Sana's GMAT n MBA crusade

Indian student in the foreign land

2009-06-06T19:16:00.002-04:00

Think about it -

Australia: 97,000 students

US: 94,563 students

UK: 31,000 students

Canada: 6,937 students

New Zealand: 6,000 students

These are TOI's figures of number of indian students going to these lands to obtain education. For most of the students diversity does not exist in India, quality of education needs to be improved upon or competition for admission is real tough . . . Source

India's MBAs Face Dismal Job Market

2009-05-10T11:54:00.001-04:00

Salaries are down by 25%, international offers have dried up, and at some top business schools nearly half the graduates can't find jobs
By Alison Damast

Students at Indian business schools are having just as hard a time as their American counterparts landing jobs after graduation, and they are facing one of the most painful recruiting seasons in years, according to a new report.
The job placement figures this year at nearly a dozen ofIndia's top management schools—including four Indian Institute of Management campuses (IIMs)—are more dire than expected, according to the highlights of the 2009 MBA Placement Report, released on Apr. 22 by MBA Universe, an India-based Web site about business schools.
It's a sharp reversal from last spring, when Indian B-school students had what was their best recruiting season ever. This year the average salary across top tier B-schools is down 25%, wiping out the record 20%-to-22% salary gains students made last year.
A. Kumar, the site's editor, said the global financial crisis is having a serious impact on the morale of Indian students.
"Students who saw MBA admissions as the ticket to good jobs have started questioning the return on investment, perhaps for the first time in several decades," Kumar said in an e-mail.
The news comes at a time when many students from India are opting to study at business schools in their home country, rather than to go abroad to a U.S. or European school, as many have done in the past. Admissions officers at top U.S. B-schools reportapplications from Indians are down this year, with many worried about obtaining student loans and H1-B visas, as well as the strict hiring restrictions on any companies receiving federal bailout funds under the Troubled Assets Relief Program. Meanwhile, the growing reputation of top-tier Indian business schools like the IIMs is making them a viable option for Indians who otherwise might have chosen to shell out $100,000 or more for a brand-name U.S. degree.
PLACEMENT PROBLEMS
But Indian students opting to stay at home will face significant challenges ahead, especially when it comes to landing a job. At many business schools, career placement officers anticipate the hiring season will continue long after graduation, extending into the summer and perhaps beyond.
Even top-tier schools like the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad have extended their job placement season indefinitely because only 57% of students have found jobs, according to anApr. 2 report in the Business Standard, one of India's leading business newspapers. The school has not yet released its official placement numbers, according to the MBA Universe report. A spokeswoman from the Indian School of Business did not return several e-mails seeking comment about placement results.
Complicating matters, "the picture is dull" for students looking to land jobs outside of India, according to the report. The best international offer at any of the IIMs came from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, where the highest salary topped out at $86,785. At the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, the highest international offer was $83,000, down from last year's peak of $280,000 to $360,000. Meanwhile, schools outside the top 20 are facing an even harder time placing students, Kumar said.
"The second- and third-tier schools will see a constant struggle until the economy revives," he said.
Abhishek Nagaraj, 22, a first-year student at IIM Calcutta who is interning at an investment bank in Mumbai, is spending his summer working as an intern at a financial firm. Among his classmates, there is "this perception that we are at the bottom right now," he said, referring to the economy.

Source for complete article

ISB's graduating class (2009) not fully placed?

2009-04-19T20:14:00.001-04:00

The graduating class of Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad has not been fully placed and the procedure has been extended. “The ISB has set up a special task force with the support of our board members to continue to find the right opportunities and appropriate openings for its talented and experienced students,” said the school’s official statement.

Complete article

1 lakh Indians to return from US in 3-5 yrs: Study

2009-03-02T10:41:00.000-05:00

Washington: As many as 1,00,000 Indians and an equal number of Chinese will return to their native countries in the next three to five years, a move that will greatly boost their economies and undermine technological innovation in America, a new US study warns.
The study on immigration by a team at Duke, Harvard and Berkeley universities led by Vivek Wadhwa, an Indian-American technology entrepreneur turned academic, says "America's loss is the world's gain".
There are no hard numbers available on how many have returned, but anecdotal evidence shows that this is in the tens of thousands, says Wadhwa, executive-in-residence for the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University and fellow at the Labour and Worklife Programme at Harvard Law School.
"With the economic downturn, my guess is that we'll have over 1,00,000 Indians and as many Chinese return home over the next three-five years," said Wadhwa. " This flood of western educated and skilled talent will greatly boost the economies of India and China and strengthen their competitiveness.
"India is already becoming a global hub for R&D. This will allow it to branch into many new areas and will accelerate the trend," he said.
"The US has always had the luxury of being arrogant about immigration because it has been the strongest magnet for the world's best and brightest," but as the study shows "there are other strong magnets now".
"We are effectively exporting our economic stimulus. Policies like those which the US just enacted which prevents some banks from hiring foreign workers will have the opposite effect from what they intended - they will send jobs abroad and scare away top talent," Wadhwa said.
The study released on Monday Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, based in Kansas City, Montana, indicates placing limits on foreign workers in the US is not the answer to America's rising unemployment rate and may undermine efforts to spur technological innovation.
"A substantial number of highly skilled immigrants have started returning to their home countries in recent years, draining a key source of brain power and innovation," said vice president of Research and Policy at the Kauffman Foundation, Robert E Litan.
"We wanted to know what is encouraging this much-needed economic growth engine to leave our country, thereby sending entrepreneurship and economic stimulus to places like Bangalore and Beijing," he added.
The report builds on an earlier Kauffman Foundation report by Wadhwa documenting a queue of one million H-1B holders and their families anxiously awaiting longer-term work visas and growing frustrated with the immigration process.
Until recently, America has been the prime destination for the world's best and brightest immigrants.
"Immigrants have made tremendous personal sacrifices. They would leave behind relatives and friends and accept second-tier status in American society," said Wadhwa.
"Now countries like India and China are providing equal career opportunities and a better quality of life. So the most highly educated and skilled are often returning home," he added.
The two-year study covered 1,203 Indian and Chinese subjects who had studied or worked in the US for a year or more before returning home.

Article source

For MBAs, a Brave New World

2009-01-30T13:53:00.001-05:00

As business models evolve, post-recession MBA jobs will, too, with employers looking for well-rounded types with strong leadership skills
By Eitan Ahimor

When trying to explain the regression that usually follows a chaotic event, Albert Einstein once said, "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." While the MBA job market may not revert to "sticks and stones," its future is likely to be quite different from what came after the last recession in 2001.
There is no doubt that the current recession will also be followed by an increase in MBA recruitment, but the nature of the opportunities offered to freshly minted MBAs will change. In the period following the dot-com crisis, companies sought MBAs with special skills and knowledge of niche areas, such as structured finance and private equity, as they strove to extend their business and gain market share by offering their customers sophisticated products and services. This strategy resulted from the flourishing capital markets, available funding, stiff competition, and increased consumer demand. Both MBA students and business schools were quick to seize upon these new market needs as many students chose to specialize in things such as financial real estate, financial engineering, advanced securitization, structured finance, and other exotic courses. Many MBAs saw business school as a gateway to a niche area instead of the place to develop leadership and general management skills like corporate finance, marketing, and operations. In our current recession, however, this approach is bound to change.
Article Source

Rammohan Rao resigns as ISB Dean

2009-01-09T12:46:00.001-05:00

HYDERABAD: Professor M. Rammohan Rao, who presided over the controversial meeting of Satyam’s board of directors approving acquisition of Maytas Properties and Maytas Infra on December 16, stepped down on Wednesday as Dean of the Indian School of Business (ISB).
Explaining the reasons for his decision, he said the shocking revelations by Satyam Chairman B. Ramalinga Raju, of which he had no prior knowledge, meant that the controversy surrounding the Information Technology major was far from over.
“My continued concern and preoccupation with the evolving situation are impacting my role as Dean of ISB. Given that my term with the ISB anyway ends in a few months, I think that this is an appropriate time for me to step down,” he said.

Source for complete article

Harvard's Investment Errors

2008-11-19T04:06:00.000-05:00

That's where America's greatest university is investing its endowment?

By Daniel Gross

The recent market turmoil portends hard times for even the wealthiest universities. Last week, Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust told stakeholders that, with the research service Moody's projecting "a 30 percent decline in the value of college and university endowments in the current fiscal year," Harvard needs "to be prepared to absorb unprecedented endowment losses and plan for a period of greater financial constraint."
f any investor could have avoided the credit catastrophe, it should have been Harvard. Harvard, the ultimate long-term investor (it's been compounding assets for more than 350 years), sports the nation's leading business school and counts a host of financial geniuses among its many distinguished alumni. But judging by one snapshot of a portion of Harvard's gigantic endowment, Harvard's recent financial performance is less than impressive.

The Harvard Management Company has the enviable but challenging task of managing Harvard's mammoth endowment. As of June 30, 2008, HMC managed more than $45 billion, the vast majority of it endowment assets. (Here's HMC's annual report and data on its impressive recent performance.) HMC parcels out big chunks of the endowment to outside managers—hedge funds, private-equity firms, asset managers of all stripes—and its staff manages a large chunk itself.

Source for Completer article

Full-Tuition Fellowships from Top B-Schools

2008-09-11T12:48:00.000-04:00

Complete Article here

Here's a look at some of the basics about full-tuition scholarships at some of the leading MBA programs

One of the management education world's greatest secrets is the wide variety of full-tuition fellowship programs at business schools. There are more than you might think—University of Virgina's Darden School of Business, for example, offers 61 full-tuition fellowships—and it is well worth taking the time to look into them during the application process. It could save you a cool $150,000, the average price for a two-year education at a top business school. We've rounded up some of the top schools' full-tuition fellowship programs, along with how to apply for them.

School: California Berkeley (Haas)
Name of full-tuition scholarship/fellowship: Haas Merit Scholarship; Haas Achievement Award; Maxwell Fellowship; White Fellowship
Number of full-tuition scholarships awarded to 2008 entering class: 14
How to apply: Automatic for Haas Merit Scholarships and White Fellowships; Haas Achievement Award requires optional essay as part of the application; the Maxwell Fellowship has a separate application.
Special requirements: Students must remain in good academic standing.

School: Carnegie Mellon (Tepper)
Name of full-tuition scholarship/fellowship: Dean's Scholarship; Consortium Fellowship
Number of full-tuition scholarships awarded to 2008 entering class: Not available
How to apply: Dean's Scholarship automatic consideration; Consortium application

School: U. of Chicago
Name of full-tuition scholarship/fellowship: The Dennis W. and Jane B. Carlton Fellowship; The Distinguished Fellows Program; The Wallman Fellowship; The David W. Fox Fellowship
Number of full-tuition scholarships awarded to 2008 entering class: 11
How to apply: Most admitted applicants are automatically considered at the time of the appliation, but many have additional interviews that are required as part of the final selection process.
Special requirements: All of the fellowships have a mentoring component, whether corporate or alumni. The Distiniguished Fellows are mentored by a professor.

School: Columbia
Name of full-tuition scholarship/fellowship: Feldberg Fellowship; Kopf Fellowship; Project Charity Trust; Alexander Bodini Real Estate Fellowship; Margaret B. Greenawalt Scholarship Fund; Mario Gabelli Fellowship; Goldman Sachs Foundation; Heilbrunn Fellowship; Various Corporate Fellowships
Number of full-tuitiion scholarships awarded to 2008 entering class: About 25
How to apply: Automatically considered

Source: BusinessWeek

How B-Schools Catch Résumé Liars

2008-08-29T02:06:00.001-04:00

Complete Article here:

With résumé puffing almost a national sport, business schools keep a sharp eye for inventive applicants -by Dan Macsai

Watch out, would-be fibbers. In the wake of last year's cheating expulsions at Duke's Fuqua School of Business (BusinessWeek.com, 4/30/07) and May's scandal over alleged cheating on the GMAT (BusinessWeek.com, 7/1/08), business schools are scrutinizing applications harder than ever. And so-called résumé puffing, or exaggerating your work experience and qualifications—even slightly—to appear more desirable, could cost you an acceptance letter.

In recent years, admission officials at several top business schools, including the University of California at Los Angeles' Anderson School of Management and Duke, have found a growing number of lies and half-truths in the résumés they review. To be fair, it's hardly an epidemic: Administrators contacted by BusinessWeek estimated that, annually, just under 1% of business school applicants are caught faking it (though the actual number of fibbers could be much higher).

But as applicant pools widen and competition intensifies, résumé puffing is becoming a serious issue, says Mae Jennifer Shores, assistant dean and director of MBA admissions at Anderson. "These candidates are going to great lengths—sometimes too great—to differentiate themselves," she explains. "We [the admissions staff] have essentially become watchdogs."

A SHARPER EDGE

Unlike buying live GMAT questions or plagiarizing an entrance essay, résumé puffing is something of a national sport. In fact, of 8,700 job applicants recently polled online by CareerBuilder.com, nearly 10% admitted to stretching the truth. During a separate survey of 3,700 hiring managers, roughly half said they had caught a lie on a résumé (BusinessWeek.com, 7/25/07). Of those, 28% considered the applicant anyway.

These numbers are "understandable," says Stan Walters, a leading lie-detection expert and author of The Truth About Lying, a layman's guide to lie-detection. When you're applying for a competitive position, he explains, "you naturally want to pump up your image." Late comedian W.C. Fields was more direct: "Anything worth winning is worth cheating for."

For less confident applicants, this edge is especially enticing. Top MBA programs attract premium prospects, most with sky-high GMAT scores and several years of experience. Accordingly, people with fewer credentials and personal insecurities "don't feel they're good enough," says Liz Riley Hargrove, associate dean for admissions at Fuqua. Albeit risky, résumé puffing is a quick fix: The difference between a "junior" and "senior" title, for example, is just two keystrokes.

INFLATING AND INVENTING

During her 15 years at Fuqua, Hargrove has encountered a variety of embellishments. Some applicants inflate their job responsibilities. Others invent extracurricular activities. A few even write their own letters of recommendation and forge a professor's signature. "They're willing to gain an advantage by any means possible," she says. "And that includes making something up."

If caught, these prospects face harsh penalties. Options are school-specific, but most include: a phone call from the admissions department (asking for an explanation), a harsher examination of other application elements (GMAT scores, transcript, interview answers, etc.), and/or application dismissal. Adds Bruce DelMonico, director of admissions at Yale School of Management: "We take these things very seriously."

And with good cause. Part of the role of a business school, says DelMonico, is to train Corporate America's next wave of talent. Accepting people who have knowingly lied—in any capacity—is a dangerous investment. Just ask Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose own dean of admissions, Marilee Jones, was forced to resign last year after officials exposed her doctored education credentials. For weeks, the MIT brand was sullied by embarrassing press coverage.

CRACKING DOWN

Fuqua's Hargrove calls résumé puffing "unfortunate," and Anderson's Shores agrees. Yet both confirm it's tough to track. Who's to say, for example, that an applicant was treasurer, not secretary, of his business fraternity? Or that he spent five hours assisting a professor each week, and not 20? Short of calling every source, on every application, from every candidate, "we can't make sure information is 100% accurate," says Yale's DelMonico.

But they're getting close. At Duke, recommendation letters are now cross-checked at random, via personal phone calls. At UCLA, candidates submit contact information for all (alleged) extracurricular and volunteer activities. At Yale, applications pass through Kroll, a third-party verifier. After running a full background check, the service confirms each applicant's employment and education history, and résumé discrepancies are flagged for staff review. (Michigan State's Broad College of Business employs similar software.)

The goal, says Yale's DelMonico, is to "encourage veracity." If you haven't graduated summa cum laude or logged three years at a top-tier investment bank, be honest about it: According to Fuqua's Hargrove, most applicants who are caught embellishing "could have been accepted on their own merits." After all, a résumé alone won't get you into business school. But puffing one could shut you out.

Source: BusinessWeek

Update on GMAT Cheating Scandal

2008-07-30T02:21:00.000-04:00

Read on for the information directly from GMAC. Nice initiative taken by Business Week. - Sana

The Graduate Management Admission Council's Peg Jöbst fields questions about whose test scores will be canceled

Recent MBA students and applicants have had lots of questions since the Graduate Management Admission Council won a lawsuit against Scoretop.com (BusinessWeek.com, 7/1/08), a Web site that was allegedly providing live General Management Admission Test questions to VIP subscribers. The students want to know why GMAC never warned them that this service was against the rules. They also want to know whose scores will be canceled and what their ultimate punishment will be (BusinessWeek.com, 7/13/08)>.

Peg Jöbst, senior vice-president of GMAC, recently responded to such questions from the public and from BusinessWeek reporter Francesca Di Meglio during a live chat event. Here are edited excerpts from their conversation:

FrancescaBW: Peg, I thought you could first give us a brief overview of what has happened and the role GMAC is playing in this cheating scandal.

GMACPegJ: Certainly, Francesca. The Graduate Management Admission Council was awarded a $2.35 million judgment by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in a copyright infringement case against the operator of Scoretop.com, a U.S.-based Web site that sold access to questions used on the GMAT exam. GMAC seized the site's domain name on June 20, shut down the site, and obtained a hard drive containing subscriber information.

GMAC goes after those who try to cheat on the GMAT exam, because the council has an ethical responsibility to business schools and students to protect the integrity of the application process. GMAC sued Lei Shi and others who operated Scoretop.com, which offered forums where visitors could share information about the GMAT. The site promoted VIP memberships—$30 for 30 days of access—in which users were encouraged to read and post "JJs," for "jungle juice," the Web site's jargon for live GMAT questions.

FrancescaBW: What can subscribers and users of Scoretop expect to happen next?

GMACPegJ: GMAC is limiting its investigation to those individuals who a) posted GMAT questions they saw on their GMAT exam, and b) posted a message on Scoretop confirming that they saw items from the Scoretop Web site on their GMAT exam. In these instances, GMAC will cancel GMAT scores and notify schools to which those scores were sent.

saurabh_iiita: I have registered as a VIP member, but I never used or saw live questions, etc. What are the implications for me?

GMACPegJ: Based on what you have described, you would not fall into the category of those individuals we are investigating.

sarithababu: Do you have any comments about the pre-September 2006 version of the site and its users, vs. post-September 2006?

GMACPegJ: Our investigation criteria are not tied to versions of the site.

sarithababu: I got that dreaded e-mail. I was a VIP member. I discussed a few questions with no knowledge (still) of whether I am in violation. I am starting school this fall. I have left my job and planned my move. Should I put everything on hold and wait for your verdict on my case? Or go through the ordeal hoping GMAC will clear my name? In a way. it is none of GMAC's business. but this is what is on the minds of numerous students caught up in this mess, so if you can humanely provide response to this, it will be [appreciated].

We realize candidates take the process of admissions and preparation for the GMAT very seriously. It is hard work.

For complete transcript, visit http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/jul2008/bs20080727_833217.htm

Scoretop.com shut down?

2008-07-03T01:36:00.000-04:00

Shutting Down a GMAT Cheat Sheet

A court order against a Web site that gave away test questions could land some B-school students in hot water by Louis Lavelle

More than 1,000 prospective MBA students who paid $30 to use a now-defunct Web site to get a sneak peak at live questions from the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT) before taking the exam may have their scores canceled in coming weeks. For many, their B-school dreams may be effectively over.

On June 20, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia granted the test's publisher, the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), a $2.3 million judgment against the operator of the site, Scoretop.com. GMAC has seized the site's domain name and shut down the site, and is analyzing a hard drive containing payment information.

GMAC said any students found to have used the Scoretop site will have their test scores canceled, the schools that received them will be notified, and the student will not be permitted to take the test again. Since most top B-schools require the GMAT, the students will have little chance of enrolling. "This is illegal," said Judy Phair, GMAC's vice-president for communications. "We have a hard drive, and we're going to be analyzing it. If you used the site and paid your $30 to cheat, your scores will be canceled. They're in big trouble."

Small Advantage to Test Takers

GMAC sued the operator of the site, Lei Shi, for using it to distribute copyrighted GMAT-related materials without GMAC's permission. Shi, who has reportedly returned from the site's base in Ohio to his native China, is under investigation by the FBI, GMAC says. Shi, who did not have legal representation for the GMAC lawsuit, could not be reached for comment.

