INSEAD, Wharton Extend Educational Alliance for 3 Years

INSEAD and the Wharton School will continue for another three years an educational alliance begun in 2001.

The Wharton INSEAD alliance allows  MBA and PhD students from both schools can participate in an exchange program that enables them to study on the schools’ four campuses in Fontainebleau, France; Abu Dhabi, Singapore and Philadelphia.

For more on the INSEAD/Wharton Alliance see here

U.S., UK Schools Attract Fewer International Students

Immigration policies in the United States and Great Britain are making it less appealing for students from other countries to pursue MBAs there, even though they are home to some of the best MBA programs in the world, according the Economist.

America has the best universities in the world, but its immigration enforcers have done a good job of making them less attractive. The proportion of the world’s overseas students who come to America has fallen from 23% in 2000 to 18% in 2009. 

In 2011, America educated 448% of the world’s MBAs, a sharp reduction from the 668% it claimed in 2000, the Economist reports. The number has shrunken from 126,000 to 116,000. The main difficulty is getting a visa for work. According to the Economist, even highly-skilled foreigners, like MBA graduates, typically wait a decade for a green card.

The proportion of Silicon Valley startups with immigrant founders has fallen from 52% to 44% since 2005, the magazine said. 

In Britain, meanwhile, students from outside the European Union are getting squeezed even more. In its efforts to reduce net immigration, the Conservative Party has made the application process to receive student visas significantly more difficult, the Economist reports. British business schools were down 11 percent over the past year according to its own recent MBA rankings.

But with their tighter immigration policies, the United States and Britain are the ones who stand to suffer, the Economist piece argues. The schools lose out on tuition from foreign students, native-born students lose out on the valuable opportunity to mix with bright people from elsewhere and truly understand the globalized world, and foreign students are less likely to forge connections that could lead to future business between their home countries and the U.S. and U.K.

Source: The Economist

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

The Economist Latest MBA Rankings Out!

The Economist has just revealed its latest  2012 Full time MBA ranking, and it makes for very interesting reading, with, as expected, The Economist's way of doing things making for different results than other famous ranking systems. Every ranking system is full of flaws, for example, critics note that 80% of the Economist's rankings are based on unaudited data submitted by the participating schools. That leaves the door wide open to self-serving submissions that fudge the numbers, according to Harvard. 

You can also click on a button to jump to the rankings in your area or country. This blog notes that Japan is not even mentioned as a country in Asia. 

The Economist's methodology is here: The Economist ranking of full-time MBA programmes was based on an initial selection of 135 leading business schools around the world. All 135 schools were invited to take part in our two-stage survey, which requires input from schools and students/alumni. Of these, we were unable to rank 17 schools, either because the failed to respond to our survey or did not provide enough data to be ranked. The global top 100 schools were gleaned from the remaining 118. Schools outside the top 100 receive a regional ranking only.

To qualify for inclusion in the ranking, the schools with full-time MBA programmes that responded to our survey had to meet various thresholds of data provision, as well as attaining a minimum number of responses to a survey gauging the opinion of current students and alumni who graduated within the last three years. These were set as a proportion of the annual intake of students to the programme as shown in the table below.

Data were collected during spring 2012 using two web-based questionnaires, one for business schools and one for students and recent graduates. Schools distributed the web address of the latter questionnaire to their own students and graduates. A total of 15,550 students and graduates participated. All data received from schools were subject to verification checks, including, where possible, comparison with historical data, peer schools and other published sources. Student and graduate questionnaires were audited for multiple or false entries.

Memory has been built into the rankings by taking a weighted average of 2012 (50%), 2011 (30%) and 2010 (20%) data to provide a rounded picture of the school. Sudden movements in data, which might not produce an immediate increase in quality, are thus reflected gradually, much as the improvement would affect students.

The table below summarises the measures used to calculate the rankings together with their respective weightings. Salaries were converted at average 2011 exchange rates. Student and alumni ratings make up 20% of the total ranking, and 80% is based on data provided by schools. The statistical methodology adopted for the ranking gives each business school a unique score (known to statisticians as a z-score). Unlike some other rankings, we do not include any “equal” schools (for example, four schools ranked equal sixth followed by one ranked tenth). However, it should be noted that differences between some schools might be slight. 

For more details, please see The Economist. 

http://www.economist.com/whichmba/full-time-mba-ranking

HBS Reveals Some R1 Details

Harvard Business School (HBS) Dean of Admissions Dee Leopold has given a preview of how Round 1 works.

Details: 

* R1 deadline is September 21

* No need to submit earlier

* Interview invitations on October 17 and 24

* Planned interview locations for Round 1include London, Paris, Dubai, Shanghai, Sao Paulo, Palo Alto, New York City and on campus in Boston

* Some candidates will also be invited to join the waitlist on that date and may be invited to interview in Round 2.

*Interviews will then take place from the last week in October through mid-November

* Round 1 decisions – admit, deny or waitlist – will go out on December 12.

Source: Dean's Blog

Yale University President to Resign

The president of Yale University, Richard Levine, is to resign

“It is a source of great satisfaction to leave Yale in much stronger condition – academically, physically, and financially – than it was when I began in 1993,” Levine wrote, noting that the school has been his life since he and his wife, Jane, entered graduate school there in 1970. Having said that, the approach of his 20th anniversary as president seems to signal “a natural time for a transition,” he continued.

The Yale School of Management (SOM) has been under new leadership since Dean Ed Snyder joined from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in July 2011. 

“Our faculty is stronger than ever, and our deans and directors all have clear and ambitious agendas that will keep the University moving forward,” Levine said in his farewell address.

A sucessor for President Levine has not yet been named.

Source: Yale

Texas McCombs Essay Topics 2012-2013

The UT Austin / McCombs essay topics for 2012-2013 are now available:

The two required essays and one optional essay 

Required Essays

1. Describe how your professional and personal experiences have led you to pursue an MBA at this time. Please share with us your short and long term goals and why the Texas MBA at McCombs is the program best positioned to help you achieve them.
 Limit: 800 words

2. At the University of Texas at Austin, our motto is “What starts here changes the world.” Here at McCombs, we are looking for students who share this vision. We believe that the MBA experience is a transformative one and that our students are able to have a positive impact, not only on their own lives, but also in their workplaces, their local communities, their professional industries and/or the world generally.

• a) In your life to date, please tell us about an instance when you felt that you had the most positive impact and why you believe it to be significant?
Limit: 200 words

• b) How do you intend to positively impact the MBA community while you are an MBA student at McCombs?
Limit: 200 words

• c) After graduation from business school, what kind of positive impact would you like to have?
Limit: 200 words

Optional Essay

Please provide any additional information to the admissions committee that you believe is important and/or will address any areas of concern that will be beneficial to the committee in considering your application. (For example, if your standardized test scores are low or if you have not had coursework in core business subjects (i.e. calculus, microeconomics, statistics, financial accounting), please tell us how you plan to prepare yourself for the quantitative rigor of the MBA curriculum.)
Limit: 200 words

McCombs announced its 2012-2013 admissions deadlines in May.  

Source: Texas McCombs