We are not as cosmopolitan as we assume

The Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University offers a new blend of online and on-site formats beginning in autumn 2013.

Member schools of the Global Network for Advanced Management, a consortium of 22 international business schools, have launched a global immersion programme for their students. The participating schools come from five countries:

Still a bit nervous about your GMAT? Here is a link provided by the administrators of the test that the editorial team at MBA Channel finds helpful.

Both, Financial Times and BusinessWeek, share the opinion that investment banks lose their attraction as employers for MBA students. The American magazine quotes an alumnus from University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business with the words: “I wasn’t really ready to work 100 hours a week for something that didn’t have a clear pay-off and career security.”

Fathers and sons sometimes have the proverbial difficult relationship. That seems to be the case with John A. Byrne, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of C-Change Media, with his creation: the famous – and infamous – BusinessWeek ranking of the world’s best business schools. Its first edition was published in 1988 and now – having seen the 13th edition - Byrne seems to have regrets. On LinkedIn he writes: “I’ve sometimes wondered if I created the proverbial Frankenstein monster.”

Climbing Kilimanjaro is an MBA elective course at Rotterdam School of Management. It doesn’t sound like the toughest of business courses but rather like the most challenging physical and mental exercise… 17 female MBA students from Rotterdam School of Management (RSM) at the Erasmus University in the Netherlands climbed Kilimanjaro this year and they say, they learned more on the mountain than in any classroom.

Ernst & Young and the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) announced the launch of the CEIBS Research Centre for Emerging Market Studies (RCEMS). The Centre will focus on developing thought leadership in emerging markets, as well as providing the business community and governmental organizations with new knowledge of these markets. CEIBS Professor of Strategy and International Business Klaus Meyer will be the academic director. The RCEMS will undertake and facilitate scholarly research on international aspects of business strategies in emerging markets.

There has been a lot of talk about the one-year MBA model. Getting all the knowledge in high speed and being back on the career ladder within a year sounds all too enticing. Some American schools seem to be successful with the abbreviated course like Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, Cornell University’s Johnson School and Emory University’s Goizueta.

The U.S. based website Poets & Quants has published a different kind of ranking. They haven’t chosen the best b-schools, but instead paid tribute to some of the best b-school teachers. Amongst them are a few legends of the academic community like Harvard’s Clayton Christensen, Wharton’s Jeremy Siegel, Stanford’s Jeffrey Pfeffer, Dartmouth’s Vijay Govindarajan, NYU’s Aswath Damodaran, Duke’s Peter Ubel, and London Business School’s Lynda Gratton.

Princeton Review presents the best business schools worldwide in its new edition of the Best 296 Business Schools. On 784 pages the book aims to help future students find the right school for their career goals. The Princeton Review surveyed over 19,000 students. Apart from providing profiles of the top 296 business schools, the book helps students answer all of the practical questions they should ask when applying to business school.

“Coming to study at a UK university has become increasingly difficult, as would-be students get entangled in more complex and expensive visa requirements”, says James Pitman, managing director of the UK’s Study Group, a specialist provider of educational programmes for international students.

Irene Adler, General Manager Global Marketing at Mori Seiki, about her MBA with The Open University Business School: I come from Austria and neither studied economics nor technology and I am not in banking or controlling either. So I guess I am not classic MBA material.

Business ethics have been in the spotlight since the beginning of the financial crisis in 2008. Many business schools have discussed how to integrate and how to teach business ethics in their MBA curriculum and quite a few have taken actions as well. But business ethics is not as easily taught as accounting where hard facts prevail. A recently published book aims at being a useful support tool for exactly this integration process.

According to the US daily Boston Globe, a couple from Hong Kong sued the American college admission consultant Mark Zimny. They claim the former Harvard lecturer, who ran the education consultancy group IvyAdmit Consulting LLC, took 2.2 million dollars from them to secure places for their two boys at American Ivy League universities, preferably Harvard. 

Demand for part-time MBA programmes has held steady through the financial crisis, as the degree attracts people who want to study without giving up a job. This is the outcome of the Application Trend Survey conducted by the Graduate Management Admission Council or GMAC. Amongst the surveyed part-time MBA programmes 44 per cent saw an increase in applications from 2011 and 14 per cent reported no change.

Goldman Sachs once created the name BRIC countries – meaning Brazil, Russia, India and China. The name has stuck despite that the countries don’t have a lot in common apart from being the fastest growing and largest emerging markets economies. The global focus has mainly been on the IC part of the abbreviation – India and China, but Brazil has slowly and steadily “climbed the ladder” as well.

Belgian business school’s rebranding campaign

Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School has changed its name to Vlerick Business School. The change in name is part of a rebranding process that also gave the school’s logo a bold new typeface and a bright colour-setting.

With a new admissions cycle comes plenty of opportunities to meet someone from the MBA team.  We always encourage applicants to come and visit us in St.Gallen in person, partly because the best way to to judge a school is through your own experience, but also because we know that Switzerland, St.Gallen and the MBA experience will sell itself to you!

Crisis? What crisis? Business schools are going to be busier than ever, if all the students who took the GMAT exam actually apply for an MBA programme. The Graduate Management Admission Council or GMAC - a non-profit education organisation of the world’s leading graduate business schools and owner of the GMAT exam, accepted by more than 5,400 graduate business and management programmes worldwide - has announced a total of 286,529 GMAT exams worldwide were taken.

Stanford Graduate School of Business started accepting the GRE revised General Test as an alternative to the GMAT in 2004 because school officials felt it was nonsensical to accept the GRE from candidates applying to their Ph.D. programmes but not from their MBA applicants. In the years since hundreds of business schools have followed suit. According to Educational Testing Services, which administers the GRE, about 1000 business schools accept the GRE today: “Graduate and business school programmes worldwide use GRE scores in their admissions and fellowship decisions for a variety of programmes, including master’s, MBA, specialised master’s degrees, and doctoral programmes.” 

“The Global Compact asks companies to embrace universal principles and to partner with the United Nations. It has grown to become a critical platform for the UN to engage effectively with enlightened global business,” describes UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon the UN’s initiative to team up with the corporate world to enforce good practice in regards to labour, the environment and to fight corruption. Audencia Nantes was the first French Business school to sign this Global Compact in 2004. Now the school will emphasise its dedication to sustainability by launching an MBA in Responsible Management.

The case method is a key teaching tool in most business schools. A case study provides students with mostly real events and challenges from the corporate world. These can be 30 pages on the introduction of a new frequent flyer programme or a company’s re-branding campaign for example … During a case students have to turn into decision makers, they are confronted with a problem and need to solve it.
For years this method has been praised but in recent times, more and more criticism has sprung up.

European business schools dominated the Financial Times’ masters in management ranking for 2012. The University of St Gallen placed first followed by ESCP Europe, Cems, HEC Paris, Essec Business School, IE Business School, Esade Business School and Rotterdam School of Management.

A generous donation of $60m will see Northeastern University’s business school renamed. Two alumni of Northeastern University, Richard D’Amore and Alan McKim, are the sponsors, and the school’s new name will accordingly be the D’Amore-McKim School of Business. The business school plans to invest the donation in the undergraduate, graduate and executive programmes at the school. Money will also go towards overseas programmes and teaching in entrepreneurship.

The administrators of the GMAT are keen for test takers to share their most successful and quirky study techniques. Successful test takers who tell others via Facebook how they prepared for the epic test may win a an Apple iPad.