While the consequences for students may be severe, the advantage they gained by using Scoretop is almost inconsequential. Unlike other GMAT test-prep sites, which use retired questions, Scoretop and others claim to provide access to "live" questions that test takers might encounter when they show up for the exam. Participants on the site would debate the proper answers. But the GMAT uses a computer adaptive format that generates a new test for every user based on responses to previous questions from a stockpile that contains thousands of possible questions. "Even if a site is illegally able to obtain some real questions, it is extremely unlikely that a test taker will see the same questions on the live exam," says Larry Rudner, GMAC vice-president for research and development.

Scoretop has been in operation since 2003. Visitors to the Scoretop Web site before it was shut down would have encountered posts from happy users and a list of "test experiences," users' firsthand reports about the most recent test questions. But on June 23, they found this message from GMAC: "GMAC takes cheating very seriously, especially attempts to obtain access to live test questions in advance of an exam. We also take very seriously any unauthorized distribution of our copyrighted GMAT preparation materials. If you are caught disclosing, accessing, or using 'real' GMAT questions your GMAT score will be cancelled [and] you may be subject to a civil lawsuit or criminal prosecution."

The news about the cheating scandal was the talk of the annual GMAC conference in Chicago over the weekend, where the organization's President and CEO David Wilson described the latest developments for an audience of 700.

It's unclear how individual schools will respond. More than 4,000 graduate management programs use the test as part of the admissions process, but many of those using sites like Scoretop seek admission to the most competitive programs. So the fallout is likely to be limited to top schools.

Several schools, contacted June 23, said it was far too early to determine what fate awaits students or prospective students whose scores are canceled. "It's impossible to say at this point what that means," said Ed Anderson, Duke's associate director of admissions.

Some Scoretop Users May Have MBAs

Joe Fox, director of MBA programs at Washington University's Olin Business School, said a lot depends on what information GMAC can provide about individual students, especially the frequency with which they used the site. "There's an infraction, that's for sure," Fox said. "At a minimum it flies in the face of our code of professional conduct. We could do anything we wanted—from a slap on the wrist to expulsion from the program—and we'd be well within our rights."

Since the Scoretop site has been in operation since 2003, it's possible that students with tainted GMAT scores are in the application process, currently enrolled, or already graduated. For those in the application process, the applicants may be rejected, and for those currently enrolled, expulsion is a possibility.

Several years ago, when a Chinese national was caught taking the GMAT for dozens of prospective students, one Olin student who had the test taken on his behalf was dismissed before he could complete his degree, Fox said. That's a possibility this time around, too. "I think it's fair to say we'll take this seriously," he added. "It could be the end of the line."

Source: Business Week

More students opting fore entrepreneurship at ISB

2008-03-29T23:24:00.000-04:00

This year, close to 20 students are teaming up in different groups to start new business ventures.
Students are starting businesses ranging from nano technology firm to Photo wave Technologies to financial analytics and consultancy firm.
ISB also offers a two-year placement holiday for those who want to set up their own business.

IIM-A and IIM-B and IIm-C hike fees for MBA programme

2008-03-29T23:07:00.001-04:00

Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad (IIM-A) , on Saturday hiked the fees of its two-year post-graduate course (Business Management) from Rs.4,50,000 to Rs.11,50,000 from the next academic session joining in June 2008. IIM-Bangalore had also raised its fees to Rs 9 lakh for two years and IIM-Calcutta to Rs 6 lakh from the 2009-11 batch.

However, need based scholarships are available.

Signing off post !!!

2008-02-13T09:18:00.000-05:00

Hello fellow aspirants,

I wish to share with you the news of getting admit from Duke, ISB and LBS.

I thank Adcom at these schools, my present organization, my admission consultant at Apexwriters, various forums that I participated in (including but not limited to pagalguy and scoretop) and my family for their tremendous help.

This blog has helped me remain in touch with other aspirants, track the latest related news and make some friends. But, now I will move on to other things and I will not keep posting to this blog anymore. However, If anyone wants to access the GMAT material that I had downloaded from some resources on the net and uploaded , then you are welcome to join the Google group.

Best of luck to all the applicants.

Cheers,
Sana!

Webcam Interviews Disconnect Imposters

2008-01-25T08:52:00.000-05:00

Phone interviews allow for possible deception, but the growing use of Webcams by schools is making it more difficult to use a stand-in

by Alina Dizik

Who's really on the other end of the line during a phone interview? It could be the student on the MBA application—or a well-spoken cheater.

It used to be that business school officials couldn't necessarily tell one from the other. But now, with the widespread use of Webcams, one avenue for potential cheating—including coaching or having an imposter sit in for the applicant—is being narrowed.

Busted!

While most B-school interviews are conducted in person, that's not always possible, particularly when candidates are living in other countries. And that's when the temptation to test the boundaries of ethics, such as referring to prepared notes or using a stand-in, can come into play.

No one knows how often it happens. Anne Cooper, the admissions director at University of Georgia's Terry College of Business said in an e-mail that she suspects—but can't prove—impersonation in one or two cases in each incoming class of about 120 full-time students. Cooper says the difference in a student's English-language skills once he or she comes to campus is an automatic tip-off.

"There's no way to confirm that you are speaking with the same person that shows up," Cooper says. "It's disconcerting when it happens, because you want to know that you're dealing with someone of integrity."

Starting this month, Georgia is requiring that phone interviews be conducted via Webcam. Several other schools, including Penn State, Arizona State, and Ohio State offer it as an option. While cutting down on cheating is just one of the reasons schools are adopting Webcam interviews, the technology has other benefits they're not ignoring.

When Is It Cheating?

"It's always suspect, in terms of dialogue, who's on the other end of the phone [line]," says Rudy Pino, the director of admissions at Arizona State University's W.P. Carey School of Business. Over the phone, interviewers listen for suspicious clues such as rustling paper, delayed responses, and requests for the interviewer to repeat questions—possible indications that the candidate is searching notes for an answer or consulting with someone.

Pino estimates that every year close to 5% of about 160 full-time students receive an unethical amount of help—which includes anything from scripted answers to having a well-versed helper present during their phone interview.

Besides outright impersonation, its not really clear where the ethical lines in phone interviews are, admissions experts say. Even if it's not strictly forbidden, when admissions officials like Carrie Marcinkevage, the admissions director at Penn State's Smeal College of Business, get a scripted or delayed answer, they automatically become concerned about the applicant's ability to succeed in an MBA program. An applicant can use notes to "hide language deficiencies, glide over unfavorable parts of an experience they don't want to reveal, or worse, to give someone else's answer," Marcinkevage explains in an e-mail.

But Los Angeles-based admissions consultant Stacy Blackman says there are different expectations for a phone interview than for an in-person meeting. "I don't know that [script reading] is necessarily unethical if you prepared it yourself," adds Blackman who discourages her clients from reading word-for-word answers because that prevents them from coming across as genuine.

Webcam interviews also let schools record and store images for later use. Alison Merzel, admissions director at Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business, another MBA program that officially started using Webcams this year, is impressed with the screening potential. "You can capture an image and compare it with their GMAT or TOEFL image; it gives you the option of having identification," she says.

VoIP Makes It Easy

Although Webcams have been around for years, the proliferation of VoIP technologies like Skype (EBAY) (BusinessWeek.com, 11/29/07) or Yahoo! Messenger (YHOO) means that MBA admissions offices can now see them as a feasible, low-cost option.

Mandy Stowers, a first-year MBA student at Ohio State who's on the admissions committee, says she hasn't received any negative feedback on their new Skype-based offering because of the applicants' familiarity with the program. Stowers predicts that more than half of this year's international students will choose Webcam interviews conducted over Skype rather than speaking via telephone and says that many candidates already had Skype IDs and simply had to log in. "It's been pretty positive—we've had people who scheduled phone interviews actually switch to Skype interviews."

Georgia's Cooper said the school has started using Cisco's (CSCO) WebEx technology, which has the capability for one-on-one interviews. With WebEx, an applicant can log in and schedule a date and time while having technical support readily available, says Cooper. And even though the service is costlier than just signing up for Skype, Cooper says the investment is worth it. "We wanted to find reliable alternatives, and I believe more schools will be moving in that direction."

Smile, You're on Camera

The adoption of Webcams for admissions interviews is changing the rules in more subtle ways as well. For instance, with this technology an applicant can't interview for business school in his or her nightclothes. On the other hand, it's a little more forgiving than an in-person chat. For his Webcam interview with Penn State, Ross Cain combined his everyday shorts with a suit and shirt because he knew his interviewer wouldn't see below his computer desk. "I was kind of like the ESPN sportscasters," he recalls.

And exactly how you handle yourself during the interview is also a bit jarring. During a Webcam interview in December, Xiaoyu Zhang, a Penn State applicant from Shanghai, had a hard time deciding on how best to make eye contact with Smeal's Marcinkevage. Zhang had to look at the Webcam above the monitor, instead of into Marcinkevage's eyes on the computer screen. But other than a few mishaps, Zhang says the Webcam was worth it. "Via phone you can only convey 7% of the whole message—I can't use my hands, I can't smile." He's surprised more schools don't provide the option.

Another factor with Webcams: They give a glimpse into applicants' homes and work environments. So interviewees and interviewers have to think about set design. "I think you could do two things: take it in a very professional direction and draw the attention away from the background so all the attention is on you, or you could use the background to develop a sense of who you are," recommends Marcinkevage. (She's also had to modify her own interviewing space. Since starting the process in November, she's removed unkempt-looking binders from a shelf and found a new spot for her purse—both of which could be seen through the camera lens.)

But even though most admissions officials encourage in-person conversations that take place on campus, both applicants and interviewers are pleased with the Webcam. After the first year of conducting Webcam interviews, Merzel says Ohio State hopes to continue taking advantage of emerging video capabilities. "There's limitations, it's still not perfect," she says. "But we will move toward [using Webcams] as technology improves."

Source

A Shaky Season for Student Loans

2008-01-25T08:44:00.000-05:00

Subprime woes and recent legislation have lenders tightening standards for applicants, and the credit crunch is eating away at other sources for tuition money

by Alison Damast

Shortly after New Year's Day, Pat Watkins, financial aid director at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Fla., placed a worried call to National Education, a student loan company she has been working with for nearly two decades. She had heard rumors that the company was no longer funding federal Stafford and PLUS (Parent Loans for Undergraduate Students) education loans, but had received no official word from the company.

She found out that the phone of National Education's local rep had been disconnected. Later she learned that Chicago-based National Education was not planning to accept applications for new loans for the spring semester after Jan. 15, though they planned to fund disbursements for students who received loans for the fall.

Federal Loans Lose Funders

That was the first surprise. In mid-January, Watkins received a letter from Phoenix loan company NextStudent saying they, too, would not be funding new Stafford or PLUS loans for the spring semester, only funding loans where there has been a fall disbursement.

At least one other student loan company, San Diego-based Goal Financial, has also pulled back their federal loan lending, according to college loan officials. Federal student loans are low-interest loans guaranteed by the federal government. Congress outsources many of these loans to private companies and has recently passed legislation that has eliminated many of the subsidies they gave these lenders to encourage them to participate and administer the federal loans.

"I haven't seen it this bad before," said Watkins, who has worked in the financial aid industry for 34 years. "It is going to put a lot of students in a bind." She said she will help students find a new loan provider, but for students with existing loans this will likely incur more costs and a second loan to be repaid.

Student financial aid season—which started on Jan. 1—is getting off to a shaky start. The industry is experiencing jitters as the fallout from the subprime credit crisis trickles down to lenders who make private loans, as well as companies that also issue federal loans. For the moment, the credit mess has had a limited effect on student borrowers, but experts said they expect students to be affected in the next few months.

Tougher Standards

For instance, students with poor or only decent credit ratings—those with FICO credits scores under 650—may encounter difficulty obtaining a private loan with reasonable interest rates or, for that matter, obtaining one at all. Loan companies may refuse, in some cases, to make loans to students at schools that have high default rates, financial aid directors said. And families that have relied on home equity borrowing to pay college costs may turn to private lenders as the home equity market tightens up (BusinessWeek, 1/16/08).

Students also may need to change their loan application tactics. In the past, students who were authorized account holders on their parents' credit cards could get loans with interest rates based on their parents' credit rating. They now will be required in most cases to apply for such loans with their parents as co-signers. Those applying for federal loans may also find their options more limited, as many major loan companies that work with the federal government temporarily pull out of the federal student loan program.

While the subprime crisis has created the most news, student lenders are also facing fallout from legislation passed by Congress last fall that eliminated nearly $19 billion worth of federal subsidies to student lenders. The combination of these two developments has made for a challenging financial environment for student loan operators, says Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid, an online provider of student aid information. "The joke in the industry is that Congress took away half the profits, and the asset-based securities markets took away the other half," Kantrowitz says.

The $85-billion student loan industry is often criticized because of the large profits private students lenders make off of students by charging them high interest and origination fees. The legislation was propelled by student borrowers who wanted to see the subsidies issued to private lenders channeled back to federal student loans. As a result of the legislation, an additional $11 billion in federal aid is now available to students.

Financial aid officers are predicting that student loan applicants may find the process more daunting and complicated than in years past. As with the mortgage market, many private student loans are packaged and sold to investors as asset-based securities, leaving them vulnerable to aftershocks of the subprime credit crisis. For example, FinAid's Kantrowitz predicts that many companies will no longer issue loans to students with credit scores below 650 to protect themselves from any subprime exposure. In addition, loan companies will require more applicants to have co-signers. "I do expect it to be a little more difficult to get one of these private loans," Kantrowitz says.

Are Lenders Hurting?

Borrowers' worries extend even to the largest student loan lender, SallieMae (SLM), which is also cutting back on federal loans and concentrating more on the private market. Earlier this month, the company said in a Securities & Exchange Commission filing that in response to the financial environment, it would be "more selective" in making federal and private education loans. Since then the company has reassured institutional borrowers that it is in sound financial condition, according to a Jan. 17 report in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The decision by some companies to withdraw from the federal loan program could indicate that more lenders are hurting, said John Dean, special counsel to the Consumer Bankers Assn., an Arlington (Va.) group that represents bank lenders in the student loan programs. "This is significant because National Education and Goal Financial were well-known operations and were seen a couple of years ago as growing rapidly," Dean says. "We presume that if they are experiencing difficulty that others could be experiencing difficulty as well."

Representatives from National Education and Goal Financial declined to comment on the federal loan suspensions. Next Student did not return phone calls requesting comment.

Private loan companies' investment practices may have led to some "overexuberance" on the part of private lenders, says Robert Shireman, executive director of the Project on Student Debt, a group that focuses on student financial aid. Like Kantrowitz, he expects private loan companies to be more cautious when making loans to students.

Battered Family Finances

In the meantime, financial aid officers are sitting back and anxiously waiting to see how the student lender landscape will shift if more loan companies continue to pull out of segments of the market.

Bill Witbrodt, director of student financial aid services at Washington University in St. Louis, says he has not seen students directly affected yet, but expects that could change. Plus, battered family finances could send more students into aid offices. Right now, students aren't reporting family financial stress from the credit crisis, Witbrodt says. "If this continues, I would expect it [to] and, in fact, I'm surprised it hasn't already."

Students facing the greatest difficulty in obtaining private loans are international graduate students, who are not eligible for any of the federal loan programs, says Rockne Bergman, manager of graduate and professional programs at University of Minnesota's financial aid office. He counsels international students seeking loans from the law, business, and nursing schools, among others, and says he has already seen the market tighten for them.

"These lenders are just being very careful as to whom they are lending to. And they want to make sure they will be able to get those loans paid back," Bergman says.

Financial aid officers like Eckerd College's Watkins say their greatest fear is that the lending environment will create a situation where students strapped for cash will take out risky private loans with sky-high interest rates, no matter what the cost. For example, Watkins says she has seen commercials on TV aimed at students with poor credit ratings and promising no interest or payment until graduation. Those loans tend to come with higher origination fees and higher, unpredictable interest rates that compound the amount students owe after graduation into a "significantly higher amount," Watkins says: "We haven't seen the full impact of this yet, but it is coming."

Source

Bump or Bust for MBA Jobs?

2008-01-25T08:26:00.000-05:00

Job cuts and a looming recession threaten the hiring outlook, but the big banks and other employers don't plan to slow their recruitingby Alison Damast

It's turning into a nervous 2008 for soon-to-be MBAs. Many of the large financial institutions that business school students typically turn to for summer internships and job offers have posted large mortgage-related losses and announced layoffs in the past few weeks. Just last week, for instance, Bank of America (BAC) announced it would cut an additional 650 corporate and investment banking jobs, while Citigroup (C) said it planned to cut 4,200 jobs globally. Suddenly, the employment outlook is looking a bit more turbulent.

Up to now, the academic year has been good for MBA student job-seekers. Recruiters haven't stopped coming to campus to interview for summer internship jobs, career services officers said. Meanwhile, second-year students looking for full-time jobs appear to be doing as well as, if not better than, their counterparts last year, with many schools reporting increased recruiting, more job offers, and higher salaries for this year's grads. But that can all change in a hurry.

The challenging financial environment means students must be extra diligent when conducting their internship and job searches this year, said Tom Kozicki, board president of the MBA Career Services Council, the umbrella group of school career placement offices. "Those who are attacking the market aggressively, I think, will fare well whether the economy dips or not, but those who wait on the sidelines and hope for something to be delivered to them by their business school are the ones who will get caught if this market turns down," said Kozicki, who also serves as executive director of the career center at the University of California, Irvine's Paul Merage School of Business.

Changing Their Strategies

Brian Mirochnik, 26, a first-year student at the University of Rochester's Simon Graduate School of Business is heeding that advice as he conducts his search for a summer internship. He wants to pursue a career in investment banking, specializing in leveraged finance, but realizes this year he might not be able to obtain a position in that sector, which has been beleaguered by job cuts and financial losses.

He has traveled to New York several times over the past few weeks to talk with nearly 50 investment bankers about the state of the industry. The news hasn't been heartening—they have told him there are about 40% fewer jobs in his area of interest. He has since changed his strategy and is now considering taking an internship in the corporate finance division of investment banking.

"I would be lying to tell you I wasn't nervous about the prospects, because I left a good career to come back to business school to go into investment banking," said Mirochnik, who worked as a commercial banker and entrepreneur before attending Rochester. "I think across the board people are nervous, but you can't let that affect how you go about the recruiting process."

Big Banks Still Recruiting

This year's first-year MBA students have been anxious about the job market from the moment they arrived on campus, said Kenneth Keeley, executive director of the career opportunities center at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business.

But their fears have been somewhat assuaged by the large number of recruiters who have been on campus to interview students in the past few weeks, including Deutsche Bank (DB), Merrill Lynch (MER), Goldman Sachs (GS), and Bank of America, he said.

"The early numbers again seem to be good. I think many firms will still want to have that pipeline for internships," Keeley said. "The real indicator of how the economy will impact the MBA job market will come next fall, when these firms decide how many offers to give to their summer interns."

So far, many of the big recruiters haven't shown signs of pulling back. For instance, the hiring strategy has not changed at Merrill Lynch—despite a huge $9.8 billion loss in the fourth quarter of 2007, the largest quarterly loss in its history. Merrill plans to hire between 170 and 180 people for summer internships globally, said Sarah Quarterman, the firm's global head of campus recruiting. Last year, Merrill hired 190 associates, but that number was higher than average, said Quarterman.

Taking the Long View of Hiring

The company takes a long-term approach to recruiting, looking ahead several years rather than tailoring their hiring to market conditions, she said. "I think some firms in the past have pulled out of recruiting due to market volatility and then reaped the consequences of that in two to three years' time," Quarterman said. "I think we're all a lot wiser now and realize that the people we hire this year are going to be the VPs of three or four years' time, so if we don't hire them now, we'll have a talent shortage."

Bank of America—which announced on Jan. 22 that its fourth-quarter profit had fallen 95%—is still an active participant in MBA campus recruiting, said Rick Parson, Bank of America's executive vice-president and global staffing executive. "While we have announced some workforce reductions in certain business units in this tough market environment, we still need to look for a variety of skills and diverse experience when hiring," Parsons said in an e-mail.

Second-year business school students appear to be in the safest spot for the moment. According to an Employment Trends Survey Report conducted this fall by the MBA Career Services Council, most of the 85 business schools surveyed reported a 20% increase in overall recruiting activity this fall over last year and a 14.9% increase in on-campus recruiting. The average full-time base salary for the class of 2007 increased by 5.5%, with an 8.8% increase in the signing bonus, the survey showed.

