Major business school reviewing “enrollment procedures and criteria”

The following email was recently sent by the Dean of Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management.

In a nutshell: oops !

Subject: Message from the Dean

Dear Kellogg community –

I wanted to personally write to you about a situation that has received some attention.

During a visit to the U.S. two months ago, Khamis Gaddafi, son of Muammar Gaddafi, attended a non-degree executive course at Kellogg from Feb. 9 – 11 at the Allen Center.

The U.S. State Department was aware of his visit, which occurred prior to the uprising in Libya and before the recent, very troubling allegations against him surfaced.

Our community shares a commitment to respecting human dignity and the integrity of our learning environment.

The Office of the Dean plans to actively review all of our enrollment procedures and criteria, and will determine any changes that need to be made.

Dean, Kellogg School of Management
Northwestern University

Bottom line: Sons of tyrants will no longer be given admissions preference.

My, how the world is changing.

Thanks to RM for feeding the lead.

In praise of global residencies …

Some timely reading for 2nd year Georgetown MBAs as they jump on planes to start their Global residencies. 

According to the dean of the Darden Graduate School of Business at the University of Virginia …

New research has revealed a sizable gap between what the business world needs and what business schools provide to their students.

The bane of most business school deans is the kind of conversation one has with a CEO who wags his finger and tells you that business schools just aren’t delivering the kind of talent business needs.

Lately, it seems that the CEOs have been telling a story like this: “A recent grad we hired got up to give a presentation to our senior management and had simply no appreciation for the challenges of globalization: no feel for the country or region; no anticipation of corruption or socialism in-country; no grasp of the supply chain difficulties; no appreciation for the differences in rule of law and property rights; and the proposed brand name translated into an unmentionable body part. The pitch was an embarrassment.”

A new report issued by the Association for the Advancement of Collegiate Schools of Business, the leading accreditor of business schools in the world reveals a sizable gap between what the world needs and what management educators do.

• There are about 12,600 institutions in the world award undergraduate or graduate degrees of some kind in business.
• Only about 10% of these are accredited as meeting widely accepted expectations of quality.
• Many of the unaccredited institutions are locally focused, and concentrate in the developed economies.

There is a gap in the curricula of business schools, between the aspiration for global content and the reality.

Most schools — even leading schools — aren’t bringing globalization into the classroom in ways that do justice to the subject or the needs of businesses.

We should do better.

Fortune.  B-Schools: It’s time to globalize, February 25, 2011 

FT asks: “Are all MBA students narcissistic … or just most of them?”

Financial Times, The narcissistic world of the MBA student,  November 7, 2010

Success requires ambition, drive and the persistence and resilience to overcome setbacks and to work constantly on weaknesses.

But, the current generation of business school students entering the workforce have

• a remarkable sense of entitlement
• a reluctance to face honest feedback and the consequences of one’s actions
• an unwillingness to acknowledge and engage in the competition that characterizes organizational life.

A recent meta-analysis found that between 1982 and 2009 there was a dramatic increase in narcissistic personality traits among MBA students – in part characterized by

• an inability to take the perspective of others
• a dependence on others for affirmation
• a tendency to value oneself regardless of real achievements
• a quest for constant praise.

Even if students didn’t arrive at the leading business schools already narcissistic, orientation activities would soon make them so.

One of the first things they are told is how accomplished and wonderful they are.

And the result of all of this coddling …  criticism is as likely to beget quitting as any efforts to improve.

Business schools must make changes to affect the pernicious culture of entitlement and narcissism.

Overall employment in advertising, marketing, promotions and PR is expected to jump 13 percent in the next decade, but …

… according to CNBC, career prospects for client-side Advertising and Promotions Managers are weakening.

The stats:
Employed in U.S.: 44,600
Change expected in next decade: -2%
Average salary: $80,220

The situation:
Overall employment in advertising, marketing, promotions and PR is expected to jump 13 percent in the next decade, but for those who direct a firm’s ad campaigns and promotions aimed at driving sales, prospects are expected to drop by 2 percent.

The drop is largely due to the economy – and the changing landscape of the media business.

Advertising and promotions are also subject to demand in the industries they’re promoting, so if an industry is hard hit by the economic slump, it will take a toll on the advertising and promotions managers that work with it.

The advertising industry is changing rapidly as the media and Internet landscape changes, making it crucial for advertising and promotions managers to be flexible and creative in harnessing new methods of promoting products.

Job opportunities will be greatest for those with a high level of creativity, plus strong communications and computer skills, and those who quickly adapt to new media such as the Internet and social media.

Full article:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/39541097?slide=7

Bold Stroke: GMAT to start testing skills that matter to MBAs

In its biggest change in more than a decade, the B-school admissions test will have a new section designed to test advanced reasoning skills.

Two years from now, the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), the primary gatekeeper to business school for generations of MBA students, will get its biggest makeover in more than a decade, with the addition of a new section designed to test advanced reasoning skills.

The new section will replace one of the two writing sections currently on the exam … The test’s current verbal and math sections will remain unchanged.

The coming changes to the GMAT were pressed by faculty members at business schools around the world, who told the testing organization that they wanted a section that simulated the skills students use in MBA classrooms.

“These questions are really microcosms of what goes on in the MBA classroom, and it will help schools identify students [who] will thrive in the classroom, not just survive.”

The format of the new GMAT section—which GMAC has dubbed the integrated reasoning section—will be different from anything students have encountered before on the test.

Test takers will need to interpret charts, graphs, and spreadsheets, determine the relationships among data points, and answer interactive questions that will test their analytical skills.

