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MBA diary: Get up and go
Karim Karim, a student on Rotman School of Management's Morning MBA programme, explains what makes people sign up for a 7am class
SOMETIMES, you just want to try something different. So in 2009, after six years of working full-time, I decided to start my day with something out of the ordinary to go with my mochachino grande latte: a 7am Morning MBA class, twice a week at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto.
Actually, I don’t drink coffee but I do attend the classes. I used to associate morning classes with images of bleary-eyed students, poor attendance, and hardened (read jumpy) coffee drinkers. I could not have been more wrong.
After all, what kind of student would show up to a 7am class? The vast majority are employed full-time, but dedicated enough to put in a few hours before the office. Most are contemplating career advances while some envision radical changes. A small yet significant minority eventually quit their jobs and switch into the full-time programme to complete the transformation. Some, unsurprisingly, are in committed relationships and have families. I say unsurprising because families tend to cherish the time they spend together in the evenings, so for them a morning programme makes sense. Some even decide to start or expand families (another evening activity). The most astonishing example was a woman who quit her job, gave birth to two children, found another job, and finished the Morning MBA programme with the rest of the cohort.
New programme at Columbia
by B.R.
Columbia Business School is to launch a new executive MBA called EMBA – Americas. The 20-month programme includes three semesters of core courses and two of electives. Most teaching will be delivered on Columbia's New York campus, with some also offered in California and Latin America. Applications for the programme open on July 1st; the first class will be in January 2013. The announcement comes on the heels of the school’s decision to discontinue the EMBA it offered jointly with the University of California, Berkeley.
A new Paris design
by B.R.
THE degree to which commercial organisations should dictate the syllabuses of MBA programmes is a thorny issue. Business schools are clearly preparing students for a commercial life; and many students want the skills that will make them as enticing as possible to the big employers. Business professors, on the other hand, bristle if they are told they are teaching mere vocational qualifications; they like a bit of academia thrown in too.
The new curriculum at HEC Paris, which launches in September, is an interesting case in point. The school called in Bain & Co, a large consultancy, to help revamp its MBA programme. Businesses, even consultancies, like the idea of hiring students who have some real-world know-how. So it has suggested the school focuses more on students’ practical experience. It will thus beef up its involvement in MBA tournaments and off-campus activities.
Stern in Shanghai
by J.L.H.D | ATLANTA
NYU Stern is now taking applications for a new master’s degree in business analytics, which will start in May 2013. The curriculum will focus on data analysis and the use of modelling tools for business forecasting. Like many executive MBAs currently on the market, it will be modular, with 12 months’ worth of coursework spread out over two years, and in-class sessions supplemented by online learning.
Also noteworthy is the location. While some classes will be in New York, some will be at NYU’s new campus in Shanghai; in fact, the business-analytics students will the first to earn degrees at NYU Shanghai. East China Normal University will help host the first undergraduate class, scheduled to start in the fall of 2013, and the Chinese Ministry of Education has given its blessing to a range of degree programmes.
Forum: NYU Stern
Playing the visa card
Apr 10th 2012, 15:23 by B.R.
WHEN trying to lure foreign students to its business schools, Canadian universities used to find it hard to draw attention away from their boisterous cousins south of the border. No longer. Over the last two years, Canadian full-time MBAs have seen the biggest increase in applications of any region, according to the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), a business school association.
Several things have happened to persuade more overseas students to consider Canada. Firstly, the US, in response to a tough job market, has tightened up its visa policy, making it more difficult for foreigners to stay and work in the country once they graduate. The number of H1-Bs, as the relevant visas are called, is now capped at 65,000. In 2003 it was 195,000. This is a puny number given that in 2011 there were around 723,000 foreign students in the US, according to the Institute of International Education. Furthermore, students are only awarded an H1-B if they already have a job offer. To make matters harder, this must be directly related to their field of study. MBAs have been particularly affected by the clampdown because the raison d’être of many business students is to get a new job at the end of the course.
While America works to keep well-qualified people out, Canada has moved in the opposite direction. As of 2008, all students who complete a two-year Master’s degree automatically have the right to stay in the country and work for three years. They do not need to have a job lined up and are not restricted to working in a particular field.
End of an EMBA
Mar 29th 2012, 15:03 by J.L.H.D | ATLANTA
“We teach our students, just because you sold a product or provided a service in the past doesn’t mean you should continue to do it.” So says Amir Ziv, vice dean at Columbia Business School. Columbia and Berkeley Haas are taking this advice to heart: earlier this week the two schools announced that they are to end their ten-year-old joint executive MBA programme, in which students could pick up MBA degrees from both schools. The last class will graduate next February; students who have been admitted, but not yet enrolled, are being offered the option of attending either Columbia or Haas—just not both.