Signing Bonuses Up

The data from that survey seem to be aligning with preliminary hiring figures at schools such as Carnegie Mellon, where nearly 78% of second-year MBA students already had job offers by Jan. 21, up about 10% from this time last year, according to Keeley. "The number of companies making offers is up, and that's a good sign to us," he said. "If that number was dipping, we'd be really concerned."

The employment picture also remains a question mark for undergraduates, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). As of last fall, employers said they planned to hire 16% more graduates in academic year 2007-2008 compared to the previous year, according to a survey released in November. Signing bonuses for undergrads are also up.

But that picture could change in the coming months, said Andrea Koncz, NACE's employment information manager. "We are hearing a lot, of course, about the economy and how it will affect the college job market," Koncz said this week. "We normally do another update survey in late March, but we're probably going to go out sometime in mid-February, just to see if anything is changing at all."

Source

Darden's Demanding, Fulfilling Schedule

2007-12-12T20:41:00.000-05:00

The school makes no excuse for its rigorous reputation. Students quickly learn how to work in teams and squeeze in meals, even pizza in a cup
by Scott Clemente

Pizza in a cup. This is by far the biggest innovation I've come across since starting classes 10 weeks ago. While I don't think you'll ever find this remarkable product in the aisles of your neighborhood supermarket, I think it does a good job of illustrating how busy first-year students at University of Virginia's Darden School of Business find themselves.
Let me explain. As a first-year, you quickly learn time efficiency. Between classes, working on cases, and attending various recruiting and club events, there is little time for anything else, including eating. It is the situation a friend found herself in three weeks ago. I was sitting in the library, working on cases for classes the next day, when my friend walked up to my table with her book bag slung over her shoulder and a coffee cup in her left hand. There was nothing unusual about this, but when she sat down I noticed what looked like a pizza crust sticking up over the top of the coffee cup. I asked her what it was, and she confirmed my suspicion that there was a slice of pizza stuffed pointy-side first into her cup.
Now, why would someone ever do that? Well, on this particular day my friend had gone straight through three classes in the morning, right into a presentation by PepsiCo (PEP) about its summer intern program, to a meeting for the marketing club. She had just enough time to pick up a slice of pizza from the cafeteria on her way to the library, where she was going to work on her cases before meeting with her learning team later that night (more on learning teams later). There was only one problem—food isn't allowed in the library. Her solution? Pizza in a cup. The cup concealed the pizza and allowed her to sneak it in.
If you talk to enough Darden students you will hear stories like this repeated often—from people doing laundry at 2 a.m. to a second-year who thought he lost his car keys only to return to his car and find them in the ignition…and the car still running! The dean of Darden, Robert Bruner, recently wrote: "Our reputation on Web chat boards and in the B-school rankings is that Darden's MBA program is the most demanding of all. We make no apology for that reputation." In short, it is intense.
School Days
A typical day at Darden starts off with your first class at 8 a.m. Afterward, the school meets for the Darden tradition of First Coffee, a brief informal gathering in between classes. It gives people a chance to socialize and catch up on any funny events from the previous weekend or any late-night study sessions. After First Coffee we have our second class, another break, and then typically a third class that gets done just after 1 p.m.
After classes we have from 1 p.m. to 7 p.m. to attend any recruiting events, work on cases for the next day, and hopefully squeeze in some time for personal matters that need to be taken care of. It gets busy. I have classmates who put reminders in their Outlook calendars to call their parents out of fear of forgetting.
One for the Team
At 7 every night we meet with our learning team. This is a group of five to six classmates who are assigned to the team by the school. The team's purpose is to work through the cases for the next day's classes, and generally help each other learn. My learning team consists of six people, including Katie, a former AOL (TWX) communications manager originally from Tennessee; Ian, a professional cyclist and entrepreneur from Virginia; Vikram, a business developer from a software company in India; Jihyun, a television news director from South Korea; and Saul, a corporate development director from Spain.

Every night from 7 to 10 we attempt to bring our varied backgrounds and different points of view together to come up with solutions to such problems as: Did Apple (AAPL) make a mistake by cutting the price of the iPhone so quickly? How did Zimbabwe find itself in an era of 10,000% inflation and what can it do to get itself out of it? Is the Mirage Las Vegas (MGM) properly accounting for uncollectible accounts from its casino customers on its financial statements? All are real business problems and none have straight black-and-white answers.
Honing Co-Working Skills
Analyzing these problems is complicated by two factors. First, because of the case structure at Darden and the way classes are set up, you do the homework before you learn the lesson. The consequence of this is that you are constantly kept at the forefront of your learning curve and must initially struggle through the new concepts as you encounter them.
The second complicating factor is that when you put six people in a room, each with very different cultural and career backgrounds, and each used to having the right answer, you end up initially with what can best be described as a human train wreck. In our team, each person wanted to demonstrate their knowledge or skill in a particular subject and none of us ever wanted to admit that our answers were wrong.
As you can imagine, this led to a lot of wasted time. Indeed, the hours we spent debating whether the net present value of the investment in our decision analysis case was $1,567,524 or $1,567,526 are ones we'll never get back. However, over the first several weeks, each of us learned that we may not always be right. We learned to leverage each other's experience and background to not only learn from one another but perhaps take a different path to attack the problem at hand.
The end result is that now, as a group, we develop a deeper and more thorough analysis of any given case than each of us could have done individually. That's significant because at Darden it isn't enough to have the right answer. What's more important is to be able to explain how you arrived at that answer to the other 60 people who share your classroom at 8 a.m. the next day.
Direct, Invigorating Experience
These classes typically start off with another Darden tradition called the Cold Call, which occurs at the beginning of class when the professor calls on a student to give an overview of the case and begin the discussion. Some inside information for those of you who may end up here next year: If you ever find yourself unprepared to start the class off, when the professor scans the room deciding who to call on, maintain eye contact! I once made the rookie mistake of looking down at my computer when the professor looked my way. This is the equivalent of a wayward gazelle limping into the middle of a pack of lions. You can imagine how it ends.
After the Cold Call the class proceeds with a discussion of the case and the various analyses different people have come up with. Instead of lecturing, the professor guides the discussion and most of the talking is done by the students. It may not be the most comfortable way to learn but it makes for an incredibly interesting learning environment.
To date, my experience at Darden has reaffirmed my decision to come back to business school. The best way I can describe it is to quote author Michael Crichton. In his book Travels, he wrote how he would often take trips to various parts of the world to be reminded of who he really was: "Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends and your daily routines, you are forced into direct experience. That's not always comfortable but it is always invigorating."
In making the decision to pursue my MBA, I left behind my friends, my routine, a good job, and the overall comfort of home in Denver. I am working harder than I have in a long time but every morning I wake up in anticipation of the day, knowing that I am going to be challenged and that I will learn something new. The best is the stuff I never saw coming. Like if you have to, you can in fact eat pizza out of a cup.

Source

First-Semester Shock

2007-12-06T11:06:00.000-05:00

"If you are heading to business school in the fall, you should expect to hit a low point sometime in November"
by Sarah Baranowski

"You have got to be kidding me," I thought. I was sitting in an MBA information session the day after my GMAT. A busy schedule had just been laid out before me. It included challenging classes, center activities, networking opportunities—all kinds of things that I wanted in an MBA program. The workload was heavy, no question about it, but a little hard work doesn't scare me. What threw me was the rigid schedule. The lockstep course structure means that you take classes when they are offered; you do not fit your credit load or your class schedule to the other things going on in your life, whether professional or personal. Required evening events, like exams and reviews, are par for the course too. (Can you imagine what would happen in the typical office if a manager regularly scheduled meetings at 7 p.m.?)
At the risk of asking a dumb question, I raised my hand and said, "So what happens if you just can't make it to one of these things?" I was met with a perplexed look. "I mean, what if a student has another obligation at night that can't be rescheduled? Are there any options?" The answer I got threw me even more. The basic gist of it went something like this: If you have that sort of concern, then maybe you should reevaluate your priorities and decide whether an MBA is really something you should be doing. In other words, give yourself over entirely to the MBA experience, or don't bother getting an MBA. That moment was the first hint of things to come. I began to adjust my expectations.
A "Crazy Way to Live"
When I began the semester and started talking to fellow students, I realized that many of us are unable (or disinclined) to give up our other pursuits in life. Some of us have children. Some of us have jobs. Some of us are starting up businesses. Some of us have other academic studies or professional training to complete. Some of us have ties to family or community or causes that we want to maintain. The MBA is designed to consume every moment and then some, but plenty of people who belong in business school do not have every moment to give. Nevertheless, we all decided to forge ahead and make it work.
Now I have finished midterms, and I am closer to the end of the semester than the beginning. I am pretty satisfied with my progress. But before the halfway point, when exams are piling up and every waking minute is devoted to the program, the doubts creep in. You think, why am I punishing myself this way? You think, how did I end up here? You think, being a student is a crazy way to live. You think, I might not make it.
If you are heading to business school in the fall, you should expect to hit a low point sometime in November. Plan for it, because it will happen no matter what you do ahead of time. For my part, I started to see combinations of panic and fatigue on the faces in my cohorts first. I felt like I was doing reasonably well. Then midterms hit, and I fell apart. I realized that I don't know how to take tests anymore, especially tests that have anything to do with math (my last math class was more than 15 years ago). The stress plays out in everyone differently, but everyone learns one common lesson: the value of grace under pressure.
First semester is like a finishing school and a boot camp wrapped up in one package. On the finishing school side, I have decked out my wardrobe with formal business attire, learned lessons in business meal etiquette, and dressed up more often in the first couple weeks than I had in the past couple of years. Then to cover boot camp, add to the mix conditions of sleep loss, identity loss, and mounting pressure to perform well on demand. Like I said before, it is one long lesson in grace under pressure. Is it worth it? Definitely. But I need a reminder once in a while.

To that end, let me tell you, and remind myself, why the first semester is worth the stress, late nights, and self doubts. If you have a first semester in your near future, then you may want to bookmark this spot and come back to it around, say, Nov. 9 next year. Here it is—my personal list of reasons to stick with it:
Reason #1: You have earned a place at the table.
In the Wisconsin full-time MBA program, every student is a member of a center, which corresponds to a specialization. My specialization is Operations & Technology Management. Each center has an industry board comprised of executive-level managers who have expertise within the specialization. My center brought its industry board together for its annual meeting earlier this semester. The board is comprised of VPs, COOs, CIOs, and CTOs for the most part. All of the center's students were invited to sit in on the meeting. As I watched the day's activities, I realized the extent to which I was capable of participating in the discussions. I also happened to be deep in the thick of midterms and facing the cold fact that I am working my tail off just to pull Bs in some of my classes. It was fortunate timing; I needed a confidence booster. I left knowing that I belonged at the table. Grades didn't mean a lick.
Reason #2: You will never look at a business problem the same way again.
The amount of learning packed into a few brief months is amazing. At first it was overwhelming, and then exhilarating, and now (in November) exhausting. But in spite of my mental and physical exhaustion, I cannot question the value of what I have learned, and I find myself eager to begin putting these lessons to work on the job. On a similar note, the business fundamentals in the first semester have also validated my work experience. No book ever told me to ignore sunk costs, for example, but I knew it anyway from experience. It's gratifying to put a framework around intuition.
Reason #3: You meet all the right people.
It's great fun to be surrounded every day by a really smart group of people. It's even better when you get to see how different smarts tackle the same problem in different ways. With students, faculty, and business leaders in one place, and with perspectives that cut across industries and fields of practice, I have deepened my already healthy respect for the power of diverse thinking. First semester is a constant stream of new faces and new ideas; many of them are at the C-level or VP-level of management; some of the most valuable are sitting next to me in class.
Reason #4: It ends in December.
Can I keep up this pace indefinitely? No. Can I last until Dec. 20? Yes. The key is to work hard and get as much as possible out of the experience, knowing that the opportunity will not last. I cannot help but wonder if there isn't a way to prepare driven, intelligent people for roles as business leaders and strategists without pushing us to the breaking point. Perhaps it is too early for me to say. But one thing I know: it's all temporary. At the end of December, I will be enjoying the holidays with my family, and I can spend much of January recovering.

Source

MBA students left high and dry

2007-11-28T10:20:00.000-05:00

Spare a thought for the classes of 2007 and 2008. It seems investment banking jobs are proving hard to come by.

A student at a leading European business school says banks are still coming to present on campus, but that with the exception of Credit Suisse, few appear to have any full-time places left for 2008: “Places have already been filled by last year’s summer interns. If you missed the boat last summer, it’s a lot of work to find a place – especially if you don’t already have a finance background.”
A spokesperson for London Business School assures us it’s too early to establish what’s going on in terms of banks’ recruitment, but that banks are still coming on campus and conducting interviews.
Really? Other business schools are a little more explicit about the situation. Sandra Schwarzer, a finance careers manager at INSEAD, says they’ve had an “exceptional” year in terms of summer interns and that banks are on campus making offers, but admits that three have already filled corporate finance places – largely with interns.
And another London-based business school careers service manager says MBA students are definitely less popular among banks: “There are a lot more MBAs on the market, and banks appear to be more interested in MSc students with a really good specialty background.”
Malcolm Horton, head of European graduate recruiting and programme management at Lehman Brothers, says this year is no different from any other: “There are some business areas that don’t need to top up offers made to interns with additional full-time hires, and there are others that are still looking.”
Summer interns typically account for 65% to 90% of full-time associate hires, says Horton.
In many cases it looks like 90% may be closer to the mark.

Source

Student Funds Get Responsible

2007-11-28T09:45:00.000-05:00

A new breed of student-run investment funds looks for social returns along with dividends
by Alison Damast

Student-run investment funds at business schools typically have had one goal: to teach students how to make money. Now a new generation of business-school students is giving that old-fashioned model a face-lift, aligning their investments with socially responsible business practices.
It's a movement that's quickly gaining steam. Students and faculty at Columbia Business School and the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business launched funds this fall directed solely toward socially responsible investing. The funds are an extension of a flurry of new electives, specialized research institutes, student clubs, and internships focused on social and environmental issues (BusinessWeek.com, 10/10/07).
This new breed of student-run funds has taken a variety of forms, from funds that invest in mainstream index funds to nonprofit arrangements aimed at helping "micro" entrepreneurs.
Students are clamoring to apply their new knowledge in this field to the financial markets, says Rich Leimsider, director of the Center for Business Education in New York, part of the nonprofit Aspen Institute. "It is definitely a new concept for business-school students to be doing this, " Leimsider says. "This is obviously a real-life example of putting your money where your mouth is."
Haas Fund Eschews Blanket Restrictions
Among the most high-profile of these funds is the Haas Socially Responsible Investment Fund, launched this fall with a seed gift of $250,000 from Haas alumnus Charlie Michaels. The school has since managed to raise a total of $1.3 million for the fund, which will be managed by four MBA students and two master's in financial engineering students.
The idea emerged from a discussion between Michaels and Haas professor Kellie McElhaney in which they both lamented the way most socially responsible investment funds are run. Typically, these funds screen out entire industries such as tobacco, alcohol, or firearms from their investment portfolios, a move that can have a significant impact on returns and could eliminate some companies that integrate socially responsible activities into their operations, said McElhaney, a professor of corporate responsibility and the director of the Center for Responsible Business.
Michaels and McElhaney decided to create a fund that would not impose those blanket restrictions on categories, but rather encourage students to make more significant investments in companies closely aligned with the philosophy of the fund. "We were trying to get away from the negative screening process of eliminating an entire industry," McElhaney says. "We wouldn't screen out a tobacco company, but we'd take a shorter position on tobacco than an energy company that more closely matches our criteria."
Putting Ideals into Practice
Most of the students running the fund were required to take a class in socially responsible investment techniques, offered by the school for the first time this semester. They spent the past few months developing their investment criteria and plan to evaluate firms on their social, environmental, and financial performance. By January, they expect to start investing in companies.
"For us, it is an opportunity to put our stake in the ground and prove that social investing can be a big part of a business-school curriculum," says Michael Pearce, a second-year Haas student who worked as an analyst for UBS (UBS) before attending business school. "It's one thing to read about it in class or learn about it in a club, but it's another thing to see if it actually works out in practice."
Columbia Takes a Micro View
At Columbia, students are hoping to make a dent in global poverty by creating a nonprofit investment fund dubbed the Microlumbia Fund. The students will make two to three low-interest "micro" loans a year to small, entry-level microfinance programs or banks in developing areas. These groups will then assist would-be small business owners in their communities.
The idea developed last year, when a group of first-year students took a class in social entrepreneurship. Since then, about 20 students have gotten involved with the group and have raised $10,000 for the venture. They hope to raise $100,000 and make two to three investments of approximately $25,000 each by the end of the year, says Katharine Leonberger, a second-year student and co-founder of the group. "It's not huge money," Leonberger says, "but even giving a loan of $25,000 to such a small institution can make a big difference."
The group will closely track its investments, sending a team of four to five students to third-world countries each year to work with microfinance institutions and entrepreneurs.
Raymond Fisman, the Lambert Family Professor of Social Enterprise and a faculty adviser to the group, applauds the approach. He hopes the lessons students learn from running Microlumbia will extend beyond their years as business-school students. "It's not like the primary function of a university should be to fund small-scale enterprise," Fisman says. "The primary goal should be to help our students understand how, when they go out into the world, they can do these things themselves."
A New Twist on Student Funds
Student-run investment funds have been around since at least 1952, when Gannon University in Erie, Pa., created what is believed to be the first one, says Edward Lawrence, a professor of finance at the University of Missouri-St. Louis College of Business, who is compiling a directory of student-run investment funds. There are now about 200 in the world, approximately 190 of which are in North America.
Socially responsible investment funds at universities are a relatively new phenomenon, Lawrence says. Although the first one was launched at Bluffton University in Ohio in 1956, most have been launched in the past three to four years, he says. For example, NYU's Stern School of Business launched a social-entrepreneurship venture fund in 2004, and the Villanova School of Business launched a socially responsible investment fund the same year.
Other schools are following suit, though, given the resources required, only the largest schools are likely to create such funds. "Business students have become more socially oriented, and they realize that it is not just about making money," Lawrence says. "It's about having an impact in a positive way in the rest of the world."

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Now, Virginia University to train Indian managers

2007-11-15T17:53:00.000-05:00

Virginia University in the US is set to enter the fast-paced education scene in India with certificate programmes for senior managers of Indian companies — for a steep fee of Rs 200,000 per candidate. “Whether it’s economy or education, India is a huge market. We are all getting attracted towards India’s fast expanding corporate sector, stable government, talented and young human capital and a vast English-speaking population,” said Darden School of Business dean Robert F Bruner. “We are going to start customised executive certificate programmes for Indian executives. The programmes will range from three to five days and the fee will be $5,000 (about Rs 200,000),” Bruner informed. The author of the book “The Panic of 1907” said the residential courses would be for senior managers of growing Indian companies. “I have interacted with seven top companies this time and they have shown real interest in our courses. We are also planning to give customised courses to individual companies,” said Bruner

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ISB to scale up ties with foreign varsities

2007-11-15T17:47:00.000-05:00

Indian School of Business (ISB) is scaling up its partnerships with universities overseas. A slew of tie-ups are on the anvil — one with premier institutions in Brazil, Russia and China, another with Cornell University and a third with Columbia University. The proposed tie-up with institutions in Brazil, Russia and China is expected to generate new courses that will help executives tap business opportunities in these countries. The partnership with Cornell University is for joint research and curriculum development, while that with Columbia University is to develop a rating system for transnational corporates. “The goal of our tie-up with institutes in Brazil, Russia and China is to develop a programme for those who are entering BRIC (Brazil, Russia, China and India) countries to start their operations. It will also help train executives in an existing organization and generate more business opportunities,” ISB dean M Rammohan Rao told ET. According to him, the new programme will help executives understand the factors that triggered growth in the BRIC economies. ISB’s Wadhwani Centre of Entrepreneurial Development (WECD) and Cornell Centre (Cornell University) have agreed to work on a joint initiative, Sustainable Global Enterprise Initiative-India (SEGI). “It is aimed at developing a unique Indian model of corporate sustainability. The initiative will include establishing a Base of the Pyramid (BOP) Learning Laboratory-India. The initiative will also seek to build an executive council of serious and informed business leaders who can help to drive the agenda,” said Rao. Besides an executive council, faculty network and curriculum development, the programme will also involve applied research. It will offer a post PGP immersion programme for ISB graduates, develop an executive education programme and foster faculty and student exchanges across the two institutions. The B-school already has formed academic alliances with the Kellogg School of Mnagement at Northwestern University, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the London Business School (LBS). Kellogg, Wharton and ISB signed a memorandum of understanding in November 1997 to share expertise and academic resources.

