HBS Admissions Director to Offer Feedback for Denied Candidates

In her Director’s Blog, Harvard Business School (HBS) Dean of Admissions Dee Leopold said she would provide feedback regarding Round 2 decision notifications following notice given to successful candidates on March 29. Her office will be able to make offers to between 25 and 50 candidates on the waitlist, some from each Rounds 1 and 2.

HBS doesn’t make financial aid awards at the time of admission. The school provides generous financial aid to both U.S. and international students based on demonstrated financial need regardless of the round in which candidates are admitted.

Source: HBS Director’s Blog

Booth Boosts Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital

The Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital (EVC) at Group at University of Chicago Booth School of Business is pushing forward with entrepreneurship and venture capital opportunities through promoting conferences, guest speakers, recruiting sessions and experiential learning.

The group, one of the largest full-time student groups at Chicago Booth, seeks to educate student members about relevant career paths and connect them with professors and professionals in the EVC space. The student group also partners with Booth’s Michael P. Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship  to develop EVC-related programming, events and classes.

In the fall, the EVC Group hosts the University of Chicago Booth School of Business Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Conference, or SeedCon, a two-day event featuring a fast-pitch competition as well as panels and keynotes by entrepreneurs and venture capitalists from Chicago and beyond. Each winter quarter the group helps put on the Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC) – to give students a chance to think and act like venture capitalists while identifying top students to represent Chicago Booth at regional and national intercollegiate competitions – and the Bay Area Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Trek – a networking opportunity with the Silicon Valley Venture Capital community.

Next month, the group will host the finals of the annual National Venture Competition (NVC), one of the nation’s top business competitions. Organized by the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship with support from the EVC Group, the NVC is a year-long process featuring two initial phases and a May finals event. Now it its 16th year, the NVC features traditional, global and social tracks and has awarded $750,000 and helped launch more than 65 companies.

Source: Chicago Booth EVC Website

U.S. News & World Report 2013 Business School Rankings

Harvard Business School and Stanford Graduate School of Business once again tied for first, marking the fourth time in five years those two schools have shared the top spot. Last year, Stanford edged ahead enough to bump HBS down to number two.

U.S. News rankings are based on a weighted average of several indicators, including overall program quality, peer assessments, recruiter assessments, placement success, mean starting salary and bonus, average GMAT score and GPA and more.
 

The rankings track 441 master’s programs accredited by AACSB International.

Rounding out the top 10 full-time programs this year were the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School (3), MIT Sloan’s School of Management (4), Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management (4), the University of Chicago Booth School of Business (4), UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business (7), Columbia Business School (8), Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business (9), and the Yale School of Management (10). The only significant shifts here were that Tuck slipped down two spots (falling from 7th last year) allowing Haas and CBS to each climb, and that New York University’s Stern School of Business, which tied for 10th last year with Yale, fell to 11th.
 

Source: US News & World Report

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

MBA Applications Defy U.S. Trends

Bucking a nationwide trend of declining interest in MBA applications to Georgetown’s MBA program have increased in recent years.

A 2011 survey released by the Graduate Management Admission Council reported that more than two-thirds of participating full-time MBA programs saw application numbers drop from 2009 to 2010 and 2010 to 2011.

According to Assistant Dean and Director of the McDonough School of Business Admissions Kelly Wilson, Georgetown’s application numbers have risen from last year at this point in the admissions cycle, while most comparable business schools have seen no change or a dip in application numbers. Georgetown’s full-time MBA program received 1,438 applications for the class that began studying in fall 2011.

Wilson credited the university’s adaptations in a changing MBA recruitment landscape for the rise in applications. The MBA program offers virtual visits, web seminars, and a customized web portal for prospective students.

The study also reported that the volume of applications for executive programs, intended for people with eight years of managerial experience, has held steady on average. Among participating schools, 42 percent reported a rise in applications, while another 42 percent reported a decline.

Bloomberg Businessweek identified 30 schools as in its top tier. The magazine currently ranks Georgetown’s full-time MBA program as the 33rd-best program in the country, placing it in what it deems the second tier of schools. 

Source: The Hoya

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

UNC Online MBA Programs are Credibile

UNC Kenan-Flagler's online MBA program is gaining credibility. Kenan-Flagler's program is is the first time a top 20 school has put together an online effort with the publicly stated goal of making it the world's best MBA program delivered over the Internet.

UNC's partner, 2tor Inc., is a startup with over $68 million in venture funding, is investing more than $10 million into the program. It also has online degree programs in nursing at Georgetown University as well as social work and education at the University of Southern California. Kenan-Flagler has 20 of its full-time professors, many of them considered the school's best faculty, deeply involved in the online initiative, developing and recording special lectures and teaching live classes online.

Together, 2tor and UNC aim to make online education both respectable and credible. If they succeed, the number of MBA candidates in this two-year, $92,725 program will vastly exceed Kenan-Flagler's full-time MBA student population on-campus and the program will reach a worldwide audience.

So far, UNC has signed up 134 students for MBA@UNC since taking on an inaugural class of 19 students in the fall of last year. The school enrolls a new group of candidates every quarter and, on April 4, it will bring in some 45 new students as part of a fourth cohort.

A typical webinar session has little more than a dozen. "These guys are being taught in groups of no more than 15 students," he says. "It's an intense experience. Everyone sits in the front row so there is nowhere to hide."

Kenan-Flagler's professors have developed 32 hours of asynchronous teaching material and have another 36 hours under development. Three professors -- including two adjunct hires -- are teaching their live sessions from India, Israel, and France. The students, meantime, hail from all over the country and the world, including China and Kuwait.

A few field trips to keep things personal

The San Francisco experience -- which runs from a Thursday to Sunday evening -- is one of four in-person immersions in the program. Another one is devoted to leadership development and held at the school's Chapel Hill campus in North Carolina. Two more will be global, with an immersion in San Paulo, Brazil, focused on managing in a high-growth environment, and one in London centered on global markets. Each student is required to do two immersions during the two-year program.

Source: CNN