Posted by: Alison Damast on January 13, 2011
The summer internship hiring season is just beginning at many business schools and already things are looking up for first-year MBA students, according to the latest survey from the MBA Career Services Council. Of the B-school career officers surveyed, 81 percent said they expected internship hiring to improve, up from 60 percent in 2009. The improved economic outlook is also boding well for other key hiring indictors like on-campus recruiting and full-time job postings, according to the survey, conducted this December at 79 public and private business schools worldwide
In the latest survey, 63 percent of schools reported an increase in full-time on-campus recruiting, a sharp contrast from last year when 79 percent said they saw a decline in the number of recruiters visiting. Another bright spot? Full-time job postings are making a comeback, with 70 percent of schools reporting a spike in postings; last year at this time, 48 percent reported a decrease in this area.
Continue reading "2011 MBA Job Outlook Bright"
Posted by: Louis Lavelle on January 11, 2011
With the Dec. 1, 2009 sale of Businessweek to Bloomberg LP, the magazine's former owner, the McGraw-Hill Companies, officially exited the b-school ranking business. It now appears that the company wants back in. Credit Rating and Information Services of India (CRISIL), a rating agency that's majority owned by McGraw-Hill's Standard & Poor's unit, yesterday announced the launch of a new rating service for business schools.
CRISIL has already graded management education programs at 20 schools, all of them in India, and it appears that the ratings will be limited to Indian business schools. Martin Winn, an S&P; vice president, told me that neither S&P; or CRISIL have any plans to rate business schools outside of India.
According to the CRISIL press release, schools that volunteer to be rated will be ranked on an eight-point scale, from A★★★ to B using a detailed methodology that "assesses the ability of the institute to impart quality education and to achieve desired student outcomes through the graded programme." Programs will receive two ratings comparing them to other programs in the same Indian state and nationally. Grading criteria include quantitative and qualitative parameters such as faculty, curriculum, research, admissions, and student outcomes. Grades will be based on school-supplied information as well as a campus visit by a CRISIL team and input from recruiters and alumni.
Continue reading "Rating Agency Begins Grading Business Schools"
Posted by: Louis Lavelle on January 10, 2011
The Yale Daily News is reporting that the donor who contributed $50 million to help fund construction of a new campus for the Yale School of Management (Yale Full-Time MBA Profile) has died, less than two weeks after making the gift.
According to the newspaper, Edward P. Evans, the 68-year-old former chief executive of publishing house Macmillan, died on Dec. 31 of acute myeloid leukemia, a cancer of the blood and bone marrow. It quoted Yale President Richard Levin as saying that the Dec. 20 gift, the largest in the school's 35-year history, was part of Evans' plans for his estate. Evans never married and had no children.
The new 4.25 acre campus on Whitney Avenue is expected to open in the fall of 2013. The new School of Management building will be named Edward P. Evans Hall in his honor. Evans was a member of Yale College Class of 1964.
Joel Getz, Yale SOM's associate dean for development and alumni relations, told Bloomberg Businessweek that Evans made a "significant" payment on his commitment prior to his death, with the remainder coming from his estate. Getz added: "We are incredibly sorry that he won't be able to see the building that will bear his name come to fruition and participate in the celebrations surrounding the opening in 2013."
Posted by: Louis Lavelle on January 7, 2011
About five years ago, Warren Bennis and James O'Toole penned an article for the Harvard Business Review called "How Business Schools Lost Their Way." It was, in many ways, the shot heard round the world. (I was visiting b-schools in China when it came out and people were talking about it there. The same day.) Their premise: that way too much of what passes for research in business schools is an unmitigated waste--abstract financial and economic analysis, increasingly focused on theory instead of practice, that's completely irrelevant to the real world of business.
A new study calls that conclusion into question. It was co-authored by Jonathan P. O'Brien of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Paul L. Drnevich and Craig E. Armstrong of the University of Alabama, and T. Russell Crook of the University of Tennessee and published in the December-February issue of Academy of Management Learning and Education.
The authors found that scholarly research at business schools appears to add as much as 21 percent to the MBA students' future salaries, or about $24,000 a year. "The result strongly suggests that research-intensive schools generally do a superior job in helping their students acquire and hone their knowledge, skills, and abilities, which pays financial returns to the students through their future employment," the authors write. "One might conclude that the actual state of the relevance of business school research is not nearly as dire as...some have suggested."
Continue reading "For MBAs, Faculty Research Pays Off"
Posted by: Louis Lavelle on January 4, 2011
U.S. News and World Report recently studied the educational credentials of Fortune 500 CEOs and concluded that (1) Ivy League schools produce a disproportionate share, (2) big state schools aren't too shabby either, and (3) just three schools--Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania--account for nearly 100 graduate and undergraduate degrees among the corporate bigwigs.
It should probably come as no surprise by now that an MBA is definitely not a prerequisite for a corner office job. Of the 500 CEOs in the U.S. News study only 174 have MBAs. What's more fascinating is that nearly 200 have no graduate degrees and 19 have no college degree at all.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison lived up to its reputation as a school that churns out CEOs by the dozen. With 17 degrees among the Fortune 500 CEOs, it came out ahead of Dartmouth, Stanford, Northwestern and a host of other top schools.
A lot of ink has been spilled on the educational credentials of top CEOs, including some of Bloomberg Businessweek's own. But I'm left wondering if the alma maters of CEOs have anything to do with their success in the business realm. If schools do matter, I also wonder to what extent academics set young men and women on a path to the C-suite, and to what extent it's the raw intelligence they had from the get-go or the connections they made hobnobbing with similarly brilliant people. I also don't know what to make of the fact that the list of colleges claiming members of Congress as alumni bears little resemblance to the CEO list. Thoughts?