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Indian students dominate Harvard Business School

2007-11-15T17:43:00.000-05:00

For the first time, Indian students will have a majority representation among the foreign students at the Harvard Business School (HBS). Out of the 900 students who joined this year and will graduate in 2009, 38 students are from India or of Indian origin. The Indian contingent has pipped the one from Canada, which usually has the maximum representation. The number of students from Canada has remained constant at 35 for the graduating batches of 2008 and 2009. According to, HBS assistant director in MBA career services, Kurt Piemonte, “Increasingly, we find Indian students want to head back to the country to pursue their careers. There is a real interest in India and the trend of returning to India to work is catching up. The number of students who have not been in the US before and want to return to India to work is rising.” Apparently, this also holds true for second generation Indian students, for whom the only link to India is their parents are also opting to work from the country. HBS alumni in the country have taken keen interest in familiarising HBS students with India during field visits, he added. As is well known, about 15% of HBS’s faculty are either from India or of Indian origin, making them the highest international representation after the US. Today, many of these professors teach cases based on frontline Indian companies like TCS, ITC e-choupal and ICICI Bank. In addition, HBS also holds an India conference annually and invites business leaders from India to share their perspective. Also, as part of its plan to globalise its curriculum, in 2005, HBS opened the India Research Center (IRC) in Mumbai, one of the six research units across the world. The research centre will help build HBS’s knowledge about the Indian economy and the corporate sector through case studies and original research work. HBS plans of offer its first executive education programme in India in February 2008.

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Chicago GSB Announces Creative New Way For Applicants to Present Themselves

2007-11-03T21:50:00.000-04:00

To enable prospective full-time MBA students to present a more complete picture of their candidacy, applicants to the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business will now submit up to four slides about themselves with their application, the school announced today.

In announcing the new requirement the school noted that prospective students are asked to supply facts about themselves throughout the application, but the slides will allow applicants to be creative and tell the admissions committee about themselves using a medium that parallels the communication tools used for professional and social networking.

“This is a departure from the text-only application that we used in the past because under the old format we were unable to capture important information showing how prospective students define themselves,” said Stacey Kole, deputy dean at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

The slides may contain pictures, graphs, text, or anything else that prospective students want to include, according to the school.

The requirement applies to students seeking to start the MBA program in September 2008. Applicants must still submit two traditional essays as part of the application process in addition to a maximum of four slides.

“There is no right or wrong way to satisfy the new requirement,” said Rosemaria Martinelli, associate dean for student recruitment and admissions for the school’s full-time MBA program. “The important thing is that applicants can express themselves in ways they could not before in essay form,” she said.

In today’s business environment, communication is fast and concise, Martinelli said. “Whether it be e-mail, PowerPoint, or a two-minute elevator speech, successful businesspeople need to learn how to express their full ideas in very restrictive formats. We feel the new application requirement represents this very common challenge,” she said. “But instead of using this tool to sell a product or request new business, applicants are using it to present themselves.”

In addition to the slides, applicants for next year’s entering class must also answer two essay questions. The first essay, limited to 1,500 words, is: “Why are you pursuing an MBA at this point in your career? What are your personal and professional goals and the role an MBA from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business plays in your plans to reach these goals?”

The second essay, limited to 500 words, asks: “If you could step into someone else’s shoes for a day, who would it be and why?”
“Feedback from our current students shows that one of the unique things about our MBA program is that it challenges people to think in different ways and to be prepared for the unexpected,” Martinelli said. “We keep that in mind as we select our essay questions. The new requirement for slides just takes that to another level.”

The slides submitted with the application will not be judged on technical ability but rather the self-expression that is revealed, the school said. “Slides allow people to stretch beyond just the written word and one inch margins into a different space where an applicant can be much more expressive,” Martinelli said.

“The slides will be printed and placed in each applicant’s file for review, which means all the bells and whistles such as Flash, video clips, embedded music and hyperlinks won’t be considered in the evaluation process,” she said. “This clearly levels the playing field for everyone.”

The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business is one of the leading business schools in the world. The school’s faculty includes many renowned scholars and its graduates include many business leaders across the U.S. and worldwide.

It is consistently ranked as one of the top ten business schools in the world and usually as one
of the top five. The Chicago Approach to Management Education is distinguished by
how it leverages fundamental knowledge, its rigor, and its practical application to business challenges.

Chicago GSB offers full-time and part-time MBA programs, an executive MBA program, a Ph.D. program, open enrollment executive education and custom corporate education.

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M.B.A. Programs Pay Off for Women Seeking a Return to Wall Street

2007-11-03T21:35:00.000-04:00

Efforts on Wall Street to re-engage women who are trying to return to the work force, many of whom left for family obligations, have started to yield results.

During the last few years, some of the nation’s premier business schools began to address that demographic group with executive M.B.A. programs. Of those, perhaps the most encompassing is the annual program started last fall by the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, with a curriculum that combined academics and career opportunities.

With a median age of 47 and an average of eight years out of the work force, 41 students — 35 women and 6 men — participated in the first Tuck program, known as Back in Business. Of those, slightly more than half have found high-level and often high-paying work, according to the program’s director, Anant Sundaram.

He said that of those, “one or two ended up with consumer products companies, four with nonprofit organizations and a dozen with banks or financial services firms.” Three others returned to their own businesses, one went on to graduate school and another “had great offers but has postponed getting back into the work force.”

Those in the program said that the biggest issue facing them was not whether their skills were rusty; rather, it was the confidence that they had lost while not working. As Diana Allan, a graduate, said when polled by another program graduate, she realized that she should “never apologize for being out of the market.”

Several Tuck graduates landed at Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and Citi, where Hans Morris, an early champion of the program, was chief financial officer of the markets and banking division before becoming president of Visa Inc. in September.

One, Janine Abbatecola, 40, a 1989 Cornell graduate who left her job at Credit Suisse in 2003, landed at Goldman Sachs, she said, because of Tuck’s “career evening where eight, nine companies, one of which was Goldman Sachs, came.” She subsequently “came to an event at Goldman, wound up connecting with a recruiter and meeting with a group, and everything took off from there.” She took a job as a vice president in Goldman’s equities division, a position similar to the one she had held at Credit Suisse. (Goldman has hired six other women through its own initiative for those who have taken career breaks.)

Another Tuck participant, Bette Rice, 50, joined Merrill Lynch in the late 1980s but left in 2002 when “my kids were in middle school,” when she was a director working on fixed income products. Ms. Rice decided to try the Tuck program when her daughter was applying to college, and she found that it “contributed a lot to the soft skills — how to put together your approach to re-entry and to think through the job market, my skills, résumé and core competencies.”

While she interviewed at several places, she decided in January to return to Merrill Lynch.

Not all of the Tuck graduates have joined Wall Street firms. Some have opted to try their hand at entrepreneurship while others, like Anne Donoghue, turned to the nonprofit world.

Ms. Donoghue, a publicist, did some consulting work after being laid off at Warner Brothers in 2001, but she devoted time to her nieces and nephews after her brother-in-law died in the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. The program, she said, “gave me the confidence that I had something to contribute.” Ms. Donoghue, now 44, eventually decided that she wanted to work at a nonprofit organization. She learned through a networking site that the American Kennel Club was looking for a director of publicity.

While the need to explain their career gaps was not an issue, the women interviewed said, compensation, as expected, was a question. Those interviewed said their pay at least equaled their earlier earnings.

As Catherine Tanelli, 46, who now works in Citi’s investment banking division put it: “If you do the math, and look at straight numbers, my salary is higher now although it is five years later. I don’t know what it would have been had I stayed, because I probably would have had one or two promotions, with commensurate salary increases. My new position is as if time stood still.”

While there are many successes, Professor Sundaram said that consumer products companies have been more reluctant to hire those who have taken time off. “In part, many organizations don’t have champions like Hans Morris,” he said, adding that “some in H.R. have trouble dealing with this demographic and are struggling with how to appropriately place these people.”

Tuck is not the only business school with this type of executive program. Harvard Business School, for example, has had a program for its alumni for five years. Wharton started its first program in March, according to Professor Monica McGrath, who is directing the program.

Professor Sundaram said that the Tuck faculty is now reviewing applications for the next class, set to begin this month. He said that Tuck would adjust the program slightly this year, concentrating more heavily on refreshing financial knowledge as well as career skills, with less emphasis on leadership. The program has three sessions — two on the Dartmouth campus and one in New York. The cost is $13,500, but more than half is underwritten by corporate sponsors, which this year include Citi, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers and MetLife. The participants pay for the rest.

While Professor Sundaram is pleased with the results to date, he acknowledged the difficulties in placing these high-level professionals. “It’s been a slog — out of 41 participants in the charter class, maybe 22, 23 are in positions close to what they are looking for. A handful, when confronted with the reality of the workplace, have recalibrated and decided they’re not quite ready. But there are a dozen who are very talented and hungry to do things, and who are, nine months later, still looking.”

Ms. Allan, 52, is one participant who is still looking. She said, “It’s a little harder to re-enter when you’re trying to change industries at the same time. It’s possible, because I’m talking to some people, but it’s finding the right fit — the right industry, the right level and where the job is challenging. The world is not as open to returnees as you would hope, but it’s getting there. I’ve been pleased with how people look at the résumé and accept that’s what I did.”

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The Basics of MBA Budgeting

2007-09-22T12:50:00.000-04:00

Handling tuition and unexpected expenses can be draining for business school students. Here are some tips for managing your money - by Francesca Di Meglio

Being shaky with personal finances is the dirty little secret of many business school students. While most would-be MBAs know corporate finance like the back of their hands, personal finance is a whole other matter for many of them. Bonnie Lack, director of financial aid at Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business, says many MBA students do not know how to balance their checkbooks, fail to regularly check their credit score, hold too many credit cards, and mistakenly think they make too much money to qualify for student loans and aid.

Worse, they feel like they should know all this stuff, so they don't ask questions or get help. B-schoolers who could use a hand getting their finances in order can do something about their situation and still have a life. Here are some tips from personal finance experts and fellow students on how to budget your money even when you're without a salary and unexpected expenses come up:
Start Early

The moment you start contemplating going back to school, you should take stock of the money available to you. How much do you have and how much do you need to get through testing, applications, visits to schools, tuition, books, living expenses, the job search, etc.? And how will you make up the difference—loans, help from mom and dad, living off investments?

Those who get an early start—at least a year before joining a B-school—can stash some cash for their starving-student days. Most experts agree that you should save either six months worth of living expenses or $10,000 before returning to graduate school. Lack suggests that people start "living like students" as soon as they decide to apply to B-school. That means packing lunches, forgoing designer clothes and unnecessarily pricey outings with friends, and basically living below your means.
Expect the Unexpected

If you've done your homework, you've calculated the big ticket items such as tuition. But you should also sweat the small stuff, which can add up. Jerel Harvey, a second-year student at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, was taken aback when he discovered that campus parking fees would cost him about $400 annually. Add that to the student activities fees and costs for traveling to conferences and job interviews, and Harvey says students can easily break the bank.

Extracurricular activities such as studying abroad and networking events are often initially unplanned and expensive. For study abroad, some students take out more loans. Getting student loans with lower interest rates is better than using credit cards that tend to have high interest rates. Dinners and networking trips will come out of the student's own pocket. Attend events, suggests Harvey, that give you the most bang for your buck, where you'll meet lots of people in your sector or be able to make an impression with your first choice of employers. Stay home for all the others.
Finding A Job Costs Money

There are many chances for students to go on trips to meet with potential employers. Be choosy, and prepare to have to leave at a minute's notice—and be able to afford the airfare, hotel, and accommodations—for an interview for your dream job. Some students estimate that the job search can cost between $5,000 and $10,000.

There's the temptation, of course, to build up credit card debt and use summer internship earnings to pay it down. Use credit cards only when you have the cash to pay it off at the end of the month, says Dianna Barra, author of Quick and Easy Budget Book (Idea Designs; December, 2002) and owner of Idea Designs, a publishing group that offers resources and advice on issues such as emergency preparedness and budgeting your household. "When I was younger, I learned that a person who understands interest earns it, and those who don't, pay it," she says.
Track Your Spending

Because those little things—such as the morning cup of coffee—add up, Jerrold Mundis, author of How to Get Out of Debt, Stay Out of Debt, and Live Prosperously (Bantam; January, 2003) suggests keeping tabs on every penny you spend for at least 30 days, ideally for three months. Include everything from laundry to Starbucks (SBUX) to renting videos. That will help you realize how many costly things you could do without. "Just doing this reduces expenses by 10% per month," says Mundis.

Write out a detailed budget for yourself and decide exactly how much money you need to allocate for necessities (food, utilities, shelter, commuting, etc.), says Jason Rich, series editor of Entrepreneur magazine's Personal Finance Pocket Guides. Don't forget to include a column for miscellaneous things such as dental work, auto repairs, or travel expenses for a job interview. "It might be a cliché, but expect the unexpected," says Michael Scrafford, a second-year student at Kenan-Flagler. He suggests thinking of your tuition as only 50% of the B-school tab. The other 50% is for living expenses and all of these other costs that you might not have even thought about before returning to school.
Keep It Simple

Think about ways you can cut back on the unnecessary stuff. "Do you really need cable?" asks Rich. In fact, Carnegie Mellon's Lack says you should consider making a simple home for yourself for the two years in B-school. Forget video game consoles and stereo equipment, she says, because you'll rarely be in your room anyway.

Lack even suggests that graduate students consider getting a roommate to divvy up expenses. This might not be the right choice for married couples, but usually one spouse works while the other attends B-school. In those instances, the spouses should stretch any income that's coming in as much as they can.

Experts remind students that they can save money and still have fun. One route to affordable good times is taking advantage of student discounts and free cultural activities on campus or in the city or town where you're studying, says Mundis. Learning to cook and making meals at home is almost a requirement, say students. And life's luxuries—from name-brand cereals to flat-screen TVs—will have to wait until after grad school.
Families Face Special Problems

One Kenan-Flagler student/mother, Patrycja Krzok, found that caring for her son's financial needs was a challenge. Student loans don't factor in children. She has to pay more for medical insurance to get him covered, too, and he needs supplies for school. That's not to mention the usual food and shelter required for everyone, which is more expensive for families. Even Krzok's books were not covered by her loans, and they often cost up to $400 for each modular. Her son's grandparents pitched in to help her make ends meet for him, and she tried to get student loans to cover as much as possible. Krzok advises anyone entering school with a family to start living on a reduced budget even before B-school, so everyone can adjust to the new lifestyle—and you can determine how much you're really going to need.

Don't be too arrogant or too afraid to ask for help. Talking to an accountant is a great idea, says Rich, because a professional can advise you on how to get rid of debt, set up a budget, and understand the tax benefits to being a student (BusinessWeek, 2/20/07).
Keep the Long View

Most people who go back to school for an MBA are looking for a lifetime of benefit from the degree. "You will come out of it alive," says Krzok. "It's about short-term sacrifices for long-term gain." Tuition may be upward of $80,000, rent could be well over $1,000 per month (even more at urban campuses), and dinners out could cost hundreds. But an enriched mind, after all, is priceless.

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More International Graduate Admissions

2007-09-07T22:34:00.000-04:00

A new report shows business schools are increasing numbers of international students as well as expanding their own programs overseas

Come fall, U.S. business schools will reach even more international students. According to a study released Aug. 28 by the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS), a jump in overseas applications and admission offers will increase international student populations at U.S. schools—particularly business programs. It also predicts the significant expansion of U.S. programs abroad.
According to the group's interim findings, admission offers for international business students rose 10% for the upcoming school year, while applications were up by 15% from last year. It's the second straight year of sharp increases in applications and offers of admission to international students.
Equally Competitive
How many of these international students will actually make it to campus is another matter, says Kenneth Redd, the author of the study and director of Research & Policy Analysis at the Council of Graduate Schools. After September 11, stricter visa requirements decreased the number of international students coming into the U.S. Some of the restrictions that were put in place have been eased, Redd says. "We're hoping to see that the changes made by the State Dept. will alleviate some of the barriers for student visas and will be reflected in our enrollment numbers, but there seems to be a backlog of complaints from our consulates."
Does the smaller growth in admission offers mean that spots for international students are getting even more competitive? Not quite, says Redd. The bulk of the increase probably comes from foreign students applying to several U.S. schools at one time, he says.
While application rates for business programs have been leveling off since 2005, this year's study shows a significant increase in international students who want to pursue business-related fields. "What you're seeing is business increasing faster than the overall average," says Redd. "It's an indication of foreign students who are wanting to learn about American business practices."
International Degree
According to the survey, the international applicant pool is also growing faster at universities that have smaller international populations. They're "getting more involved with recruitment and enrollment, so there's more internal activity away from the traditional 50 campuses," says Redd. For example, of the 50 universities with the largest international populations, admission offers to students from China grew by 15%, but for those outside of the 50 largest, there was a 38% surge.
It's telling that, as international education is becoming increasingly important, the CGS for the first time gathered data on the joint and dual-degree programs that U.S. universities have recently developed abroad. The study found that nearly 30% of American universities have established collaborative degree programs with international universities. But what's more indicative of future global business trends is that almost a quarter of U.S. schools plan to establish at least one international program in the next two years. For business schools that number is significantly higher—44%—than other fields, including engineering and social sciences.
International programs include dual-degree programs (in which graduates receive degrees from both institutions) and joint-degree programs (in which graduates receive only one degree), as well as other programs including MBA and executive MBA options.
The August survey by the CGS is the second of three that studies international applications for the upcoming academic year. A final report analyzing actual enrollment trends will be issued in October.
Dizik is a BusinessWeek.com project assistant.

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Reflections from India

2007-08-31T08:23:00.000-04:00

Education and educators are highly regarded in India, which makes teaching a pleasure and a privilege

by Marshall Goldsmith

During a recent trip to India, I had the opportunity to work with many dedicated professionals at the Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad.

ISB is an amazing place. It is a new institution that was formed with the support of Kellogg, Wharton, and the London Business School. The admission standards are extremely selective. Although it is only a few years old, ISB is already one of the top five schools in the world in terms of average GMAT score. I was there to teach a two-day executive education class on coaching to 50 top leaders from across India.

I love teaching in India. Every participant in my program was eager to learn. There is nothing that a teacher loves more than dedicated students who want to learn. The first day of my program lasted from 7 in the morning until 10 at night. I tried to answer as many questions as I could, but eventually I ran out of time! My students were willing to listen as long as I was willing to teach.

Deep Respect for Education

I was amazed at the sincerity and interest shown by the participants in my course. There was absolutely none of the cynicism or skepticism that I sometimes encounter in the U.S. or Western Europe. As a rule, people in India have a deep respect for education and for educators. At the end of the two days, I was given a lovely card with a personal thank-you note from each participant. I was very moved by their gratitude.

As I headed to my room at around 10:30 p.m., I saw three young ISB MBA students working on an assignment and decided to stop by and introduce myself. I asked them several questions about their lives, their futures, India, and the new global economy.

When I asked, "How many hours a day do you work?" one young woman laughed and said, "28!"

Income Gap Widens

All three agreed that they started studying each day early in the morning and finished late at night. They didn't seem to mind. They realized how fortunate they were to be admitted to such a selective program. They were grateful for the opportunity to be there and wanted to learn as much as they could.

As a country, India still has hundreds of millions of extremely poor citizens who live in villages. The differentiation in incomes between the rich and poor has increased dramatically in the past 10 years.

I asked the MBA students, "How do the poor people in the villages feel about fortunate students like you? You are going to be making a lot of money when you graduate from ISB. Is there increasing resentment out there in the countryside?"

Emigration Not as Attractive

Their answer surprised me. The students all knew people in the villages. The general feeling was that, in almost every village, there was a resident who had left, attained a good education, and achieved a much more affluent life. If there was not a person in the village who had made it out, there was a relative in a nearby village. The students felt that even poor villagers saw hope for their children or grandchildren through hard work and education.