The changes to the exam mirror shifts in the business school classroom in recent years, as schools have changed their curriculums to emphasize problem-solving and critical thinking.”So far, with the students we’ve tested, they felt like it did simulate what they are expected to do in business school.” 

Excerpted from BusinessWeek, The GMAT Gets a Makeover, June 24, 2010
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/jun2010/bs20100624_048037.htm

There's still hope for MBAs …

TakeAway:  There is no doubt that the hiring environment is less than ideal for MBAs … all MBAs. 

However, there is hope.  Companies appear to be hiring but students must be a little more flexible and patient than in the past.

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Excerpted from BusinessWeek, “MBAs Confront a Savage Job Market,” By Anne VanderMey, October 29, 2009

Adam Rosenberg did everything right. He got into a good school. He landed a great internship. He was even vice-president of two MBA clubs and a graduate teaching fellow. But when it came time for companies to hire this year, the 2009 graduate … was surprised to find out how little it all mattered … 

He’s not alone … MBA students have found themselves facing what schools say is the worst hiring season they’ve ever seen.

According to the latest data … 16.5% of job-seeking students from the top 30 MBA programs did not get even one offer … three months after graduation. Last year that was true of just 5% of students. And … starting pay was down … For many programs, it marked the first time since the tech bubble burst that salaries didn’t increase. Signing bonuses, too, fell both in value and quantity …

One factor that made this recession different was that it hit MBA students where it hurt the most, with thousands of high-paying finance jobs going up in smoke …

The most successful schools this year were able to direct students who were shut out of investment banking and consulting into different industries … Rather than holding on to their hopes of working on Wall Street, students looked at their other skill sets …

A few sectors have been able to pick up some of the slack. Health care, energy, government, and nonprofit hiring are holding up particularly well …

Much of the hiring happened months later than normal. Many companies shifted from hiring on an academic schedule, which requires the stability to sign on new employees almost half a year before they show up to work, to hiring on an as-needed basis—often making offers much later in the year …

Early signs this year don’t point to a swift recovery for the class of 2010. Some believe the coming months will be even worse. That means many students will end up taking jobs they might not otherwise have considered or returning to industries they came to business school to get out of. That could be both good and bad news for this recession’s new grads.

Some students will discover jobs in new fields, try entrepreneurship, or travel to new countries. Instead of gravitating to a few companies that dominate recruiting, many schools say students are going to boutique firms or startups where they might be the only MBA hire that year … Students are opening their minds to new things …

Edit by TJS

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Full Article
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/oct2009/bs20091029_862211.htm

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Did MBAs (and their financial models) kill Wall Street?

Ken’ Take: An interesting read.

Central premise: MBAs over-engineered markets with statistical models that left no room for error (or common sense).

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Excerpted from Bloomberg.com, “Harvard Narcissists With MBAs Killed Wall Street”, Hassett, Feb 17, 2009

For two centuries, Wall Street survived wars, depressions, bank panics and terrorist attacks. Now Wall Street as we know it is dead. Gone.

Wall Street changed radically in recent years in one notable way. Twenty or 30 years ago, it was common for the best and the brightest to be doctors or engineers. By the 2000s, they wanted to be investment bankers.

When Wall Street was run by ordinary people it was able to survive everything. After the best and brightest took over, it died the first time real-estate prices dropped 20 percent.

If you walked into any major Wall Street firm a year ago and randomly selected an employee, chances are that person would either be from an Ivy League school like Harvard University, or have an MBA, or both.

The statistics are striking. Back in the 1970s, it was typical for about 5 percent of Harvard graduates to work in the financial sector… by the 1990s, that number was 15 percent. And the proportion of those with MBAs grew as well.. A 2008 report in Fortune said that Goldman Sachs hired about 300 MBAs in 2007 and that, last year, Merrill Lynch and Citigroup were planning to hire 160 and 235 MBAs, respectively.Is it just a coincidence that so many superstar minds arrived on Wall Street just as it died? Perhaps not.

Wall Street is gone because its firms did a terrible job assessing the risks of the positions they took. The models these firms used to evaluate risks failed. But having a failed model brings a firm down only if the firm collectively buys into the model.To do that, the firm must be run by people who have a great deal of faith in their models, and a great deal of faith in themselves.

That’s where Ivy Leaguers and MBAs come in.What do you get from an MBA? One recent study found that MBAs acquire an enormous amount of self-confidence during their graduate education. They learn to believe that they are the best and the brightest.

The consequences of Wall Street’s reckless brilliance in many ways parallel modern-day engineering disasters. If you travel through Italy, you can’t help but notice the many Roman bridges that still stretch across that nation’s waterways. How is it that the Romans could build bridges that would last thousands of years, while the ones we build today collapse after a few decades?

The answer is simple. Back then, they did not have the fancy computers required to calculate exactly how strong a bridge must be. So an architect made a bridge very, very strong. Today, engineers can calculate exactly how much steel they need to incorporate into a bridge to bear the expected load. The result is, they are free to make them weaker. Another result is less wiggle room for design error. Hence, modern bridge’s predilection for collapsing.

The same is true of the financial sector. Back when Wall Street was run by individuals without fancy degrees, they had a proper skepticism toward fancy models and managed their risks with a great deal more humility and caution.

Only when failed models became canon did catastrophe strike.Wall Street didn’t die in spite of being run by our best and brightest. It died because of that fact.
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Full article:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&refer=columnist_hassett&sid=a_ac69DqFutQ

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