified applicant who interviewed on the tail end of his top-scoring competition got lower scores overall than what he or she would have otherwise received. Conversely, those who interviewed after a group of weaker competitors got better than expected evaluations. The data covered more than 9,000 interviews done by 31 interviewers, none of whom were alumni.

So if an interviewer interviewed four people, and all four were good, they will think the fifth person is less likely to be good, they say. The effect very well could be unconscious.

They say a phenomenon called "narrow bracketing" was affecting how those late-day candidates were being judged. Narrow bracketing is when an individual makes a decision without taking into account the consequences of many similar choices.

The report is called "Daily Horizons: Evidence of Narrow Bracketing in Judgment" 

Source:  Knowledge@Wharton

Top B-Schools to Go Bankrupt?

Larry Zicklin, former chairman of asset manager Neuberger Berman, professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business and a lecturer at University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and Baruch College’s Zicklin School of Business says following hte fall of Wall Street and the publishing industry, business schools may go out of business.

On Feb 13, in an article Why Business Schools Teach Transparency but Practice Ambiguity at Knowledge at Wharton  Zicklin said if faculty members assumed larger teaching workloads, while doing less research, universities could deliver a college education at a fraction of its present cost. 

Professors are judged is 99 percent dependent on their research and 1 percent dependent on everything else. 

The money to pay for research should not come from student tuition, he arges.

"I think schools are going to go out of business. You can’t have 100 schools vying to be in the top 25 and spending the money to get there. The new technology, higher cost of universities, and smaller amounts of money available will force the wholesale revamping of higher education, especially in the business area. This is very serious stuff," he says. 

For more information, read the link below. 

Source: Knowledge at Wharton 

15/ 48 Cheats Canned at UCLA Anderson and Smeal

UCLA Anderson School of Management has scrapped 15 and  Penn State’s Smeal College of Business thrown 48 applications into the waste paper basket due to a plagiarism-spotting service, Turnitin for Admissions.

Turnitin checks admissions essays against a database of published and unpublished sources and flags similarities. In total, about 15 schools use Turnitin. 

Last year, Anderson rejected 52 applicants for plagiarism as part of the first two rounds. This time about 70 applicants may be rejected for plagiarism this year by the end of the third and final round.

Source: Bloomberg BusinessWeek

Fuqua School Gets New Dean

The Fuqua School of Business at Duke University has chosen its current dean, William Boulding, to serve a full five-year term.

Boulding, a marketing and management expert, assumed the position of dean in 2011 for an initial two-year term following the resignation of former Dean Blair Sheppard.

 Boulding has been a member of the Fuqua faculty since 1984 and has won multiple teaching awards. In his 18 months as dean, he is credited with strengthening Fuqua’s programs on its home campus in Durham while also deepening the school’s connections with students, faculty and alumni in other parts of the world, including at the school’s sites in China, India, Russia, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.

Source: Fuqua School of Business 

Stanford GBS Increases MBA Tuition

Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) is boosting its tuition cost from $57,300 to $59,534 for the incoming class of 2013-14 bringing the cost for an MBA program rising to around $185,530 for a single student living on campus.

A student living off campus with a spouse or partner will pay more than $220,000. These figures do not take into account required study trips as part of the program, which can cost up to $4,000.

The average scholarship (free money not loans) to entering MBAs this year was $25,562 and 50 percent of students got some amount of money according to Madhav Rajan, a senior associate dean who heads the Stanford MBA program.

Tuition at Harvard Business School is currently $53,500 per year, and the total cost for a single student to complete the two-year program is $174,400. At the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, meanwhile, tuition and fees for per year are $62,034, with total costs for the two-year program coming in at $184,000.

Source:  BusinessWeek

Wharton School, Lauder Institute Offer Dual-Degree Global Program for Multilingual Students

The University of Pennsylvania’s Lauder Institute, together with the Wharton School, will train MBA/MAs in politics, economics, business and culture as part of a new dual-degree Global Program, according to Wharton Magazine.

The new Global Program is like a “startup” within the Lauder Institute, according to Wharton Magazine. Students will study still-evolving aspects of the global political and economic system, such as international capital flows, the rise of sovereign wealth funds and China’s emerging dominance.

Professor Regina Abrami will direct the new program, which admitted its first three students as part of Round 1 of Wharton’s MBA admissions. With Round 2 now underway, Abrami hopes for six to eight students to make up the first Global Program class, which will begin in May 2013.

Abrami came to Wharton and Lauder from Harvard Business School (HBS) and is now a senior lecturer in the political science department and a senior fellow in the management department as well as director of the new Global Program. At HBS, she also helped launch globally-focused initiatives, including a “Doing Business in China” elective course and HBS’s global immersion programming, through which 400 students participate in 11 country-specific immersions during the winter session.

The Global Program will include classes on intercultural negotiations, international trade and the international legal order, which will take the place of language classes Lauder students take as part of that school’s other tracks. Global Program students must be proficient in two languages.

Source: Wharton Magazine

Harvard Business School Regains Number One Spot in Financial Times 2013 MBA Ranking

Harvard Business School (HBS) topped the Financial Times (FT) MBA rankings for the first time in 8 years, displacing Stanford Graduate Business School, which held the top spot last year!

