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MBA Admissions News Round Up

January 27, 2011 by

  • A Daily Pennsylvanian article, “New Wharton initiative to focus on consumer analytics” discusses the Wharton’s new data-driven customer-oriented research center. The groundbreaking Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative “helps companies analyze data about customer preferences in order to maximize profits.” The initiative will be integrated into Wharton’s undergraduate curriculum; consumer analytics will appeal to students who like “crunching numbers” and will give them options beyond the traditional finance major.
  • Starting with the MBA class of 2011, Berkeley Haas graduates will be offered free executive education programs through the school’s Center for Executive Education. This applies to graduates from Berkeley’s full-time program, Evening & Weekend program, and the Berkeley-Columbia Executive MBA program, and includes two days of free executive training to be used within five years of graduating. The initiative stays faithful to the school’s focus on being “Students Always,” one of four defining principles of the top business school. “We are thrilled to have the opportunity to work more closely with our alumni,” says Whitney Hischier, MBA 01, assistant dean for executive learning at Haas. “MBA graduation is literally just the beginning of our relationship with the student—we expect to connect with alumni throughout the course of their professional career.” (Source: “Future MBA Alumni to Receive Free Exec Ed Course,” Haas School Newsroom)
  • The Bay Area has become an MBA program hot spot, reports a San Francisco Business Times article. Babson College, Hult International Business School, and Cornell-Queens have recently opened part-time professional and executive degree programs in or around San Francisco. These programs join the ranks of other area EMBA programs, including Berkeley-Columbia.
  • Business schools are working to strengthen ties with recruiters, reports a Wall Street Journal article, “Schools solicit advice from employers.” For example, career service departments are taking recruiter feedback more seriously, especially feedback that focuses on graduates’ shortcomings. In response to such criticism, schools are adjusting their courses so that students are better prepared for the sort of work and real-life challenges that these recruiters demand. “We’ve had to be more sensitive to companies’ needs,” says Rich Lyons, dean of the University of California-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. “Because of the horrific job downturn and competition for positions, we’ve had to work even harder to get our graduates in front of employers.” The thinking is that the more proactive a school is at implementing change based on recruiting companies’ feedback, the better chances that school’s graduates will have at landing jobs in the tough job market. 

Filed Under: Columbia, EMBA, Job Search, MBA Admissions, UC Berkeley Haas, Wharton Tagged With: , , ,

More Happy MBA Hiring News

January 27, 2011 by

Last week we posted a round up of optimistic MBA hiring news, and today we’re going to supplement that with another positive update.

Today’s good news comes from a BusinessWeek article titled “Better Days Ahead for MBA Job Seekers,” in which author Erin Zlomek assures MBAs that “evidence of a rebound is everywhere.” Bringing data from a recent GMAC study, she concludes that class of 2011 MBAs are likely to have an easier time finding a job than did their peers who graduated last year and the year before.

In terms of pay, the GMAC study suggests that there probably won’t be much of a change between starting salaries for this year’s class as opposed to last year’s.

According to the MBA Career Services Council (CSC), 65% of schools surveyed reported an increase in campus recruiting by consulting firms; 60% said that financial services recruiting was also up. JPMorgan Chase plans on recruiting at 20-25 schools, an improvement over last year’s 15.

It should be noted, however, that job openings in the area of investment banking are still somewhat hard to come by, and many students are shifting their focuses away from that field toward private equity or other areas within financial services.

The positive tech market is also helping the poor investment banking market easier to swallow. At MIT Sloan, an almost equal number of grads entered the investment banking and tech fields (15% and 19% respectively), in 2008; in 2010, that gap had widened to 11.5% to investment banking and 20% to tech fields.

In general, notes J.J. Cutler, deputy vice dean for MBA admissions at Wharton, there has been a surge in interest in nontraditional MBA fields. “We’re seeing more companies coming to campus in industries such as clean tech and new media, industries that haven’t had a history of coming to MBA schools as a place to get talent,” he says.

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Filed Under: Job Search, MBA Admissions, MIT Sloan, Wharton Tagged With: , , , , ,

Stanford’s eHarmony-Style Job Search Offers Large Payoff

January 23, 2011 by

 

John Byrne offers a window into Stanford GSB‘s career services office with his article, “Creating An eHarmony Model for MBA Careers.” He starts by reminding readers that graduates from Stanford GSB report the highest median base salaries—about $120,000/year compared to Harvard and Wharton’s $110,000, Dartmouth and Kellogg’s $105,000, and Columbia’s $100,000. Furthermore, he states, nearly twice as many Stanford grads receive other guaranteed compensation as do HBS graduates.