The decision to end the programme was not prompted by a lack of demand. Rather, says Jay Stowsky, senior assistant dean at Haas, the Berkeley-Columbia EMBA was seeing a shift in its participant pool: fewer applicants subsidised by their companies, more looking to switch careers. But this is relatively normal, given the economy. Besides, Columbia still has three other EMBAs: one based in New York, one shared with London Business School, and one with both LBS and the University of Hong Kong. Haas, meanwhile, plans to start an executive MBA next year.
Close to the action
Mar 22nd 2012, 15:58 by M.S. | PARIS
EVEN the most passionate champion of management education might concede that there was a time, well within living memory, when the business campuses were little more than ivory towers. MBA students were far too busy poring over case studies to worry about what was going on in the real world outside the classroom. Particularly if that classroom happened to be situated well away from hoi polloi in a leafy French forest, for example, or overlooking the Charles River in Massachusetts.
Times change and now fashion dictates that programmes should be as rigorously practical as they are they are academic. Graduates are expected to emerge from their MBAs with corporate dirt under their fingernails. So with this in mind, wouldn’t it make sense for potential MBAs to select their school not just on the basis of its faculty, student body and the effectiveness of its careers department, but also on how close it is to the heart of commercial and political action?
Well played, Wharton
Mar 21st 2012, 14:56 by J.L.H.D | ATLANTA
AMERICANS are currently in that three-week dazed period immediately following the implementation of Daylight Savings Time. This is further aggravated by the fervour surrounding the annual NCAA college basketball tournament. Unlike most playoffs in American professional sports, a team must win every game to advance, and every year a few top-ranked colleges lose to lesser rivals, leaving fans gnashing their teeth (including Barack Obama, who picked the University of Missouri’s team to make it to the Final Four; on Friday Missouri lost to lowly Norfolk State).
Do universities suffer financially when their basketball teams lose so publicly? Scott Rosner, who directs Wharton’s Sports Business Academy, says no. Revenue from the tournament is now mostly shared among athletic conferences and from there distributed to member schools. There is much to criticise about the interplay of money and college sports, but at least players cannot (or should not) be accused of stiffing their schools by having a bad game.
Whether a big loss makes prospective students less likely to attend is a different question. A study by Devin Pope, another Wharton proerssor, and Jaren Pope from Virginia Tech, suggests that perhaps it does. They found that colleges whose football and basketball teams did well in the NCAA can expect applications to increase by between 2% and 8%. Interest in private schools with successful sports teams is particularly marked. Among the teams that have already lost in this year’s tournament are the University of Michigan, the University of California at Berkeley (home of Haas), Duke, Georgetown, Vanderbilt and Harvard. No wonder Wharton finds the topic worthy of discussion.
Top of two worlds
Mar 13th 2012, 15:08 by B.R.
Harvard has topped this year’s ranking by US News and World Report. The ranking, which covers only American schools accredited by AACSB, measures three categories: "quality assessment" which takes into account the view of business school deans and recruiters; "placement success" which measures graduate salaries and employment rates; and "student selectivity" a measure of such things as GMAT scores and grade point averages. Second on the US News ranking is Stanford, which came top last year. This is followed by Wharton, MIT, Kellogg and Chicago.
It is the second ranking that Harvard has topped in the space of a week, after it also prevailed in the Times Higher Education magazine's World Reputation rankings. The THE list, which looks at universities as a whole, not just business schools, was dominated by American and British institutions which it described as "super brands":
The group is headed by Harvard University in 1st, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2nd), the University of Cambridge (3rd), Stanford University (4th), the University of California, Berkeley (5th) and the University of Oxford (6th)...This top six super-group was identified in the first World Reputation Rankings in 2011, but the gap between sixth and the chasing pack has widened since last year.
The UK has 10 institutions in the top 100, second only to the US, which has 44.
Researching research
Mar 7th 2012, 14:56 by J.L.H.D | ATLANTA
FOR those of you who were wondering where your MBA fees went, AACSB, a business-school accreditation agency, has the answer: 83% of member schools' expendititure goes towards the salaries of their staff. Not surprisingly, business-school leaders occasionally wonder what the profesoors receiving those salaries are working on, and whether it matters. Hence AACSB published a long-awaited report (PDF) last month on the impact of their research.
Schools do have ways of counting how research makes its way into the wider world. The most common ones being publication in academic journals (the more prestigious the better), memberships on the editorial boards of said journals, presentations requested and grants awarded. Some schools cautiously count less exalted measures, such as mentions in newspapers and blogs. But lesser-known schools, in particular, are at pains to prove—to themselves and to potential faculty recruits as well as students—that they are just as intellectually serious as their top-ranked competitors.
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