The ranking also shows signs of stopping its reverse bias against other media rankings. For example U.S. media rankings tend to favor U.S. B-schools and ignore the rest of the world. The FT and The Economist, despite many failings in their own rankings methodologies, tried to address this balance, probably in search of advertising cash. 

The FT said the reason why Harvard was back in flavor was that the new dean and international perspective of Dean Nitin Nohria, who is the first Harvard dean born outside North America.

Canadian and European business schools are falling in the rankings as Asian schools move up. The top 100 MBA schools include 10 from Asia this year, the most ever. 

Among European schools, business schools in the United Kingdom have slipped the most. 

London Business School has ranked in the top five for the past decade and Cambridge’s Judge School moved up  10 spots this year to number 16, five U.K schools fell out of the top 100 completely. 

Overall, 11 U.K. schools made the rankings, down from 18 in 2009.

The top 10 global MBA programs in 2013 as ranked by the FT are as follow:

1           Harvard Business School

2           Stanford Graduate School of Business

3           Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania

4           London Business School

5           Columbia Business School

6           INSEAD

7           IESE Business School

8           Hong Kong UST Business School

9           MIT Sloan School of Management

10         University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Source:  Financial Times  

GMAC Survey of MBA Alumni Reveals Strengthening Job Market

The Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC) annual Alumni Perspectives Survey, released this week, found that 92% of last year’s graduates were working within three months of completing their MBA, up from 86% of graduates from the Class of 2011 surveyed at the same time the year before.

More than 800 MBA and other graduate-level alumni responded to this year’s survey; 77% said their starting salary met or exceeded their expectations and 76% said that were it not for their graduate management degree, they would not have gotten their job.

Source: GMAC

INSEAD Dean to Quit March 1

Following ill health, Dipak Jain will quit dean of INSEAD as of March 1st, retaining a role as marketing professor at the international business school with campuses in France, Singapore and Abu Dhabi.

Two of INSEAD’s three deputy deans, Ilian Mihov and Peter Zemsky, will act as interim deans until a permanent appointment is made, a process that could take up to a year.

Jain was appointed INSEAD dean just two years ago, in March 2011, replacing outgoing dean Frank Brown. Prior to his INSEAD appointment, Jain served for a decade as dean of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University after building an illustrious career as a professor in that school’s marketing department. 

INSEAD had hoped that Jain, who was credited with helping expand Kellogg’s international reach, would help INSEAD further strengthen its global presence and attract more students from the developing world.

Source: Financial Times

Georgetown McDonough Names New MBA Admissions Dean

The McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University has named Shari Hubert as new associate dean of MBA admissions. 

She most recently served as director of recruitment for the Peace Corps, where she led the recruitment of 4,000 volunteers annually and managed the operations of nine regional recruitment offices across the United States.

Prior to that, she worked as senior vice president of campus recruitment for Citi’s Global Bank in North America, leading the recruitment of analysts and associates for Citi’s Markets & Banking Division.

Hubert holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and also managed campus recruiting for GE.

Source: McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University

Myth vs Fact for Chicago Booth

Associate Director of Admissions Joanne Legler devoted a recent post on the Booth Insider Blog to debunking some common myths about the admissions process:

Myth 1: A campus visit is a must if you expect to be admitted.
Myth 2 : You must have a minimum GPA or GMAT/GRE score and have five years of work experience to be considered for admission.
Myth 3 : An interview with a staff member is different than an interview with a student or graduate.
Myth 4 : A letter of recommendation from the CEO of my company/Booth graduate I met once/the governor/the President of the United States would be an amazing addition to my application.
Myth 5 : It's impossible to be admitted during Round Three.

For more details, see the Booth Insider Blog

BusinessWeek Reports Widening Gender MBA Wage Gap

Female graduates from top MBA programs average 93% of their male classmates down from 98% cents in 2002 according to BusinessWeek’s latest biennial survey of MBA graduates. 

Female graduates from the class of 2012 at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, for example, earned 86% of male wages, and those at Stanford Graduate School of Business earned 79% percent, Bloomberg BW reported.

2010 census data showed the largest gender pay gaps to be among insurance agents, personal advisors and securities sales agents. Female MBAs were paid, on average, $4,600 less in their first jobs than men, and that the gap widens to $30,000 by mid-career.

Source: BusinessWeek

Cornell Johnson Glitch Delays Admissions

In a pre-Christmas letter to current applicants, Cornell Johnson Admissions Director Christine Sneva admitted that the school’s transition to paperless review of applications has caused a delay in the admissions process. 

Adcom will begin reading Round 2 applications in January, after the winter holiday break. 

Round 2 applicants can expect to receive interview invitations throughout January and February.

Sneva did not say whether the original decision notification date for Round 2 – which is posted as February 20, 2012 – will change, nor did she share details about any changes to deadlines for Johnson’s Round 3 or 4.

Johnson is one of several top business schools that have recently shifted to paperless review of applications, including Wharton School, MIT Sloan School and UCLA Anderson School of Management.

Source: Cornell Johnson