MBA ニュース： ウォートン・スクール Expands its Online MBA

Wharton School has expanded its online foundational MBA courses to now include a Business Foundations Specialization series that adds a capstone project in which participants can apply what they learn to help solve real-world business issues, the school announced last week. 

Wharton will invite top performers in the online series to apply to one of the school’s graduate programs, waiving the application fee, and will award up to five $20,000 scholarships to applicants who are admitted.

As with the initial four courses in Wharton’s Foundation Series – Accounting, Finance, Marketing and Operations Management – the new Capstone Project component is available through online education platform Coursera. Wharton was one of the first leading business schools to present the building blocks of its MBA curriculum in online form to a world audience.

The  Business Foundations Specialization series combines all four foundation courses, taught by Wharton faculty, with the newly added project component and confers a Coursera Verified Certificate for participants who complete the entire series. 

As part of the Capstone Project, participants work with industry partners to help solve a specific real-world problem. Snapdeal and Shazam have entered into initial partnerships with Wharton to provide Capstone project topics.

The cost of the entire series with a Verified Certificate is $595.

The top 50 performers each year in the Business Foundations Specialization series will be eligible to apply to one of Wharton’s graduate business programs without paying an application fee. Wharton will also award $20,000 scholarships to up to five students admitted to the MBA program who have excelled in the Specialization series in the previous 12 months.

For more information see Wharton Online

MBA Round 3/4/5 (Late Round) Deadlines

The following is a list of remaining late MBA Round deadlines:

Feb. 27: LBS R3
Mar. 03: IESE R3
Mar. 04: INSEAD
Mar. 11: Berkeley/Haas R3
Mar. 11: Cornell/Johnson R3
Mar. 13: Emory/Goizueta R4
Mar. 13: Oxford R4
Mar. 13: UNC/Kenan-Flagler R4
Mar. 15: CMU/Tepper R3
Mar. 15: NYU/Stern R4
Mar. 19: Duke/Fuqua R3
Mar. 23: Michigan/Ross R3
Mar. 24: UT McCombs R3
Mar. 26: Wharton R3
Apr. 01: Georgetown/McDonough R3
Apr. 01: Northwestern/Kellogg R3
Apr. 01: Stanford GSB R3
Apr. 01: Dartmouth/Tuck April Round
Apr. 01: UVA/Darden
Apr. 06: Harvard R3
Apr. 15: Columbia Regular Decision
Apr. 15: UCLA Anderson R3
Apr. 15: USC Marshall R3
Apr. 17: LBS R4
Apr. 23: Yale SOM R3
Apr. 24: Oxford R5
May 19: IESE R4
May 29: Oxford R6

While it’s always best to apply as early as possible, the difference between applying in Round 1 and applying in Round 2 is, for most applicants, a marginal one.  

However most of the seats in the incoming class will have been given away by the time Round 2 decisions are released, the acceptance rate in the third round is dramatically lower than that for the first two deadlines of the season.

エコノミスト：Top 10 Business School Alumni Networks

The Economist has listed the world's top-10 alumni networks. Nine of the top 10 strongest alumni networks are affiliated with U.S. schools. 

The best schools also tend to be old and big, this means keeping up to date on an awful lot of people. Harvard Business School, for example, has 44,500 registered MBA alumni.

The Tuck school at Dartmouth comes out top with its famously fierce collegiate spirit. 

For more information, please see the Economist. 

MBA ニュース：Georgetown, ESADE and SDA Bocconi School of Management Launch Global Advanced Management Program

Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, Madrid’s ESADE and Milan’s SDA Bocconi of Management have united to launch the Global Advanced Management Program (GAMP)m a new program designed to prepare senior executives to meet the demands of organizations.

The  program takes participants to three different continents. GAMP participants will meet for three one-week modules held every two months.

During the first module, at Georgetown McDonough in Washington, D.C., participants will look at the complex circumstances shaping the world today and their impact on business. 

Next, participants will convene in Asia, where the Antai College of Economics and Management (Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China) will host a second module analyzing emerging global business models. 

The third and final module will take place at ESADE in Madrid and will help participants hone the leadership skills required at highly international companies.

GAMP gives participants a crash course in the real-time challenges facing leaders in the global marketplace. The format was also designed to help participants expand their network to include new countries and cultures.

