Category Archives: Education

The First Major Business School in the US Reaches Gender Parity

This coming fall men and women will make up the student body of the incoming class in close to equal numbers at the University of Southern California’s Marshall Business School. It is the first time such a highly-ranked business school in the US can claim gender parity in its full-time MBA program. The milestone was achieved this year with a 20% jump in the number of women enrolled, from 32% last year to 52% this coming year.

“We know industry is looking for more women for leadership-level positions, so it will give us a chance to satisfy those needs from our employers,” said Dean James G. Ellis. He added that the gender gap in business runs “from boards to senior leadership down to entry level.”

Presently, many of the nation’s primary business schools favor men by about 20%, with women making up 40% while men are represented by 60% enrollment.
Ellis explained the several factors that contributed to USC made the jump to parity in just one year.

“The quality of the pool was strong, and the yield was good. A lot of our students were helping with recruiting,” he said. The school also had “positive reputational stuff” combined with a large climb in MBA rankings, which also helped. US News ranked USC as the 20th top business school in 2018, up from 31st in 2016.

According to global non-profit Catalyst, gender parity at the highest levels of business is few and far between. Women make up about 54% of the labor force among the S&P’s top 500 companies in the financial services sector, but they constitute only 29% of the executive and senior-level manager positions. Women only occupy 2% of the CEO positions. The tech world has similar figures.

Around the world business schools are struggling to improve gender diversity, hoping that these efforts will translate to more women in positions of power and influence when they graduate. Some of the methods used to encourage women to come to MBA programs are scholarships and executive coaching for women, to yearly gender diversity seminars.

College Costs Continue to Climb

Brown University Robinson Hall 2009 Providence Rhode Island. Photo by chensiyuan.

Getting a college education is not getting cheaper: far from it. As the tuition and living expenses rise so does the student debt: collectively, Americans owe over $1.3 trillion in student loans.

With help from the College Board’s Trends in College Price and the Chronicle of Higher Education, the following is a list of some of the country’s most expensive undergraduate educations.

  • Surprisingly, the most expensive school in the country is in Claremont, California. Harvey Mudd College will set a student back $69,717 just for one year of learning. The breakdown is $52,666 is the tuition plus fees, while room and board will come to $17,051 for the year.
  • Number 25 on the list of 50 schools is Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Tuition is $50,910 for the year with an additional $14,976 for tuition. Grand total: $65,886.
    The last on the list of 50 is still not cheap, by any stretch of the imagination. Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island is a bargain (not!) with tuition and fees adding up to $51,366 and room and board adding an additional $13,200.
  • Not everyone needs to go to such expensive colleges. There are choices with lower tuition, such as Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. With over 30,000 students it is the largest school with the least tuition: $5,300 for the school year 2016-17.
  • If you are inclined towards a small college in a rural area, Blue Mountain College is in Blue Mountain, Mississippi. With a campus size of 190 acres and only 457 undergrads, it might be a good choice, especially with tuition running only at $10,534 for the academic year 2016-17.

Business Schools Could Lose Overseas Students in President Trump America

Until the election of Donald Trump to become the US president beginning in early 2017, US business schools were a desirable option for students from overseas looking to earn an MBA. Now some of these prospective students are reconsidering US business schools as an option.

“I want to be able to work in the country where I study after graduation,” one marketing executive from India said. “So it is important to be in a place that is immigrant-friendly.”

US business school deans are hopeful that this prospective student is not the sign of a trend.

Douglas Skinner, dean of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business says he is “cautiously optimistic,” about the backlash from a Trump presidency. He pointed out that even if the economy was to stall, (something he does not think will happen,) domestic demand for MBA places would rise, since that is the trend when jobs are more scarce.

But Skinner is afraid that the threatened proposals to immigration will seriously effect enrollment in his school’s MBA program. More than one-third of the full-time students attending the Chicago Booth School of Business come from overseas.

“If there was a restriction on visas to students that would clearly be somewhat harmful to us,” Prof Skinner says. He adds that other schools are even more dependent on students from abroad than Booth is.

New Ranking for US Business Schools’ MBA Programs

The Financial Times has released their assessment of the best MBA programs in the United States for 2016, the second time they have released such a survey.

Coming out on top for the second straight year is Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business for its MBA programs for entrepreneurship.

In second place is Babson College’s FW Olin Graduate School of Business. In the show position, the Darden School of Business of the University of Virginia.

In the fourth through seventh positions were:

  • Dartmouth’s Tuck school
  • Anderson of UCLA
  • UC Berkeley’s Haas
  • The Wharton School of Business

The schools’ rank was decided using several criteria, including the percentage of a school’s MBA’s went on to launch companies, and how many of those new businesses sere still around by the end of 2015.

America’s Ten Best US Undergrad Business Schools

Huntsman Hall at the University of Pennsylvania.

High school seniors planning ahead are probably thinking about what they might like to do when that special day comes and they are graduates. Some of them are likely considering attending a four-year undergraduate degree program in business, a good choice as it opens doors to many possible career paths. Now that the ‘what’ has been decided, the next step is to consider the ‘where.’

Since the difference between a well-respected degree and an only ‘so-so’ degree can spell the difference between a highly paying and emotionally rewarding job and a not such well compensated job, it is important to consider the rankings of today’s best business schools.

College Factual studied the schools for USA Today. Here are their findings which are published for the 2015-2016 academic year. For more information about the schools and the methodology involved in finding the conclusions, go to the USA Today website.

1.    Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania
2.    The Haas School of Business at the University of California-Berkeley
3.    The Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California
4.    Bentley University
5.    Bryant University
6.    Georgetown University
7.    Pepperdine University
8.    Georgia Institute of Technology
9.    Gonzaga University
10.    Boston University