50 years of women at HBS

Harvard Business School (HBS) have started a yearlong celebration of the 50th anniversary of the School’s first class of female M.B.A.s. 

Women have gone from claiming just eight spots in that initial cohort to being 40 percent of the M.B.A. program.

But speakers say the world is still unfair for women; for example, at home, women still face a set of expectations as demanding as in the 1950s and ’60s. 

Source: Harvard Gazette

Harvard Business School Class of 2014 Profile

Harvard Business School (HBS) Dean of Admissions Dee Leopold says the upcoming Class of 2014 will have the following characteristics:

1. Total MBA enrollment is expected to be 925 for the HBS Class of 2014, up from 905 for the Class of 2013 and 876 for the Class of 2012. 

2. Total application volume has fallen year over year, from 10,368 two years ago to 9,331 last year to 8,963 this year. The percent admitted has risen from 10% for the Class of 2012 to 13% for the Class of 2014.

3. Women will make up 40% of the class, up 1% on last time.

4. Minorities will make up 24% up from 23% last time. 

5. The percentage of International Students will fall to 32% from 34% for the class of 2013.  

Source: Harvard Business School

Harvard MBAs to Sell Admissions Essays

A startup  by six Harvard Business School (HBS) MBAs will start a service MBA Bee to sell HBS application essays written by candidates recently admitted to the school, and is targeting international, military or other nontraditional backgrounds the same kind of access to information that counterparts from more traditional backgrounds like finance and consulting more typically have, say its founders. 

MBA Bee will build a database of successful essay sets which potential applicants can then buy according to key criteria that matches their own, such as career experience, age, and whether they are an international or domestic applicant. Initially fellow classmates willl surrender their own actual application’s essays for free, though they would consider a revenue-share agreement if it allowed them to build out the business and expand to other top schools, they told P&Q.
 

MBA Bee last month launched its first website, ArmedForcesMBA.com, where it will target military applicants, selling separate sets of essays from successful HBS applicants from each the Army, Air Force, Coast Guard, Marines Corps and Navy. The selling price will be $100 per set, though they are available now for a special introductory offer of $50.

Though not officially endorsed by the school, the new essay-selling startup is an outgrowth of HBS’s recently revised MBA curriculum, in which student teams receive seed money from the school to create and launch a new product or service development project, P&Q reports.

Source: CNN

Do We Need an MBA Oath?

The Harbus has just published a very interesting pro and counterpoint the MBA Oath issue, that originated in 2009 in HBS.

Cconfronted with the global financial crisis a group  of HBS students  developed a “Hippocratic Oath for Managers” to “transform the field of  management into a true profession.” The oath defined a social contract between business leaders and society as a whole to effectively behave in an ethical fashion.  

Years later students are still discussing whether the oath is needed. Please read the Harbus article for

Source: The Harbus

Business Majors Face an Uphill Battle

The fastest-growing segment of bachelor’s degree holders applying to MBA programs is former business majors who reached 54% percent in 2010. Former business majors taking the GMAT increased an average of 5.3 percent each year, a rate at least twice as fast as any other major. GMAT test takers are seen as a gauge of who is applying to graduate business school.

But schools don't like business majors in many cases.  The University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business as well as Harvard Business School and Oxford’s Saïd Business School, report that they have accepted more engineers in recent years.

Engineering graduates are, and have been, the second-largest group of undergraduate majors interested in applying to MBA programs. But as a portion of GMAT test takers, they’ve become increasingly scarce. Engineers taking the test grew an average of 0.6 percent each year from 2006 to 2010—more than four times slower than test takers overall.

Source: Bloomberg Businesweek

Harvard Business School Opens New Classroom in Mumbai

Harvard Business School (HBS) has announced the launch of a new, permanent classroom in Mumbai.

The new classroom, which offers seating for 82 students and provides state-of-the-art multimedia facilities to improve the learning experience, is virtually indistinguishable from the school's MBA classrooms in Boston.

According to an HBS press release, the new classroom represents a permanent foothold in India, and will facilitiate an expansion of teaching and research activities in the country to meet its quickly-developing business education needs.

Source: Harvard Business School