GAMP will also feature several special components, such as a CEO Forum, a Wellness Plan and a Ground-field Exposure Lab.

For more see Georgetown-ESADE-SDA Bocconi Global Advanced Management Program.

MBA ニュース：シカゴ大学 ブース to Make Hong Kong’s Mount Davis Asia Executive MBA Hub

The University of Chicago Booth School of Business hopes to renovate Hong Kong’s historic Mount Davis site, once an artillery base, into a new intellectual hub to serve as home to the school’s Executive MBA Program in Asia.

“The center will allow us to engage even more effectively with the business and academic communities in Hong Kong,” Chicago Booth Dean Sunil Kumar said in a statement. “It will be a testament to our lasting commitment to educating leaders in the region.”

Originally a gun battery in the 1930s, Mount Davis became a mess hall and clubhouse for British officers after World War II and later a government detention center. Chicago Booth’s plans would involve adaptive reuse of some of the original structure and key architectural elements, such as fireplaces and arches, as proscribed by local conservation management guidelines. 

Building plans were submitted in January, and Town Planning approval is slated for June 2015. Pending approval and subsequent land grant execution, construction could start in August 2016, with occupancy anticipated for August 2018.

For more information see the Chicago Booth website

MBA ニュース：コーネル大学・ジョンソンスクール Upgrades Curriculum

Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University is overhauling its curriculum which will roll out in the Class of 2016. 

In recent years The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Harvard Business School and Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management have all revised their core curriculums. 

Cornell's changes are designed to place greater emphasis on collaboration, leadership and analytical skills. The curriculum redesign is the culmination of a comprehensive two-year review process the school launched in 2011. Through student and alumni focus groups, peer benchmarking and surveys of students, alumni, corporate recruiters, faculty and staff, the review process reached more than 1,000 participants from the last 12 MBA class years and identified three priority areas for redesigned coursework and programming.

Modeling and Decision Analysis: An enhanced required course, Data Analytics and Modeling, takes students beyond statistics, to data modeling and Big Data techniques and strategies. Modeling is woven into other courses to help students develop the analytical skills needed in all areas of business.

Personal and Leadership Skills: Every Johnson student progresses through a targeted curriculum in leadership consisting of the proprietary Johnson 360° Leadership Assessment, coursework, case exercises, teamwork, hands-on leadership experience, coaching, and customized programming. The personalized program begins in the pre-term, with individual assessment and feedback, and continues through the first year, with the Leading Teams Practicum, and second year with Principled Leadership. Marquee leadership instructors teach intensives on leadership topics. These classes are enriched with a menu of Leadership Skills workshops and Leadership Expeditions that span the entire program.

Integrative and Critical Thinking Skills: In their first semester of MBA study, students learn and practice critical thinking skills, with a focus on analyzing, integrating, and synthesizing information for optimal decision making, in the face of challenges, such as incomplete, inaccurate, or ambiguous information.

Among the innovative elective courses being introduced:

The Art of Innovation: A Design Thinking Immersion and Making Design Thinking Work. These hands-on courses prepare MBAs to be future innovators by teaching them the human-centered design methodology known as Design Thinking.

Core Leadership Skills for a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) World, with retired U.S. Army General George Casey. This course builds on the skills acquired in earlier components of the leadership program, through discussion and interaction with an experienced practitioner and former leader of the United States Army.

Johnson’s FinTech Trek and Hackathon. Students convene at Cornell Tech in New York City to learn about disruptive technologies facing the financial industry and develop relevant solutions. The experience culminates in a hackathon, in which participants have about 24 hours to develop financial products or services that meet a real business need. Similar classes are planned, each focusing on a different industry.

For more information, please see MBA Students Embrace New Curriculum, Now in Place at Johnson at Cornell University

Foreign Policy: The Best International Relations Schools in the World

These are the results of the 2014 Ivory Tower survey—a collaboration between Foreign Policy and the Teaching, Research, and International Policy (TRIP) project at the College of William & Mary—provide an insider’s guide. 

Responses from 1,615 IR scholars drawn from 1,375 U.S. colleges and universities determined rankings for the leading Ph.D., terminal master’s, and undergraduate programs in IR. 

The scholars were asked to list the top five institutions in each category. The survey also quizzed respondents about recent historical events and future policy challenges.

For more information, please see Foreign Policy