The world has changed a lot in the past few years. In the past, brilliant students, like the ones that I met at ISB, all dreamed of going to America or Europe for a quality education. Now they can get a quality education in India. In the past, brilliant young students all planned on leaving India to get great jobs. Now they can get great jobs in India.

The students went on to discuss India's problems. Corruption, lack of infrastructure, and emerging competition in Asia all represent real challenges for India.

U.S. Heading Backward?

As I listened to these brilliant young students, I thought about America. In the past few decades, we have made progress on many fronts and may have gone backward on others.

In some ways there seems to be a decreasing respect for education—and for educators—in our country. The average high school teacher used to make a little less money than an accountant or consultant, but not that much. Today the difference in income is huge.

In general, teachers don't seem to get the same amount of respect that they did when I was a student. And, unlike the people whom I met in India, many Americans are not very confident that their children and grandchildren will have better lives (BusinessWeek.com, 8/21/07) than they have.

The Future Is in Knowledge

As parents, teachers, leaders, and citizens, we can learn a couple of lessons from the people whom I met in India. Individually and collectively, we may need to revisit our priorities. We may need to demonstrate more respect for education and for educators. In the competitive world of knowledge work, educated individuals and educated societies are going to have a huge competitive advantage. We may also need to connect the value of a great education with our hope for a brighter future.

Many years ago, most Americans were farmers. Those days are gone. More recently, many Americans worked in manufacturing. Those days are soon to be gone. The future of America is going to be determined by knowledge workers. Education will be a key factor in determining our collective success as a society and each person's success as an individual.

Hard-working, educated people who have hopes and dreams for a better future are going to win, no matter what country they come from.

Source

Scandal in Mind, Fuqua Welcomes MBAs

2007-08-29T16:42:00.000-04:00

New-student orientation puts renewed emphasis on the honor code and ethics in the wake of cheating expulsions at the Duke B-school

by Alison Damast

With a new MBA class arriving, administrators at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business are trying to move beyond last spring's cheating scandal, while simultaneously addressing cultural differences that may have led to the incident, which resulted in mass suspensions and expulsions (see BusinessWeek.com, 4/30/07, "Duke MBAs Fail Ethics Test"

Preventing such a situation from happening again is a top priority for the school, which greeted a new class of 431 first-year students in early August. Among the orientation activities was a session on the school's honor code, during which they talked about how international students might view ethical issues through different lenses.

The cheating scandal, which resulted in the one-year suspension of 15 students and the expulsion of nine students, was on many students' minds as they arrived on campus for orientation. Over the summer, school officials had been working hard to contain the fallout from the nationwide publicity over the scandal and calming fears of incoming students that a Duke MBA had become tainted. "When they first brought up the honor code, it was like, 'Oh gosh, what is going to happen now,'" said Kaamil Isles, a first-year Fuqua student. "You worry that the actions of a few students or subset of students will affect how teachers perceive us and potentially, the people who hire us."

Sending a Strong Message

Administrators hope to assuage students' fears that the school has lost trust in them by reassuring them that the school does not plan to change its educational practices. However, the school is taking new steps this year to ensure that all students, no matter what culture they come from, understand how to interpret and abide by the school's much-vaunted honor code. "We wanted to send a strong message to the students that we were not willing to change our teaching methods in response to the honor-code violations," said Bill Boulding, senior associate dean for daytime programs.

Over the summer, administrators conducted an exhaustive review of how the school presents the code to students during orientation and over the course of their two years at the school, from the admissions process to investigations of alleged violations. They asked professors to make sure that students are clear about how to conduct themselves during assignments and exams. There will be renewed emphasis on the code in academic settings this year. It will be discussed in more depth in a new three-week program at the school called the Global Institute and will be woven into the school's new curriculum, debuting this year.

Orientation for first-year students was a starting point for discussion on the topic. At the event, administrators and students guided a discussion of the honor code within the context of last year's cheating scandal. Boulding, who spoke at the event, emphasized that students need to buy into the school's honor-code culture, no matter what country they come from or education system they were raised in. "I wanted to drive home the point that we are all one culture here at Fuqua and we all have to accept the same standards, even though you might have been brought up in an education system where the accepted practices varied considerably," said Boulding.

Questions About Cultural Distortions

Indeed, the cultural issues at play in the case are ones that have taken on renewed importance in recent months. Nearly all of the 38 students found guilty of cheating by the school were Asian, according to papers filed by Robert Ekstrand, a Durham (N.C.) attorney who last spring filed appeals on behalf of 16 students. Those appeals were all denied by the school. Duke officials would not release details on the case, except to say that the students involved were from "multiple countries and multiple continents."

"It is a cultural issue, a very serious one. It is subtle and is capable of repetition without notice," Ekstrand said in an interview earlier this month. He declined to discuss details of the cases because, he said, the issue remained open.

Meanwhile, in a brief submitted to the school during the appeals process, provided to BusinessWeek by one of the disciplined students, Ekstrand asserted that the students may not have been given a fair trial by the school because of the manner in which the investigation was conducted, one that did not take into account the legal cultures the students came from.

Tripped Up by the U.S. Legal System?

According to the document, in the students' home countries, confessions are looked upon as a way to bring a person back into the larger group. The accused is expected to show remorse and his desire to be reintegrated. It's a philosophy that is "fundamentally different than that of the American legal culture," Ekstrand wrote. "When they were confronted with allegations of wrongdoing, they were predisposed to avoid even the appearance of a disagreement with the school's allegation. To these students, it would be illogical for them to admit violating the code, and then dispute the extent of the wrongdoing."

This worked against them during the initial judicial board hearings, Ekstrand wrote. Many of these students offered long and rambling confessions that expressed their remorse and repentance for their actions. Judicial board members may have misinterpreted the students' remorse, viewing their confessions through the lens of the American legal culture, Ekstrand argued.

Indeed, two of the students found guilty by the school, both of whom are Asian, spoke with BusinessWeek in Durham earlier this summer and agreed that cultural differences played a role in how they chose to answer the school's charges and defend themselves.

"Totally Changed Our Career"

One of the students received a one-year suspension, while the other was expelled. Both filed appeals that were turned down. They said they were unclear what evidence the school had against them when they were asked to issue a confession by the investigator assigned to the case. They also said they did not understand what it meant to have "the right to avoid self-incrimination," an option guaranteed to students in Fuqua's honor code.

The two students, who had established an e-mail address with the name "Fuqua Facts," asked that their names not be disclosed because they are hoping to return to Duke. They remained on the Duke campus after most of the other accused students had left, hoping to reverse the school's action, "I spent a lot of time during the hearing to say how I felt regretful and sorry about the charges. I didn't defend myself point by point," said one student from China, who received the suspension. "Now, I think this was a significant mistake."

The other student, a former financial-services worker from Beijing, who was expelled, added: "Even if we made a mistake, we just wanted to talk to the school. This has totally changed our career and lives."

But while the students and Ekstrand hold out hope that the incident will be reviewed, Duke business-school officials say they have no plans to reopen the issue. "For us, it is the end of the appeal process," Boulding said.

Source:

American M.B.As. Flock to Asia

2007-08-22T12:34:00.000-04:00

By Cris Prystay

When William Lee, a manager at Microsoft Corp., decided to seek to leapfrog his career by getting an M.B.A., he signed up for a joint-venture executive program in Singapore run by the Anderson School of Business of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the National University of Singapore. Mr. Lee, 37 years old, lives in Reno, Nevada, and his job is entirely based in the U.S. By the time he graduates in August, he will have flown to Asia four times over 15 months to earn a degree he easily could have done at home.

The commute is worth it, he said. This way he can ramp up his Asia experience to help fast-forward his career.

"That's where the economic growth is. If you want to be a business leader in the next 10 to 15 years, understanding the Asian business environment is important," Mr. Lee said. "When I was weighing which school to go to, credibility came to mind. The perception that I have a better understanding of the environment is easier to sell when I can say I've gone over there to study and observe the business environment and meet Asian business leaders."

U.S. and European business schools that have expanded to Asia in the past few years to tap growing demand for management education there are starting to see new demand from an unexpected clientele: students from back home.

A number of high-profile business schools, including the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business, Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management and French business school Insead, have set up campuses or joint-venture executive M.B.A. programs with local universities in Asia to tap demand from both local students and global expatriates working in the region. As Asia's booming economies, led by India and China, gain more global muscle, business students world-wide have become eager to get Asia on their résumés. These schools have seen a pickup in enrollment from students who commute from places as far away as London and Los Angeles.

"These students want the Asia exposure, even if they aren't working there now. They view the trend in business as requiring a significant understanding of Asia," said Judy Olian, dean of the Anderson School of Business. In the class that just began in May in UCLA's program based in Singapore, 48% of the students are U.S. residents, up from 29% in May 2004.

The growing number of Asia-bound M.B.A. commuters, meanwhile, lends fresh credence to business schools' decision to head to Asia themselves. For nearly a decade, U.S. and European business schools have wrestled with how best to address Asia's boom. While some have plowed ahead in Asia, others have held back, concerned that offering a satellite degree would hurt the brand power of the degree offered at their U.S. campus.

"As important as Asia and other international markets are in the global economy, we don't believe we could expand the faculty to fulfill the needs of a full-fledged 'branch campus' abroad without diluting the nature of the kind of education we offer," said Krishna Pelapu, senior associate dean for international development at Harvard Business School. Harvard has more than 200 full-time professors who are occupied at home with full course loads; it would be difficult to get faculty of the same stature and quality to teach abroad, he said.

Other business schools believe they can strengthen their brand by offering a degree overseas. Kellogg, for example, has run an executive M.B.A. in Hong Kong through a partnership with Hong Kong University of Science and Technology's School of Business and Management for 10 years, and it also offers joint-venture M.B.A.s in Israel, Canada and Germany.

Kellogg's brand is based in part on the quality of the student the school admits and the quality of instruction, said Dipak Jain, Kellogg's dean. Students admitted in places like Hong Kong must have the same qualifications as the students who take the program at the school's campus near Chicago, he said.

For staffing reasons, Kellogg offers only its part-time executive M.B.A. overseas. Its professors fly to Hong Kong on weekends and teach half the courses, and business-school professors from HKUST teach the other half. "We only partner with schools we know have quality people who can deliver the quality experience," Mr. Jain said.

"We think the quality of our program and our brand has gone up, overall, because we have programs in Europe, in Asia and a new one in Miami," he said. "In the Hong Kong program, for example, we have electives on doing business in China; students in our German program or in Chicago or Tel Aviv can go to Hong Kong and take these electives. Or they can fly to Hong Kong and take the whole M.B.A. program."

Dutch citizen Michael Hamelink, 39, commuted from Johannesburg, South Africa, to Singapore to do his executive M.B.A. at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business program five years ago. "At that time, I had just moved from Hong Kong back to Johannesburg, and I was impressed by the huge impact Asia had on the world economy and especially China on the business world. This made me choose to commute to Singapore to sense and gather most of Asia's business insights," said Mr. Hamelink, who now is chief financial officer of KLM City Hopper, KLM's regional airline for Europe. He said he would like to return to Asia to work in the next few years, and that the contacts he made in the program would prove helpful.

Kellogg and Chicago charge the same prices for the executive M.B.A. programs they run in the U.S. as those they run elsewhere. UCLA and National University of Singapore charge slightly less for the Singapore-based degree compared with UCLA's own Los Angeles-based executive M.B.A.: Fees for the degree in Los Angeles cost $100,000, and fees for the Asia-based program are $69,800.

But there also is the cost for travel. The Singapore-based program, set up in 2004, is broken into six intensive two-week blocks that are split between countries: two sessions in Singapore, one in China, one in India and two in Los Angeles. Students pay for their own flights and hotels for the 12 weeks the course is in session.

Assuming a student pays $250 a night for a hotel, he would save about $15,000 on the Asia-based program. Students get two degrees, one from UCLA and one from the National University of Singapore.

"We have quite a few Americans based in the U.S., but who have Asia responsibilities and/or interests, such as supply chains out of Asia, or working for an Asian company, or marketing to Asia," said Jochen Wirtz, a business-school professor who is co-director of the UCLA-NUS program. The program's structure of two-week sessions "allows participants to fly in from anywhere. We are probably the only program in the world where some 50% travel from another continent -- not just country -- to attend our sessions."

Mr. Lee, the Microsoft manager, said cost savings weren't a factor in his decision to go the Asian route. He had first considered doing a full-time M.B.A. at an Ivy League school, but the Singapore-based program struck a chord.

He has loved the pan-Asian exposure, including meetings with senior business executives that the school set up. Students also work on a real piece of consulting business as part of a final project. Mr. Lee prepared an Asian market-entry strategy for a hedge fund based in the U.S.

"I had never been to Asia before the program, but I know you have to understand Asia if you want to take on a senior business role," he said. "That's where the growth will be. The U.S. economy simply isn't growing like the Asian economies."

Source

MBA Applications Surge

2007-08-22T07:57:00.000-04:00

Demand for admission to U.S. graduate business schools has risen, and the growing number of applicants is entering what some say is the most competitive pool in recent years.

The Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC) reported Aug. 15 that applications to business schools are being buoyed by a confident outlook on the economy and increasing demand from employers for management degrees. In turn, schools are choosing from a pool of applicants who are equally or better qualified academically than last year's class. The majority of the group's member schools are in the U.S.

Admissions officers have had a strong group of applicants to choose from this year. Nearly three in five full-time master's and MBA programs reported that their applicants are of better quality than those seen last year, according to the GMAC survey.

Better Applicants, More Programs

That doesn't surprise California admissions consultant Stacy Blackman, who helps students navigate the admissions process and work on their applications. "I think the quality of the applications that are submitted is going up," said Blackman. "People are understanding the process better and what it takes to submit a strong application."

The boom in applications mirrors an increase in registration volume for the GMAT—the B-school entrance exam—which this year jumped by 6.2% within the U.S. and 21% outside the U.S. And nearly two-thirds (64%) of full-time MBA programs reported an increase in application volume compared to 2006. Rosemaria Martinelli, director of admissions at University of Chicago's business school, said applications overall have been up "substantially" for the past two years. "It's very competitive out there. We've seen double-digit increases for all applications two years in a row," she said.

One of the key movers in the growing number of applicants is demographics, says Rachel Edgington, director of market research and analysis for GMAC. A cohort of students dubbed "millenials"—those from the generation born in or after 1982—fueled much of the growth in domestic applications this year, Edgington said. "This younger generation is a much larger pool then the past generation and they are starting to enter into the application pool," Edgington said. "Just in sheer size, they are much larger."

Degrees in Specialized Fields

Schools are responding to demand from students by creating an array of new flexible MBA programs, ranging from part-time programs to master's degrees in specialized business fields. In just the first half of 2007, 641 new graduate management programs were introduced, according to the GMAC report. That's a sharp leap from a decade ago, when only 74 new programs were created.

The GMAC survey collected data from 445 programs at 252 business schools, 70% of them in the U.S. This is the first year that the survey received data from PhD programs and master's degrees in specialized business fields, such as master's of science in management or finance.

Fifty-six percent of full-time MBA programs said application volume from domestic candidates was up this year, a significant reversal from recent years where growth was flat. At NYU's Stern School of Business, applications from domestic students outpaced those of international students this year, said Isser Gallogly, executive director of MBA admissions. "We saw a tipping of the scales because domestic was a little higher than international growth this year," he said.

That's not to say interest from international applicants is subsiding. Applications from students abroad, particularly those in India and China, remain strong.

Growth in Part-Time Programs

India is fueling most of the growth in international applications seen by full-time programs in the U.S., with 64% of B-schools reporting India as the country from which they received the greatest number of applications. "With India, the numbers were already high and for some schools, the numbers can't get much higher," Edgington said.

Another area showing considerable growth is part-time MBA programs, where applications increased "noticeably" over the past year, Edgington said. More than two in three part-time MBA programs reported that application volume increased over 2006 and the trend is expected to continue over the next few years, she said. Women and minorities are driving the increase in application volume, drawn by the more flexible schedule and time frame offered by such programs. Not surprisingly there is a larger proportion of women in part-time programs (37%) than among full-time programs (27%).

PhD Applications Decline

While the appeal of an MBA remains strong, the lure of a PhD in management education appears to be on the decline. PhD programs were the only program surveyed in the report that did not report strong application volume from applicants this year. Most PhD applicants—two out of three—are foreign citizens, many of whom are now opting to apply to MBA programs instead, Edgington said.

"What we see now is that the international prospective students see the MBA as more valuable than PhD in terms of global currency, name recognition, and employer respect," Edgington said.

The PhD decline confirms fears in the B-school world that there will be a shortage of qualified professors in coming years. With application volume expected to increase over the next three years, B-schools may find themselves overwhelmed with students and lacking professors. It's a problem the next generation of B-schoolers may want to tackle.

Source

India beats Harvard

2007-08-21T11:43:00.000-04:00

The number of Asian examinees of the GMAT has increased significantly. This is the finding of the Asian trend report, which had recently been published by the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC). The report outlines, that Indian citizens are representing the - by far – biggest group of participants and tend to prefer Indian business schools.

n the year 2000, a total of 35,441 GMAT examinees had taken the test, in 2006, there were already 50,367 participants. India is the country, where most of the examinees come from. As in the year 2000, only 6,128 Indian citizens were taking the worldwide common Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), in 2006, there were 16,541 examinees.

With 10,142 participants, Chinese citizens represent the second biggest group. However, the increase is considerably less (8,756 examinees in the year 2000). South Korea (6,977) and Taiwan (5,401) made it to a third and fourth place with also notable gainings. Against this, the number of test-taking examinees declines in Japan, Singapore and Indonesia.

However, the figures don´t give a complete picture because the six Indian Institutes of Management (IIM) in Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Calcutta, Indore, Lucknow, and Kozhikode don´t ask for GMAT and use their own Common Admission Test (CAT). In January, 200,000 examinees had taken the test and by this, applied for one of the 1,300 places to study at the leading Indian business schools.

S still ahead
Among the ten most popular countries, Asian citizens are sending their score reports to - in order to study there, the United States are still on top with 76 percent (80 percent in 2002). Followed by Great Britain with five percent and India with four percent. As the only European country, France, with two percent, is ranking on sixth place of the top ten countries. Compared with 2002, especially India could move up in the rankings by four places.

Among all business schools, Asian GMAT participants apply for, Harvard Business School is on first place. The Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad debuted in second place, still ahead of Wharton School. With its ninth place, Insead is the best European school, still ahead of the London Business School, which holds rank nine.

The high positioning of the ISB among Asian citizens is astonishing. Especially because the business school, which was established with the support of Wharton and Kellogg, does not supply of an international accredition, yet. Moreover – like the IIMS – it does not award any MBA degree but a diploma for its Post Graduate Programs in Management (PGP).

Indian citizens tend to prefer a school in India
The ranking list of those countries Indian citizens prefer to study at, shows how strongly Indian residents have shifted their focus on their own country. Still, the United States are on top with 71 percent, leaving the others far behind, though, with a considerable decline. In 2002, still 85 percent intended to study there.

Yet, India (with nine percent) has displaced Great Britain from its second to a third place. Herein, France held its sixth place with three percent as well. Switzerland (0,7 percent) made it to place nine, ahead of Spain with 0,4 percent. In 2002, Germany still ranked on tenth place with 0,3 percent. Now, it seems to have apparently lost its attractiveness for Indian citizens as a location to study at.

The score is even more astonishing among the most popular schools for Indians. Meanwhile, the Indian School of Management has even displaced Harvard from its first place. As the best European business schools, Insead and LBS made it to place five and six.

Source

New York Suspects Student-Loan Kickbacks

2007-08-19T23:15:00.000-04:00

By CHAD BRAY

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said an investigation by his office has revealed widespread, questionable financial arrangements among student-loan providers and a number of colleges and universities, including kickbacks to some schools.

Mr. Cuomo said his inquiry has uncovered practices by lenders that, at a minimum, create questionable conflicts of interest with schools and could be illegal under the state's consumer-protection law.

The practices include paying kickbacks to schools based on a percentage of loans directed to a lender, paying for trips to resorts for financial-aid officers, and setting up funds or lines of credit for schools in exchange for being placed on preferred-lender lists.

Such practices can drive up the cost of loans to students and limit their choices of lenders, Mr. Cuomo said.

"Preferred student loans often mean preferred for the school at the expense of the student," he said.

The attorney general said his office is "actively investigating" the student-loan practices at 100 public and private colleges and universities inside and outside of New York and has sent letters to more than 400 schools, urging them to end questionable relationships with lenders.

Mr. Cuomo didn't name any of the schools involved, but they include Ivy League institutions, his office said. Mr. Cuomo said his investigation is continuing, but his office hasn't reached the point of pursuing enforcement actions against the lenders or any schools.

Source

Reviews: Admission Consultants/essay editing services in India

2007-08-19T09:14:00.002-04:00

Hi People, I have joined many threads to find out this information and found people are as confused as I was. I researched quite a few consultants and below are my findings:

Based in Delhi

1. Genesis, Delhi – Their response was quite assuring to me. They provide assurance of getting you placed in good schools, charging 100,000 – 200,000. They also claim to assure huge scholarships. I think that the claims are just too tall. I got feedback from other informal sources that they only make these claims after scrutinizing the profile of applicant. If the profile already appears promising, then they provide admission and school guarantee. My opinion is it’s not quite honest approach if what I heard is true. It’s like a doctor treating a healthy person and providing a wellness guarantee.
2. Princeton Review, Delhi - They seem to be the most feasible in terms of charges. They charge 32,000 for 5 applications. However when I interacted with the guys, I did not find them convincing enough to do justice to my profile. Also, when I told them that I may apply to 7-8 schools then they were far more interested in money than any other talk. I am not going to enroll with them.
3. Jamboree, Delhi - Gosh! Sky high rates. 30-35K for 3 applications! They do not have full time essay editors. I could not speak with anyone who would be able to answer any B-school specific queries. Personally think that to answer questions like “Why MBA” and “Why this school” you actually need someone who has been through the process and knows about your profile and what schools are looking for. Jamboree is regarded good for GMAT prep though – I will rule out for any essay editing.

Online

1. EssayEdge.Com - Probably the best known online consultants for editing business school essays. Editors are mostly Americans and have their distinct style of writing which might not be suitable for an Indian applicant like me. As per my understanding, in the admissions committee, mostly current students evaluate the applications from their region in the first place. If any Indian would evaluate my application, he would easily figure out that essays have been written or edited by an American. . Essayedge is also very expensive for me.
2. ApexWriters.Com – These are current students and alumni. I interacted with a current student and one admission consultant. When I insisted on speaking with one of the editors, they also put me through a Sloan student. I also interacted with some past applicants, received positive feedback. Apex also offered to edit one paragraph of my essay for free and I was impressed with the critique. I am going with them.
3. Essaylabb.com – When I called these guys, I could not get convincing answers for my queries again. I could not get justification of their charges. Also, they are not the guys who have gone through it …

I have enrolled with apexwriters for one school and after evaluating the services would take a decision on other schools.

Please add your experiences too.

Pls note: These are my personal views and findings, I request all the applicants to do their own due diligence.

Cheers!
gamemba blogspot

Forbes' 2007 MBA rakning out

2007-08-17T12:10:00.001-04:00

For Complete list visit Forbes

2007-08-16T01:41:00.000-04:00

Who Gets Temp Work Visas?

Temporary visas to work in the U.S., known as H-1Bs, have become highly controversial. Two U.S. senators are investigating how foreign companies are using the visas to bring workers into the country. They suspect that Indian outsourcing firms are using H-1Bs to facilitate the outsourcing of American jobs. Here is a look at the top 200 companies that receive the visas, led by India's Infosys and Wipro.

Source

Financing an MBA in the U.S.

2007-08-14T23:59:00.000-04:00

International students coming to the U.S. have resources—online and off—to help them find financial aid for business school:

by Erica Pelzek

Perhaps you attended university in Australia, New Zealand, or Britain and seek a different career and educational experience among Yanks? Or maybe your education in India or China piqued your interest in obtaining an MBA in the U.S.?

Regardless of your motives as a globe-trotting, full-time business student, you have to get here somehow, and that journey can be expensive—anywhere from $20,000 to $47,000 a year for tuition alone. But worry not, traveling student. A few key financial aid Web sites and resources are like markers on a treasure map for those who wish to head to the U.S. for B-school.

Financial aid is often complicated, and for international students in the U.S., it can be even more trying. Besides a lack of federally designated aid, many international loans for students studying in the U.S. require permanent resident or U.S. citizen co-signers. Adding yet another hurdle is the limited availability of scholarships specifically for international students studying in the U.S. Often, international students are added to the same pool as all other entering students, making scholarships incredibly competitive and difficult to obtain.

Online Resources

The No. 1 stop for international students for financial-aid resources is the Web, including the International Education Financial Aid's Web site, which provides grant listings and a database brimming with domestic and international scholarship opportunities.

More important, the Web site links to International Student Loan, a site devoted to giving students who wish to study internationally information on loan providers. These loan monies don't flow freely without a few obstacles, though. The international loan highlighted on the site requires a creditworthy co-signer who must be a U.S. citizen or permanent resident. Additionally, the student must attend a qualifying school from the Web site's list.

As of August, 2007, most of BusinessWeek's top-ranked full-time MBA programs for 2006 were qualifying schools for this loan. However, even if a school is not on the list, it may have its own loan program for international students. For instance, Diane Hunt, assistant director of financial aid for the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, says the B-school has a loan arrangement for international students through Citibank (C). CitiAssist Loan recipients can borrow up to the full cost of attendance, regardless of their credit scores and less the amount of financial aid (scholarships, etc.) received.

Similar to the International Education Financial Aid site is the Institute of International Education's Funding for U.S. Study Online. The site provides a large, free, searchable database of grants, scholarships, and other awards for international students studying in the U.S.

EduPASS, a site for prospective international students, is chock-full of advice and information on loan providers, including the Global Student Loan Corp., which offers international students loans without need of a co-signer in the U.S. Students may need co-signers from their home countries, however. For those not familiar with financial-aid and academic jargon, eduPASS has a comprehensive glossary to help decipher the vocabulary, defining words from "American" to "J-1 Visa."

For a more proactive advising experience, the U.S. State Dept.'s Bureau of Educational & Cultural Affairs has a "global network" called EducationUSA, developed to provide information and guidance to students seeking to study in the U.S. Its detailed Web site provides more than enough advice, even mapping out the step-by-step actions international students should take to apply for aid, from speaking with advisers in their home countries to seeking work-study employment in the U.S.

Offline Resources

Although databases provide a wealth of information for prospective international B-school students, certain language barriers and a lack of interpersonal communication can make merely searching the Web for financial aid time-consuming and confusing.

If a school's scholarship terms or financial-aid requirements are unclear, call the financial-aid office directly to inquire. Advisers at Michigan, Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, and the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business all note that universities often reward qualified international students the same way they reward high-achieving domestic students—with scholarships.

For instance, at Chicago, international students can qualify for target-based awards aimed at students from developing or emerging economies, says Director of Admissions Rosemaria Martinelli. Opportunities and awards like this are worth checking into, even if they are extremely competitive; often, scholarship applicants who do not receive one scholarship will be entered into the pool for a different one.

EducationUSA also lists educational advising centers in most countries around the world, where international students can go for guidance about the application process and financing higher education in the U.S. The program even offers education fairs in different countries, to provide curious students with more information on studying in the U.S. Recent fairs were held in Toronto, China, Japan, South Korea, Nicaragua, Jamaica, and Africa, to name a few.

Whatever your research method for the hunt for financial aid, persistence is key. Keep searching for the best loan and scholarship programs to suit your needs, and use proactivity and organization to lead you to your final destination: a top B-school that provides an ample amount of financial support.

Pelzek is a BusinessWeek.com intern.

Source

MBAs See Lowest Pay Within Accounting Sector

2007-08-14T23:51:00.000-04:00

MBA candidates ranked accounting as the lowest-paying among 47 industries included in Fortune Magazine’s 2007 survey of attitudes toward various employers and professional roles. The average expected starting salary for MBAs working in “auditing, accounting and taxation” (listed as a single category) came in at $63,694, according to the poll of 5,000 current MBA students. Five years after graduation, the MBA candidates expect accounting-related work to pay $111,135.

Both figures were the lowest by far among the 47 industries covered by the survey. The next-lowest paying sector, academic research, was far ahead at $77,859 for the year after graduation and $132,282 after five years. Government/public service and education/teaching ranked five and six notches higher, respectively, with expected first-year pay of about $83,500 and expected sixth-year pay at $144,000-148,000.

The annual survey is conducted for Fortune by Universum, a Philadelphia firm that specializes in employer branding.

Private equity - more specifically, "venture capital" – topped the MBA candidates’ pay expectations list, with first-year base salaries pegged at $107,919. Metals ranked second at $102,000, followed by management consulting ($101,400), investment management ($100,986) and investment banking ($98,877). However, the survey's emphasis on base pay rather than total compensation makes such comparisons cloudy.

Pay expectations showed a large gender difference. Female participants said they expected a base salary of $89,599 one year after graduation, rising to $169,849 after five years. Males expected $97,599 after one year and $204,372 after five years.

Management consulting remains the favorite initial destination for those pursuing MBA degrees. When participants were asked which companies they would most like to work for, blue-chip consulting firms McKinsey, Bain and Boston Consulting pulled down three of the top five places this year – just as they did in 2006. However, this year Google knocked McKinsey knocked out of its long-time first-place spot.

Goldman Sachs held its place as the favorite financial-sector employer in this year’s survey. Goldman placed third overall, behind Google and McKinsey.

The survey is constructed in a way that may limit its value as a gauge of candidate preferences. For one thing, private equity firms apparently weren't included among the 179 choices shown to MBA students taking part in the poll. Universum has said it compiles each year's list of possible choices by combining the prior year's top 100 with the top write-in vote-getters. Google was added in 2006 after drawing a huge write-in vote in 2005. But it looks like leading private-equity firms like Blackstone Group and Texas Pacific aren't garnering enough write-ins to earn themselves a place.

Source

Top Companies for MBAs to work

2007-08-14T23:47:00.000-04:00

And the winners are...

Think of it as a popularity contest for companies. Each year, research firm Universum surveys MBA candidates on where they'd most like to work. See the exclusive Fortune.com list, including detailed profiles of the top 25.

1. Google	6. Apple
2. McKinsey & Company	7. Microsoft
3. Goldman Sachs	8. General Electric
4. Bain & Company	9. Nike
5. Boston Consulting Group	10. Bank of America

Source

H-1B limit reached for next year

2007-08-12T09:04:00.000-04:00

The federal government has already received enough applications to reach the next fiscal year's cap for the H-1B worker visas so beloved by technology companies.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said Thursday that it determined on May 26--scarcely two months after this year's application window began on April 1--that the number of petitions streaming in will exceed the congressional limit of 65,000 visas. The people approved in that round of applications are eligible to start work on Oct. 1, 2006--which is when the federal government's 2007 fiscal year begins.

Another 5,830 petitions had arrived as of May 26 for the separate 20,000 visas reserved for the 2007 fiscal year for foreigners with advanced degrees from U.S. institutions.

Regardless, employers seeking skilled foreign workers without such degrees cannot file petitions until the next application window opens on April 1, 2007.

Proponents of the H-1B program, which permits foreigners with at least a bachelor's degree in their area of specialty to be employed in the United States for up to six years, viewed the announcement as additional evidence that Congress urgently needs to raise the limit.

"This is bad news, as America keeps losing the race to other countries to attract the world's best and the brightest high-skilled workers," said Ralph Hellman, president of the Information Technology Industry Council, whose member companies include Apple Computer, Dell, Cisco Systems, IBM, Intel and Microsoft. "This further underscores the need by Congress to provide additional incentives to attract these workers."

Those large technology companies have claimed for years that such changes are essential for filling key gaps created by a shortage of qualified Americans. Some, such as Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, have gone so far as to suggest scrapping the restrictions altogether.

The industry edged closer to getting its way last week, when the U.S. Senate voted to raise the cap to 115,000 as part of a sweeping immigration bill. The measure also contains a provision stipulating that if that cap is reached in a certain year, then it can be raised by 20 percent for the next year. The government's baseline H-1B quota has remained at 65,000 since 2004 after peaking at 195,000 between 2001 and 2003.

That bill, however, is expected to face obstacles in the House of Representatives because of broader conflicts over the Senate's approach to immigration policy and border security.

Meanwhile, the H-1B system also has its fair share of critics. The U.S. division of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which represents high-tech professionals, has argued that the current system lets powerful corporations nab foreign workers at lower salaries than they would pay their American counterparts--or, in the most unsavory cases, to keep American workers out of jobs entirely.

"We don't understand why the Senate wants to expand a program that numerous government reports have found leaves U.S and foreign workers open to exploitation," IEEE-USA President Ralph Wyndrum Jr. said in a statement. "Fraud, abuse and misuse of the visas is rampant. The program should be fixed before it is expanded."

Reference

Two individuals falsely claimed Stanford affiliation

2007-06-01T21:35:00.000-04:00

University reviews reports last week of woman impersonating student, another claiming official connection with department

Stanford student affairs administrators are conducting a deliberate and comprehensive review of circumstances surrounding the reports made last week that Azia Kim allegedly misrepresented herself as an undergraduate for several months, living in Stanford residences and participating in Santa Clara University's ROTC program.

Meanwhile, university officials are issuing a stay-away letter to another individual, Elizabeth Okazaki, alleged to be improperly claiming to have an official affiliation with an academic department.

Vice Provost for Student Affairs Greg Boardman has appointed Chris Griffith, associate dean of students, to lead the investigation of allegations that Kim impersonated a Stanford undergraduate.

"Griffith will begin by piecing together a comprehensive overview of the allegations, seeking to discover where there may be gaps in Stanford's system of identifying enrolled students. Those involved in the investigation are expected to make recommendations to solve any problems found," Boardman said.

The university is limited in what it can release regarding the Okazaki case.

"We cannot comment any further on this case, as law enforcement and university officials are delving into the matter and do not wish to jeopardize these investigations," said Jeff Wachtel, senior assistant to President John Hennessy.

"We recognize that this allegation, following earlier reports of an individual falsely impersonating an undergraduate, raises important questions about campus security," Wachtel said.

Prior to these reports, the university already had launched a broad review of campus policies under the auspices of Vice President for Business Affairs and Chief Financial Officer Randy Livingston to assure students, faculty and staff that community safety is of the utmost importance, Wachtel added.

Source

ISB's Dean Rao is GMAC Director

2007-05-22T08:52:00.000-04:00

The Dean of the Indian School of Business (ISB), Professor M R Rao, has been elected to the Board of Directors of the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) for a three year term, starting form July 1, 2007. The elections for this prestigious post were held on May 1, 2007.

GMAC (www.gmac.com) is composed of representatives from leading business schools worldwide, and is dedicated to assessing and promoting the value of Graduate Management education. As an international not-for-profit education association, GMAC is also the provider of GMAT, the widely used assessment for Graduate Management Admissions.

Amongst other key roles and responsibilities, the Board of Directors is expected to develop and implement strategic plans that leverage the Council’s core competencies and focus on service to GMAC constituents. The Board is also responsible for developing policies which ensure effective legal, ethical, and financial operations of the organisation.

It must be mentioned that last year, the ISB became the first school from India to be invited to join GMAC as a Governing School – adding to the league of premier B-schools like Harvard Business School, London Business School, among others.

Source

Prestigious Goldman is students' favourite

2007-05-16T10:13:00.000-04:00

Goldman Sachs has trounced other investment banks as the place university students studying business-related subjects would prefer to work.

The latest survey by Universum, a Swedish graduate research company, puts Goldman in pole position among investment banks. Goldman, which came in sixth overall, was also business students’ favourite investment bank last year.

JPMorgan, which regularly topped the ranking among investment banks a few years ago, came in 11th this time. Morgan Stanley came 12th, followed by Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, UBS, Credit Suisse, Lehman and Bank of America (which scraped in at 47th).

Students go for kudos

Heledd Clarke, UK country manager for Universum, said Goldman’s appeal is down to prestige: “Goldman Sachs has a strong reputation on campus, and is seen as somewhere that students would like to have on their CVs.”

Accountancy firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers ranked as business students’ overall preferred destination. HSBC ranked second. But Clarke said HSBC’s success was probably more attributable to its strong retail bank than its desirability as an investment banking employer.

Universum surveyed over 7,500 final and penultimate year university students studying degrees in business, engineering, science, IT and the humanities.

Source

The top employers for MBA students

2007-05-16T10:09:00.000-04:00

10 May 2005
By Ronald Alsop

When they envision their dream jobs, most MBA students don't get all starry-eyed and idealistic.

Instead, they take a very pragmatic view and set their sights on the companies that happen to be paying the most and hiring the most. That attitude is apparent in the results of a new survey that asked MBAs to name their "ideal" employers. In the annual study, students awarded higher popularity scores this year to nearly all of the management-consulting and financial-services companies, many of which have flocked back to campus with more jobs and fatter paychecks.

While they have traditionally been magnets for M.B.A.s, banks and consultants became scarce on campus during the bleak job market of the past few years, and some dropped in the ranking produced by Universum Communications, a research and consulting firm that surveyed more than 4,700 M.B.A.s at 50 U.S. schools.

This year, companies such as Bain, Boston Consulting Group, Booz Allen Hamilton, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley gained in popularity, knocking some corporate icons—BMW, Coca-Cola and International Business Machines—out of the top 10. Because the survey was conducted from December through March, Morgan Stanley's jump to ninth place doesn't reflect any potential effects from the battle this spring to oust Chief Executive Philip Purcell. But other companies that have faced controversies in the past year proved less appealing to M.B.A.s. Walt Disney slipped to 23rd place from 16th last year, Merck dropped to 89th from 55th, and American International Group fell 18 spots to No.100.

Some M.B.A.s are drawn to multinationals such as Johnson & Johnson, General Electric and Procter & Gamble, the highest-ranked companies outside consulting and financial services. Image also matters to some students, who aspire to work for companies with a reputation for style and innovation. Apple Computer, for example, rose to 15th place from 31st last year, leaping ahead of Microsoft and Dell. Although BMW fell seven spots to No.13, the German auto maker still outranks other car companies.

Some consulting firms and technology companies damaged their relationships with M.B.A. students back in 2001 and 2002, when business soured and they rescinded job offers. Companies that didn't renege believe they are benefiting now. "There was no bait-and-switch in our hiring, and I'd like to think that is strengthening our reputation on campus," says Kermit King, head of North American recruiting at Boston Consulting Group, which advanced to fifth place in the ranking. "We're also doing a better job of having one-on-one interactions with students, which means getting more BCG people to campus."

Some companies have succeeded in maintaining their popularity, most notably McKinsey. The consulting firm, well known as a training ground for chief executives, has ranked No.1 for 10 straight years. The firm declined to comment on the ranking but expects to hire some 600 M.B.A.s this year, 2% to 3% more than in 2004. A spokesman notes, however, that M.B.A.s represent a shrinking share of new hires as McKinsey increasingly recruits for specialized talent at medical and law schools.

Citigroup credits its repeat No.2 ranking to its global job opportunities, diverse product lines and steady recruiting. "We maintained a stable presence on campus and hired M.B.A.s even when times weren't as good," says Debbie Bertan, Citigroup's director of college relations.

Women and men expressed somewhat different employer preferences. Female M.B.A.s include more consumer-product marketers and retailers such as L'Oréal and Gap at the top of their wish lists. Male M.B.A.s are focused on consulting and financial services, but they find some technology companies alluring.

Ryan Popple, a survey respondent and first-year student at Harvard Business School, diverged from most of his fellow M.B.A.s, naming ExxonMobil (No.50) and BP (No.65) as most ideal. Why energy companies? "I tried to find an industry that combined my interests in international business, government and environmental issues," says Mr. Popple, who plans to spend his summer as an intern in the treasurer's department at ExxonMobil.

Universum also asked M.B.A.s which factors most influence their decision to accept or reject a job offer. Compensation package was the top pick, followed closely by "challenging role." Next in importance: corporate culture, a clear path for advancement, and work-life balance. "To me, work-life balance is not all that important so long as compensation is high to make up for it," says Sean Hazlett, another first-year Harvard M.B.A., who participated in the survey and aspires to be a vice president at a prominent investment bank. "I spent the last five years in the Army and my family is fully aware of how it can cope with a terrible work-life balance and low paycheck to match. My children will thank me when I pay for their college education."

For their first post-M.B.A. job, the survey found that men on average expect a salary of $89,933 and signing bonus of $18,028, while women look to earn $81,962, with a $15,415 signing bonus. By five years after graduation, salary goals soar, with men hoping for $184,352, and women, $155,909. Although still lower than men's, women's salary expectations after five years increased the most, up 10% from last year. "Work-life balance is still more important for women than men," says Claudia Tattanelli, chief executive of Universum. "But women are raising the bar and demanding more in compensation, too."

Source

Duke Works to Stem Fuqua Fallout

2007-05-16T10:02:00.000-04:00

In the wake of a cheating scandal, e-mails and phone calls to worried alums and concerned applicants by Alison Damast

When news of the cheating scandal at Duke's Fuqua School of Business broke last week, school administrators quickly devised plans to simultaneously reassure and inform incoming students and alumni. Gordon Soenksen, Fuqua's associate dean, sent out an e-mail to alumni with a copy of a statement from Dean Douglas Breeden about the business school's honor code.

Liz Riley Hargrove, the school's director of admissions, quickly followed suit, sending out a note May 1 to admitted students who had made deposits for next year. "We felt like they were the newest members of the community and because they weren't there on a daily basis like the rest of us were, they needed to be informed about that as well." She adds, "I imagine there are some students questioning whether Duke is the right place for them."

Indeed, for the past week, Duke's has grappled with the aftermath of the B-school's Judicial Board ruling on the fate of the 34 students implicated in the cheating incident, nine of whom will be expelled (see BusinessWeek.com, 4/30/07, "Duke MBAs Fail Ethics Test"). The students were convicted of collaborating with each other in mid-March on an open-book take-home exam and also on class assignments.

New Details Emerge

It is the largest episode of cheating in the school's history, and school administrators have wrestled with how to communicate with incoming students, alums, and the larger public about the situation while protecting the privacy of the students involved in the case, says Mike Hemmerich, Fuqua's associate dean for marketing and communications. "We just want to keep people updated on the process because it is an extraordinary event for our school," he says. "But we obviously have to balance that with the need and legal requirement for the confidentiality of the process and the students involved."

Still, a handful of new details emerged this week about the incident. School officials confirmed earlier this week that some of Fuqua's international students were involved in the episode. "Reflecting the global diversity of Duke's Fuqua School of Business, the students involved come from multiple countries on four different continents," wrote Dean Breeden in an e-mail update sent to students and faculty May 2.

Breeden also said that he will be a member of the Appeals Committee. He will appoint a tenured faculty member and student to sit on the committee with him. "I am confident that the appeals process will show the same meticulous consideration for each and every appeal," Breeden wrote.

Black Eye for Reputation

School officials could not confirm whether any appeals had been filed yet, but they are expecting some to be filed. "It's typical in these cases that there are appeals," Hemmerich says.

Meanwhile, the admissions office has been reaching out to incoming students in the past few days. Hargrove, Fuqua's admissions director, has spent time on the phone talking with students who had specific questions about the facts surrounding the case and how it has affected the Duke community. "Our hope is that they understand that this was a process that is important for us to uphold and it is something we take seriously. It was the right course of action for the students who will remain and for the university."

The outreach by Duke is important. Since the incident occurred, questions have arisen in the larger business school and academic community about the challenges of enforcing an honor code in a population of students who are driven, competitive, and in some instances willing to cut corners to get ahead. The discussion has not always been flattering to Duke, B-schools in general, and business ethics.

Teamwork Is Key

"Students do believe that people who are really successful in our society couldn't have possibly gotten where they are honestly," says John Knapp, director of the Southern Institute for Professional & Business Ethics at Georgia State University's Robinson College of Business. "That kind of thinking could lead one to rationalize and say, 'This is just what you have to do. Everybody is doing it.'"

Another issue clouding the discussion is the nature of the B-school experience. At Duke, for example, students complete the majority of their assignments in teams (see BusinessWeek.com, 5/14/07, "Cheating—Or Postmodern Learning?").

"This team environment does give people much closer contact with their classmates. So many times they will think—sometimes acting on an impulse—to consult a classmate on a practical issue. That's where the questions could arise," says Arthur Kraft, chairman of AACSB International, the primary accrediting association for business schools in the U.S., and dean of Chapman University's George L. Argyros School of Business & Economics. "As a result, some may see these people on teams almost as an extension of themselves."

Not a Deal-Breaker

Still, Duke's Hemmerich says, students are expected to know where to draw the line between collaboration and solo work: "We do have a very collaborative, team-oriented environment, but the rules are very clear when it is time to work on an individual basis."

So far, it seems that the incident isn't a deal-breaker for some admitted Duke MBAs. Matt Schaar, 26, an engineer for an aerospace company in Seattle who has been accepted to Fuqua's Cross-Continent MBA program, says he was impressed by the school's quick reaction to the incident. He is still considering whether to attend Fuqua next year, but says the cheating case will not influence his decision.

"I don't hold the fact that 10% of the entering class decided to cheat against the school itself," Schaar says. "Their only job is to evaluate the people who will fit in best. I don't think it's possible that you can determine whether a person will cheat or not by a 21-page application and interview. You just can't glean that."

Saleem Hussain, 26, a consultant in the Boston area who received his bachelor's degree from Duke four years ago and was recently admitted to Fuqua says he has spent the past few days closely following the reaction to the scandal in online chat rooms and forums. "It has only encouraged me to support Duke more and to continue going there to show that I do actually go there for the academics and the teaching and everything that Duke actually stands for," he says.

Source: Businessweek

DUKE MBA students found cheating, punished

2007-04-29T14:10:00.000-04:00

34 face punishment in Duke cheating case

Mcclatchy-tribune

Originally published April 29, 2007

DURHAM, N.C. // In the largest cheating scandal in the history of Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, 34 MBA students face serious penalties after university officials determined they collaborated on answers for an exam.

Nine students face expulsion, said Mike Hemmerich, an associate dean at the business school. Fifteen will receive a one-year suspension from the school along with a failing grade in the course. Nine will get a failing grade in the course, and one student received a failing grade for the exam. Four students were found not guilty. All were from the Class of 2008.

Federal privacy laws prevent naming the students, said Hemmerich, who wouldn't disclose what the course was or what the test was about. He said those involved were first-year students taking a required test.

A professor noticed unusual consistencies in the answers of a take-home exam, which students are supposed to do on their own, Hemmerich said. Investigation showed that students were meeting in groups to work on the test.

Students are allowed to use notes and other materials for the exam. Hemmerich said he wasn't sure whether the students gathered all together or in separate groups. The students were found guilty by Fuqua's judicial board after the panel heard 22 separate cases over several weeks.

"Fuqua depends on every member of its community to uphold the code in both spirit and action," Fuqua Dean Douglas T. Breeden said in a written statement. "This is why we require, as a condition for enrollment, that all students acknowledge their personal acceptance of the code."

Source

IIM- A PGPX key facts

2007-04-28T12:50:00.000-04:00

PGPX Placements 2007

The PGPX (1 year full time residential Post Graduate Programme for executives) is a special programme that is unique in the following respects

It requires that all participants are above 27 years of age with substantial years of work experience
It is mandatory for all participants to spend time outside the country on international immersion
It requires all participants to be grounded in areas pertinent to senior and top management like corporate governance, tracking organizational performance, mergers and acquisitions, etc.

With accelerated economic growth and new opportunities emerging in the last five years, many are now choosing to work immediately after their bachelor’s degree and, after having worked for several years, they feel the need for a professional management qualification to either accelerate their career growth or shift to a different vertical at a higher level. PGPX has been designed and launched by IIMA to meet this need.

PGPX is a full time residential programme specially designed for those who have a sufficient amount of managerial experience to make them a “truly experienced masters” class. The entering batch of 2006 (which is the first graduating PGPX batch of 2007) had a profile as follows

Average age 32 (range 27-43)
Average GMAT 699 which places the PGPX batch amongst the best one year MBA programmes in the world. For instance, INSEAD has 707 average GMAT while Harvard has an average GMAT of 690.
Average experience of 9 years

Placements for the pioneering first PGPX batch are now complete. IIMA is proud to announce that it has achieved 100% placements for all available participants of the first batch well before their graduation. Of the 60 participants in the batch, 58 took placements. 135 offers were made to candidates in the first batch with roles varying from Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer to Group Engagement Manager to Corporate Strategy Officer to Vice President (Sales and Marketing) to Senior Associate to Senior Analyst to Operations Manager.
The heartening part of the process is that the market is also signaling that it recognizes that the PGPX is a different programme with recruits coming in at a different level (middle and senior management roles). Jobs were accepted companies that are in consulting, manufacturing, corporate banking, retailing, IT, telecommunications, chemical process industry, investment banking, private equity, and energy sectors. Companies that recruited from the PGPX programme include AD Little, Booz Allen Hamilton, Citibank IBD, Cognizant, Computer Associates, Covansys, Cypress, Delta Lloyd, Fire Capital, Genpact, ICICI Bank, ICRA, IMACS, Infosys BPO, Infotech, JM Morgan Stanley, Kotak PE, KPIT, NISG, McKinsey, Microsoft, MindTree Consulting, Nexus, Olam International, PwC, Paramount Airways, RPG, Reliance Energy, Reliance Communications, Reliance Industries, Tech Mahindra, Thermax, Syntel, Yes Bank, VSNL and WNS.

With the success of the PGPX programme, IIMA now has a “full menu” of products for recruiters – entry level hires – bright young people with little or no experience and experienced hires at the middle and senior management levels.

Source: IIM-A

ISB Placement Statistics - 2007

2007-04-26T23:05:00.000-04:00

Source: ISB

ISB - Setting New Trends in Admissions

2007-04-24T23:02:00.000-04:00

Source: http://isb.edu/media/UsrSiteNewsMgmt.aspx?topicID=215

This year, the new batch of 2007-08 at ISB witnessed some new and interesting trends in admissions. The number of applications increased by 32% this year compared to 2006-07. A total of 425 students were admitted this year, as against 416 last year. The percentage of women students shot up from 20% last year to 25% this year, with one of them being a top ten finalist of Miss India-Australia. The number of international students admitted this year increased significantly from 5 to 23. There has also been a very balanced enrolment of engineering and non-engineering students this year, with 58% and 42% respectively. Three students who represented civil services and 5 entrepreneur students have also been admitted in the current batch. The highest GMAT score of a student this year was 780, and average work experience was 5 years, which were the same as last year.

A unique MBA which pays for your tuition

2007-04-23T09:58:00.000-04:00

Texas- Austin's Acton is the only MBA program in the country that is taught by successful entrepreneurs, completes in nine months and offers every student a $35,000 Acton Fellowship to cover the full cost of tuition, fees, and materials.

Acton Fellowships are gifts from the business leaders of today to the entrepreneurs of tomorrow. The fellowships are a testament to our belief in the transformational power of the Acton program, and our faith that today's Acton Scholars will in turn invest in the following generation.

Learn more about the program here.

Darden Capsule Marks 50 Years

2007-04-19T20:00:00.000-04:00

A time capsule for Darden artifacts was unveiled April 18 during the school’s traditional First Coffee.
“We want to touch base with people in 2057, to give them an idea of what Darden was all about in 2007,” said Ken White, Darden’s vice president of communication and marketing. “This will be our connection to the future.”

Rather than bury the treasure underground, White said the time capsule will be displayed prominently on Grounds where people will be able to view it for decades to come.

The stainless steel canister, about four feet tall and 12 inches in diameter, will be filled with Darden memorabilia and items commemorating the 50th anniversary of the school’s founding in 1955. As the two-year celebration of the anniversary draws to a close, the time capsule will be sealed and presented to Dean Robert Bruner by alumni with the Class of 1957 – the first graduates of Darden. The ceremony will take place over the upcoming Reunion Weekend, when the Class of ’57 will celebrate their 50th anniversary.

A fireworks display on Grounds will mark the occasion Saturday night, April 21.
The engraved capsule gives explicit instructions that it is not to be opened until Reunion Weekend 2057.
More than three dozen unique items will be placed in the capsule, including a Darden baseball cap, a case study of Enron written by the dean and professor Sam Bodily, 2007 Darden Incubator company business plans, Executive Education program offerings in 2007, an issue of the student newspaper, the Cold Call Chronicle; employment reports for the classes of 2006 and 2007, the MBA for Executives program directory, a Darden military coin, a student t-shirt, a brochure of fabulous things to do in Charlottesville, and a wealth of photographs.
Members of the Darden community are encouraged to submit items for possible inclusion in the time capsule before it is sealed April 21 for the next half century. Bring future artifacts to the Communication and Marketing suite in the Abbott Center on Grounds.

- Darden News site

Duke to Receive $10 Million for its Financial Aid Initiative

2007-04-19T19:48:00.000-04:00

Duke to Receive $10 Million for its Financial Aid Initiative

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation of Seattle will contribute $10 million to Duke University to support scholarships for undergraduates and business school students, Duke President Richard H. Brodhead announced Tuesday.

The gift will provide $9 million in endowment to support need-based undergraduate scholarships and $1 million in endowment to support scholarships for students at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business.

“Duke offers significant financial aid to its students, but our endowment for aid covers only a portion of the need,” Brodhead said. “I am grateful to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for strengthening the foundation of Duke’s need-blind admissions policy for undergraduates and helping us ensure that a Duke education remains available to all qualified students regardless of their family’s financial situation.”

In December 2005, Brodhead announced Duke’s Financial Aid Initiative, an effort to raise $300 million in endowed financial aid. Including the Gates gift, the university has received more than $216 million in support of this effort. (More information about the initiative can be found at .)

“Fundamentally, students who earn admission to Duke should be able to pursue their education regardless of financial barriers,” said Melinda French Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. “We are proud to support this initiative and Duke’s commitment to enroll more students from a wide range of backgrounds.” Ms. Gates is a graduate of Duke and of the Fuqua School of Business and is a former university trustee.

The Gates Foundation’s $10 million gift represents the second in a two-part contribution to Duke. On Feb. 12, Brodhead announced that the Gates Foundation and The Duke Endowment of Charlotte, N.C., contributed $15 million each to support DukeEngage, one of the most ambitious civic engagement initiatives in U.S. higher education. (More information about DukeEngage can be found at .)

The Gates family has supported financial aid at Duke in the past, including a $20 million gift in 1998 to help establish the University Scholars Program, which encourages interdisciplinary study by outstanding undergraduate, graduate and professional students. There have been 154 University Scholars since the program’s inception, including the current 28 undergraduate, 34 doctoral and 18 professional school students.

Duke’s spending on need-based undergraduate aid totaled almost $47 million in 2005-06, up more than $20 million from spending five years prior. In total, Duke spent more than $143 million on financial aid grants for undergraduate, graduate and professional students in 2005-06. Less than a quarter of that cost was met with financial aid endowment.

“We never want to see Duke’s need to fund student aid come into competition with the need to fund the academic programs that draw top students and faculty here in the first place,” Brodhead said. “By significantly strengthening Duke’s permanent support for financial aid, donors like the Gates Foundation are doing something crucial not only for the university and its students, but also for the many people its graduates will serve in the years ahead.”

The High Price of Admission

2007-04-17T13:31:00.000-04:00

Source: Businessweekonline

Click to see larger image

Stanford accepts GRE scores for MBA admissions

2007-04-16T22:41:00.000-04:00

Stanford to accept GRE scores

It is open for those who join the Fall 2007 onwards. This introduction, keeping in mind the financial burden on applicants, is heartening. This surely will allow more people to apply and even more top schools can join the club. But we can also think that GMAT would anyways be taken by applicants at this point because they are not going to apply to only Stanford. The ones who are not 100% sure of getting into Stanford will take this 'expensive' exam anyways . Thinking more, The application fee of $245 can be reduced to help the applicants too ;-) . What say?

Stanford: Loan forgiveness program

2007-04-14T17:04:00.000-04:00

New Loan Forgiveness Program Gives International MBA Students More Options

STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS — In Moscow one Stanford MBA graduate now can set aside his personal financial concerns and focus on career choices that will allow him to contribute to his country’s prosperity. For the next three years a good chunk of Maxim Melnikov’s educational debt will be forgiven.

As the first awardee of the new Graduate School of Business International Loan Forgiveness Program, Melnikov, MBA ’06, has been able to switch from an investment career to an operational role managing newspaper and magazine distribution enterprises, the first step toward his goal of helping stimulate the Russian economy by creating his own companies.

The GSB International Loan Forgiveness Program (ILFP) was launched in fall 2006 and is already having the kind of impact it was designed for: helping international students who graduate from the Business School with staggering debt. “The program is part of the School’s increased interest in having a greater positive influence abroad,” explains Colleen MacDonald, director of financial aid and a key player in the creation of the new program.

For many international students, particularly for those in developing nations, financing their education becomes a huge obstacle. Securing a loan in their home countries can be challenging, and loans from the United States are tied to American currency. The average indebtedness for an international student in the MBA Class of 2006, for example, was more than $80,000. That spells tough choices upon graduation. Going back home where one’s expertise could make a real difference can mean not earning enough to keep up with loan payments. Working in wealthy nations has often been seen as the only option.

MacDonald, along with Sharon Marine, director of campaign giving for the School, and a committed team of other GSB administrators have worked with donor Peter Seldin, MBA ’80, to create the new international program modeled after the School’s successful Nonprofit/Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program. During the pilot phase, non-U.S. graduates from the classes of 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009 who have loan debt can apply—as long as they have chosen to work in what the World Bank classifies as low-, lower-middle-, or upper-middle-income countries. These nations include Kenya, Pakistan, China, Bolivia, Morocco, Indonesia, Mexico, Malaysia, and the Russian Federation, among others.

“We want to enable students to go back to their home countries or other countries where they can really put their skills to work assisting developing economies,” MacDonald says. Eligible graduates may be awarded up to $7,500 each year, according to their level of indebtedness. Currently, recipients can receive funds for a total of three years after graduation.

“Our hope is to expand the program beyond the pilot so that it can function much like our nonprofit loan forgiveness program, which has been serving about 30 students a year since 1988,” Marine says. Some of those students are happily receiving grants for the life of their loans. The ILFP is just beginning to be known, accepting its first applications in fall 2006. Until it takes hold, special loan forgiveness awards have also been extended to several international students in classes not covered by the new program: Mizmun Kusairi, MBA ’05, in Malyasia; and Bryan Droznes, MBA ’05, and Juan Meryn, MBA ’04, both in Argentina.

Meanwhile in Russia, Melnikov has moved out of structuring deals for PromSvyazCapital Group, thanks to having a significant portion of his loans paid off. He now oversees and manages several companies that store and transport newspapers and magazines and manage their own press retail chains, such as kiosks and press mini-stores.

It’s a slightly lower paying job but more stimulating, Melnikov says. “The lack of good business education hinders Russia from becoming a developed country. I’m now in an even better position to teach the people I work with the concepts I learned at Stanford,” he says. “I’m delighted how quickly they’re absorbing those lessons.”

For more information on ILFP or to extend support, visit www.gsb.stanford.edu/finaid/forgiveness/international.html.

–– Marguerite Rigoglioso

Going to Canada . . . research before applying!

2007-04-11T18:16:00.000-04:00

A University in Canada shuts down from May1

VANCOUVER: A group of Indian students who travelled across the globe in pursuit of their MBA dreams are living their worst nightmare. The university into which they had got admission has been ordered to close down by the local government.

Lansbridge University, British Columbia, Canada, has been asked to shut down from May 1 following the discovery of management malpractice by the local ministry of advanced education.

In Canada, education is the responsibility of the provincial government and the ministry is responsible for governing public, private institutions in the province. According to sources there asre around 13 students from India at Lansbridge, a private institution.

This is once again a grim reminder for students to be cautious when applying to an institution overseas. Two students from Lansbridge, who prefer not to be named, said: "We are in complete shock. We never imagined something like this can happen in the developed world too."

The students have requested that either the tuition fees are refunded or they are given a transfer to another institute. The cost of an MBA is 10-15,000 Canadian dollars at Lansbridge. Many families in India invest their life savings to send their children overseas for higher education.

Responding to the students anxieties, Bo Hansen, manager, international education, ministry of advanced education, assured that the British Columbia government is taking all measures to protect the interests of international students.

2007 Placements - Indian School of Business (ISB)

2007-04-11T10:02:00.000-04:00

ISB is one school which is giving all reasons to prospective students to be a part of it, if you are an Indian the reasons are more than obvious. This year when the class of 2007 graduated on April 7, 2007; it had reasons to celebrate the past year of learning and the coming years of rewards. Right! the placements at ISB.

A quick snap:

Average domestic salary was Rs15.03 lacs
Highest domestic offer being Rs 43.91 lacs
Average international salary was USD 135,000 ( Rs 59.5 lacs )
Highest international salary was USD 269,000 (Rs1.18crores)

Getting into a top 5 MBA program

2007-04-05T16:40:00.000-04:00

Friends, I found this article while surfing the net and found it enlightening. It has been written by some business school students. You can check it out here

Why a Top MBA?

Unlike graduates of medical schools and law schools, there is no licensing exam required to practice business in the United States. In addition, the quality of accredited schools offering MBA degrees varies tremendously. This is a degree you can obtain part-time in 4 years, in an executive program in 1 year, via correspondence courses, and from schools with near 100% acceptance rates.

As a result, the value of your MBA degree is directly related to the prestige of the university and business school which grants it. A recent study of the value of MBA programs concluded that “if you don’t get into a leading business school, the economic value of the degree is really quite limited.” [1] The study examined consultants at McKinsey & Company and investment bankers at Goldman, Sachs & Co. and found that those without MBA’s performed as well, or better, than business school graduates. The fallacy of the study was that it did not recognize that it is much harder to get such a job without an MBA degree. Intellectual horsepower and potential – rather than business knowledge – is the primary criterion top consulting firms and investment banks look for. If someone possesses a Ph.D. in economics from MIT or a JD from Harvard – quite common at such firms – then that obviously serves as a more than adequate intellectual proxy for even a top two-year MBA.

The required curriculum at most business schools consists of courses such as finance, accounting, statistics, organizational behavior, strategy, economics, communications and technology. Schools may have a larger or smaller set of “core” courses, and many give these subjects different names. But overall, MBA programs have more similarities with one another than they do differences, and most of the same subjects are taught from the same textbooks, using many of the same cases.

Thus, the academic content of a business school education – much like a law school or medical school education – does not vary greatly between programs. But due to the tremendous variation in the standards of institutions conferring the degree, an MBA has the most value in the marketplace when it is from a school that is highly respected. In addition, the lifelong professional network which comes from going to business school is more valuable when it is from a school where graduates typically go on to the most successful careers.

Ranking the Rankings

There is no other academic degree which is ranked and analyzed by so many publications and organizations as the MBA. While the general public and the business world have intuitive ideas of which the most famous and prestigious programs are, many of these rankings have highlighted improvements in other programs and presented them as viable competitors. Nonetheless, the traditional top schools perform the best across the best-regarded rankings.

US News and BusinessWeek

US News & World Report and BusinessWeek are the most well-known and respected MBA rankings, and have each been published for more than 10 years. New rankings from the Financial Times, Forbes, the Economist and the Wall Street Journal have come out in the last few years. Each ranking has strengths and weaknesses.

US News is generally considered the best ranking for prospective MBA applicants, as their system is the most transparent, and their rankings always come closest to peoples’ common sense perception of relative prestige. This is no accident, since their ranking heavily favors "peer assessment", which is essentially "prestige", as one of their key factors. There are three schools which have been ranked #1 by US News in the past ten years – the Stanford Graduate School of Business, Harvard Business School, and the MIT Sloan School of Management.

BusinessWeek is considered the next most useful ranking for applicants, since they collect a great deal of data and weight their ranking toward student feedback. Yet, none of Harvard, Stanford or MIT has ever been ranked #1 by BusinessWeek. Instead, the only schools to achieve the top position in their ranking are the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Business School	Highest Ranking in US News	Highest Ranking in BusinessWeek
Harvard Business School	1	3
Stanford Graduate School of Business	1	4
MIT Sloan School of Management	1	4
Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania	2	1
Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University	3	1

Outside of these five schools, no other school has ever been ranked #1 in either of these rankings. BusinessWeek displays some variation, but has generally had each of these schools in or near the top 5. In US News, they have consistently been the top five schools every year the ranking has been published.

Other Rankings

The newer rankings, The Financial Times, Forbes, and the Wall Street Journal, are essentially specialty rankings which weight specifically chosen criteria very heavily to produce different results. The end results have some similarities with US News and BusinessWeek, but also produce many curious outcomes for individual schools and are more useful for the data they collect than the rankings they produce. A summary of the methodology issues with these rankings:

Ranking	Methodology	Problems
Financial Times	Focuses on self-reported salary data several years post-graduation	Unreliable and incomplete data: self-reporting bias
Forbes	Focuses on self-reported salary data several years post-graduation; focuses on ROI	Unreliable and incomplete data: self-reporting bias; penalizes schools with high entering salaries (inversely correlates program quality and applicant salary)
Wall Street Journal	Based entirely on recruiter satisfaction	Recruiters who tend to be unsuccessful at attracting interest from students at top schools tend to give those schools poor marks (inversely correlates program quality and graduate choices)

These methodology problems produce some questionable results, such as the Wall Street Journal ranking Stanford outside of the top 40, Forbes ranking MIT Sloan outside the top 15, and the Financial Times ranking Yale and NYU ahead of Kellogg. As such, the top business schools don't pay as much attention to these rankings. Stanford's dean even commented, quite justifiably, that doing poorly in the Wall Street Journal ranking was probably a better indicator of the quality of a program than doing well!

The Top Programs

Harvard, Stanford, MIT Sloan, Kellogg and Wharton stand out consistently amongst their peers, and have historically been considered the most prestigious MBA programs. They are also considered the best programs today. Two other notable programs are the University of Chicago and Columbia Business School. In fact, the deans of Harvard, Kellogg, MIT Sloan, Stanford, Wharton, Columbia and Chicago, meet regularly to share benchmarking information, and generally consider each other to be peer schools.

The reason that Columbia and Chicago are generally considered just below the other five is because they carry somewhat less prestige, as reflected in a couple of key statistics. Columbia used to have a 46% acceptance rate as recently as 10 years ago, far higher than any other top school, admitting nearly half of all applicants. Meanwhile, Chicago consistently has a much higher acceptance rate than any other top school (above 25-30%) and through much of the last 10 years maintained a 50% yield – in other words, nearly half of the people offered admission to Chicago choose not to attend. Nonetheless, these two schools are considered among the most prestigious after the top 5, and are even ranked in the top 5 in some finance-heavy rankings. Siebel's "Siebel Scholars" program recognizes the top MBA students in the United States by awarding $25000 scholarships to the top five students at each of Harvard, Stanford, Sloan, Wharton, Kellogg and Chicago.

After these seven schools, other well known and highly regarded programs include:

Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College
Haas School of Business, University of California-Berkeley
Yale School of Management
NYU Stern School of Business
Ross School of Business, University of Michigan
Anderson School of Business, UCLA
Darden School of Business, University of Virginia

Collectively, there are about 15 schools in the United States with a claim to "top 10 status" in one area or another.

Additional Statistics

Top MBA programs by subject area – one of the best ways to think about the top five MBA programs is to consider that they are all excellent in nearly every discipline, but are #1 in different specific subject areas:

Business School	US News #1 in 2006 for...	BusinessWeek "top-rated" in 2005 for...
Harvard Business School	- Management	- Finance - Management - Entrepreneurship
Stanford Graduate School of Business	- N/A	- Management - Entrepreneurship
MIT Sloan School of Management	- Information Systems - Production/Operations - Supply Chain/Logistics	- Finance - Management - Marketing - Entrepreneurship
Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania	- Finance - Accounting	- Finance - Management - Marketing - Entrepreneurship
Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University	- Marketing	- Management - Marketing

Yield – that is, the % of students who accept offers of admission. While some less prestigious programs may have high yields because of a highly targeted audience, the top programs are certainly competing with one another for many of the same students. In other words, the typical explanation for someone turning down an offer of admission at one top business school is because they accepted the offer of a school they would rather attend. Since top candidates receive more offers of admission, their choice of program is a factor which can be used to gauge the quality of each program. The yields of the top schools (2004 figures) are:

	School Name	Yield	Acceptance Rate
1	Harvard	85%	12%
2	Stanford	83%	9%
3	MIT Sloan	75%	18%
3	Wharton	75%	15%
5	Columbia	71%	13%
6	Kellogg	66%	16%
7	Chicago	58%	28%

Endowment – this is kind of like the market capitalization of a business school, in a somewhat silly way. If a school has many graduates who have gone on to become very wealthy, it should have a lot of money in its endowment fund. If the school is well-managed, that fund should grow and help it attract more successful students. These are the top 10 schools by endowment (BusinessWeek, 2001):

	School Name	Endowment ($ millions)	Endowment per student ($ 000)
1	Harvard	1100	628
2	MIT Sloan	402	560
3	Stanford	387	530
4	Kellogg	380	152
5	Wharton	338	216
6	Michigan	267	138
7	Darden	255	523
7	Yale	255	607
9	Chicago	207	87
10	Tuck	167	420

The reason the per-capita endowment figures for schools like Chicago and Kellogg are so low is because they spread their resources amongst a large number of full-time and part-time students. Harvard, MIT, Stanford and Wharton do not have part-time programs.

Famous Alumni – so who goes on to fame and fortune with an MBA degree? Besides George W. Bush, the nation’s first MBA president (Harvard ‘75), the most prominent MBA’s are CEO’s of the world’s largest companies. MBA Jungle analyzed the Fortune 200 to see where their CEO’s went to school. The list, once again, has the top schools well-represented, and shows Harvard’s strength historically:

	School Name	# of Fortune 200 CEO’s
1	Harvard	20
2	MIT Sloan	5
3	Stanford	4
3	Columbia	4
3	Chicago	4
6	NYU Stern	3
7	Kellogg	2
7	Darden	2
7	Goizueta	2
7	Indiana	2
7	Texas	2

In the past 100 years, Harvard has been the most popular destination for those interested in an MBA. Of course, the MBA was a completely different animal just 20 years ago. Back then, most students went directly out of college, and the competition and prestige were nothing like it is today. It is worth noting that only 79 CEO’s in the Fortune 200 had MBA degrees at all – but the MBA accounted for more than two-thirds of all graduate degrees held by these CEO’s. Although Wharton only had 1 CEO in the Fortune 200, they have historically had more, and this particular ranking is always in a state of flux.

The rest of this document will focus on the top 5 programs, but the same principles apply to the admissions process at most top 10 or top 20 programs.

Keys to Admission

Your GMAT score, undergraduate GPA, and the number of years of work experience you possess are the primary quantitative indicators used by business school admissions committees. Here is how the top 5 schools stack up on those measures:

Business School	Median GMAT	Median GPA	Mean Work Experience (Years)
Stanford	710	3.5	4.0
MIT Sloan	700	3.4	5.3
Harvard	700	3.6	4.4
Wharton	710	3.5	5.8
Kellogg	700	3.4	5.2

As of this writing, this means that more than half of all students attending these schools scored in the top 5% of all GMAT test takers worldwide. It also means that somewhat less than half did not. The GMAT is the primary indicator of raw intellectual ability considered by admissions committees, since it is standardized, and offers an objective – albeit incomplete – measure of ability between students from different colleges and majors. If you are lower than your target school’s average on any of these measures, it should be compensated by all of the other areas. In other words, if you expect to get in to Wharton with only 2 years of full-time work experience, you should have a very high GMAT score and GPA amongst other things.

Retaking the GMAT – this is only useful if your highest score is below your target school’s median. Retaking the GMAT to get a 730 when you already have a 710 is reasonably meaningless and shows you to be focused on the wrong things. Of course, getting a 720 after previously scoring a 670 may greatly help your candidacy. While most schools say you can take the GMAT as many times as you want, you should never take the test without proper preparation, as the entire process can be quite arduous. Prepare by taking practice tests – particularly CAT simulations – and if you find that you are not scoring 700+ with regularity, you should consider taking a course to prepare.

Although admissions committees at top schools say that a low GMAT score won’t keep you out, those who get in with scores in the low 600’s are almost certainly exceptional cases. If you are the average candidate without any internationally impressive accomplishments, a low GMAT score almost guarantees you a dreaded “ding” letter. On the other hand, for the candidate who is average in all other respects, a 790 isn’t much different from a 740 from the school’s point of view. Most schools will admit two otherwise similar candidates with disparate but high GMAT scores based on characteristics other than the GMAT. As for the people who get in with scores from 650 to 700, admissions can be frustratingly random – even more so than for everyone else.

While the overall GMAT score is what will be counted most heavily, the quantitative score is more important for applicants with non-technical backgrounds while the verbal score is examined more closely for applicants from foreign countries and those with science or engineering degrees. Schools are merely looking for the assurance that a candidate will be able to both crunch numbers and communicate well. Assuming that the overall GMAT score is alright, only a seriously low score on the section that will be examined most closely for a given candidate would be a liability. For example, if you are a native english speaker and have good grades from an Ivy League college in Literature, they probably won’t be too concerned about a low score on the verbal section, and just consider it an aberration. However, a low score on the quantitative section – regardless of how strong your combined GMAT score is – could be a major liability. The AWA score is not important for most applicants, and is not factored into the overall GMAT score anyway. In some cases, the actual text of the AWA section might be compared to an applicant’s essays if the schools are skeptical about either’s authenticity.

How the GPA is evaluated – top business schools are not as focused on undergraduate grades as other professional programs. If you have a 99^th percentile LSAT score, and a 4.0 GPA in Political Science from Princeton, you will almost definitely get into Yale Law School. If you score 9.2 on the MCAT and graduate with a 3.4 in music, you will almost definitely not get into Johns Hopkins Medical School. On the other hand, if you graduate first in your class in finance at NYU, get a 780 on the GMAT, and work at Boston Consulting Group for three years, the admissions committee at Stanford Business School could decide they’ve already let in enough people like you, and the spot could go to someone with a 3.2 GPA in English who worked in a NGO in Africa. The bottom line is that if you are still in school, you should try to get the very best grades you can, but afterwards you just have to live with them. If you did poorly in undergraduate, good graduate degree grades help offset the impression that you’re incapable of getting good grades, but they don’t undo the damage your GPA does to the school’s average. Thus, letting you in becomes a very context and timing-driven judgment call.

Essays – there are typically two to seven essay questions in each application, with between 2000 and 3000 words required in total. While the first application will take you the longest, and you can cut-and-paste many paragraphs into subsequent essays, overall the differing nature of school’s questions will require you to spend many days on each package to create a satisfactory product. The essays are your primary opportunity to convince the school to let you in. They will evaluate you on two dimensions: what you will bring to the school as an MBA student, and what you will bring to the school as an alumnus. The second criterion is obviously the most important. Schools are trying to select the applicants they believe will be the most successful in their careers based on their backgrounds and accomplishments to date. Put another way, the 10-20% of applicants who get into a top business school are the ones who least needed the top MBA degree to succeed in their careers. Ironic, but true.

Of course, most of the applicants to top schools are reasonably successful in their careers already, so your essays need to distinguish you from others in your peer group. Your peer group – those applicants who are most like you – is who you are competing against primarily. For example, any top school could fill up their entire class with analysts from consulting firms with high GMAT scores and GPA’s. But they won’t. Instead, they will have a certain number of spots for such applicants, and someone who was a sculptor would not be competing for one of those spaces. This makes some peer groups more competitive than others in any given year. Most schools will say that every candidate competes against every other candidate, and from a certain point of view this is true. Someone could be a consultant, and even though they have already let in more consultants than they would like, he could bring something so special to the class from other experiences that they decide to let him in too. But in such a situation, the candidate likely won’t get in on strong numbers alone.

Your essays also give the school a sense of your personality. They want to see how you work your argument and the reasons they should admit you into your writing – while still answering their questions directly. They want you to be able to list and explain your accomplishments without being boastful or off-topic. These are, of course, the same skills you will need to be successful in your career after graduation.

Many people have taken to using admissions and essay consultants, and most schools will tell you that they discourage this. It is our opinion that the vast majority of successful candidates do not use paid essay editing services, and the majority of those who do use such services do not get in. This makes sense, of course – the people that need those services the most are the weakest candidates, and they’re on their own when it comes to a final interview. But beyond that, admissions consultants are invariably not the kind of people that a candidate to a top school wants advice from. Most did not ever attend a top business school themselves, and those few that did were essentially not successful enough to find reasonable jobs afterwards – and thus got into the essay editing business. We encourage you to get someone else to look at your essays and make suggestions, but pick someone who isn’t being paid on the basis of how much of your time they take, or how many changes they suggest you make. Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with your essays at all!

On the other hand, you should collect as much information and advice on the admissions process as you can, but always take it with a grain of salt. An unsuccessful applicant may not always be right about why they didn’t get in, but alumni of a given school can usually give you a pretty accurate picture of what it takes to get in. Written information sources are also essential, and this guide assumes that you’ve probably already picked up Richard Montauk’s excellent book, “How to Get Into The Top MBA Programs”. Although his advice is more generic – and thus applicable to any MBA program, but not customized for the truly best programs – you need to learn everything about the process. You should use that book with this guide to tune your application for top 5 schools.

Recommendations – these are most certainly the least important part of your application, but you shouldn’t discount them. They should reinforce what their rest of your package says, and provide the opinion of a real person who knows you very well and can answer the school’s questions directly and honestly. Every school will tell you this, and you should listen. The truth is that school’s know that many applicants write their own recommendations and just get their recommenders to sign and send them.

When to apply – the earlier the better, in general. Schools have either 2 or 3 application deadlines (rounds) and round 3 is almost always incredibly difficult to get in. This is just because statistically, there are very few spots left open by the third round. While some people believe that round 2 can be best for candidates without extremely strong backgrounds, it’s our belief that the first round is the best if you can get your application up to a desirable standard of quality in time.

The Interview – Harvard, Sloan, Stanford and Wharton all interview candidates by invitation only. This means that if you receive an interview – and at Harvard and Sloan, nearly all accepted candidates are required to interview – then this is your last and best opportunity to convince the admissions committee that you are someone they would like to have at their school. At Kellogg, all applicants are required to interview, so this changes the dynamic of the session significantly. Instead of the interview being an opportunity for you to address any weaknesses and convince them to let you in, it is merely another data point taken with the rest of your application. Put another way, a strong interview at Kellogg can’t get you in – but a weak interview can, and will, keep you out.

Conclusion

Attending one of the top business schools in the United States is really an amazing experience that we would recommend to anyone. Our classmates from business school are some of our closest friends, and the value of the network after graduation is immeasurable. We believe that you will be best served by attending the very best school you can get into, so never set your sights too low for reasons of expense, geography or other hassles.

Take a risk, and apply to some great programs – you won’t regret it.

Good luck!

New Dean at Cornell

2007-04-03T15:57:00.000-04:00

Cornell names two front-runners for dean’s job

When a business school hunts for a new dean, the process is usually covered with a shroud of secrecy and riddled with gossip. Not so at Cornell, where the Johnson school is looking for a supremo to replace Robert Swieringa when he steps down this summer. The university has published the names of the two short-listed candidates on its website.

The chosen two are David Besanko, professor of management and strategy at the Kellogg school at Northwestern University, and Elke Weber, professor of international business at Columbia.

Prof Besanko, 51, earned his PhD from Kellogg and has taught there since 1991. In the interim he was professor at Indiana University. He was chair of Kellogg’s own dean search committee in 2000/1 and was also associate dean for academic affairs at Kellogg between 2001 and 2003.

Prof Weber, a Harvard PhD, has taught in many business schools, most notably Columbia, Ohio State and Chicago Graduate School of Business. She has held several visiting positions in European business schools, most recently at London Business School.

York university to open a campus in India

2007-04-03T15:37:00.000-04:00

Schulich Plans India Campus

The Schulich School of Business, York University, Toronto, which has been ranked as high as 18 worldwide by FT is all set to develop a full-fledged campus in either Mumbai or Pune. Schulich should be up and running in two to three years.

11 Rules of Life - Bill Gates

2007-04-03T15:14:00.000-04:00

In his book, Bill Gates talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings has created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept is setting them up for failure in the real world.

RULE 1 - Life is not fair; get used to it.

RULE 2 - The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

RULE 3 - You will NOT make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice president with a corner office, until you earn both.

RULE 4 - If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. He doesn't have tenure.

RULE 5 - Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping; they called it opportunity.

RULE 6 - If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

RULE 7 - Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parents' generation, try "delousing" the closet in your own room.

RULE 8 - Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades; they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

RULE 9 - Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.

RULE 10 - Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

RULE 11 - Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

Taken from here