Such numbers could be attributed to Stanford’s small class size (about 385 a year compared to 910 at Harvard), to its location in the Silicon Valley, and/or to its phenomenal Career Management Center.

It is this latter consideration that Byrne focuses on in his article. The GSB’s Career Management Center is headed by Pulin Sanghvi who is modeling the career match process to a system similar to that of eHarmony, a popular dating website.

Bryne sums up Sanghvi’s understanding of the changing face of MBA recruiting as such:

“MBA recruiting is changing from the old recruiters-visit-campus model to one that is far more customized and targeted to individual student desires and goals. Roughly 80% of the companies that recruit at the school now hire only a single Stanford grad a year. For many of these recruiters, it makes little sense to come to campus and interview dozens to hundreds of students. Half of Stanford’s graduates now do self-directed job searches, forgoing the prestigious yet more traditional MBA jobs with McKinsey, BCG, Goldman and Morgan Stanley. Instead, they’re searching for positions with smaller companies in biotech, healthcare, private equity, or venture capital. They’re looking at small hedge funds along with Internet and technology startups.”

To accommodate this change, Sanghvi is relying more on online resources to connect students with unique career opportunities. Similar to eHarmony’s personalized matching system, Sanghvi is crafting custom support for individual students to connect them with jobs that best match their objectives and skills.

Stanford’s career management staff uses an innovative software program to match student-updated online profiles to available career opportunities and to create customized support and mentorship between students and career advisors. The process is not automated, but more “an outcome of…high touch service” (15 full-time people in the career management center for 385 students). Such personalized matchmaking is realistic only when you’re dealing with a student body the size of Stanford’s.

“As we capture information online, we are using it to inform our one-on-one interactions with them,” says Sanghvi. “What we can bring every student is deeply customized support. Instead of focusing on generic topics, we’ll find out that there are ten students who want to know how to network in the clean tech industry. So then we can do customized programming for them, gathering best practices for that industry and bringing in alums from clean tech to speak with them.”

As a result of Sanghvi’s program’s success, many Stanford students are choosing not to participate in the fall recruiting cycle; the school has adopted a year-round recruiting schedule instead, recognizing that sometimes the longer you stay in the market, the greater the opportunities you may encounter.

Here are some statistics included in Byrne’s article on how MBAs of Stanford’s class of 2010 found their high-paying jobs:

SCHOOL-FACILITATED ACTIVITIES:
On-Campus Recruiting: 27%
Other (GSB-facilitated): 4%
Alumni: 4%
Job Boards: 6%
Resume Book: 2%
Career Fair: 1%
Faculty: 1%
GSB Class/Project: 1%
Student Club/Club Event: 1%

GRADUATE-FACILITATED ACTIVITIES:
Pre-MBA Employer: 23%
Family/Friend: 11%
Business Contact: 11%
Other (student-facilitated): 5%
Company Website: 2%
Executive Search Firm: 1%
Undergraduate Network: 1%

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Filed Under: Harvard HBS, Job Search, MBA Admissions, Stanford GSB Tagged With: , , ,

MBA Hiring Round Up: Happy Days are Here Again!

January 20, 2011 by
  • A Wall Street Journal article, “Hiring Prospects Improve for M.B.A. Grads in 2011,” discusses the upward hiring trend expected in 2011. A recent GMAC study indicates that 64% of surveyed managers, executives, and recruiters plan on hiring MBA grads in 2011, compared to 60% in 2010. 69% expect salaries to remain flat; 26% forecast an increase and 4% expect a decrease. “As the economy recovers, the demand for management grows, and the M.B.A. market is one of the easiest targets to go after,” says Dave Wilson, GMAC CEO. “Nowadays, companies can get a well-trained asset at a reasonable price.”
  • A BusinessWeek article, “2011 MBA Job Outlook Bright,” offers another positive look at the expanding MBA job market. This article focuses on summer internship hiring and the fact that 81% of b-school career officers surveyed said that they expected hiring to improve—that’s compared to 60% in 2009. Further research shows that on-campus recruitment is up, as are full-time job postings. 63% of schools reported an increase in recruiting; 70% saw a spike in job postings. One reason for the encouraging hiring picture, explains Nicole Hall, president of the MBA Career Services Council at Pepperdine Graziadio, is that business schools are changing their tactics to help their students secure employment. “B-schools have adapted to help students secure jobs,” she says. “The practice of aggressively promoting graduates to fill current openings at target companies is certain to continue even when the economy fully recovers as employers benefit through streamlined placements and students gain from connections to companies of interest.”
  • Yet another article, Poets & Quant‘s “MBA Jobs: From the Dark Days to a Happy Present,” celebrates the improved MBA job market. It traces the recent history from “those dark days at the heights of the Great Recession [when] people began to again debate the value of the MBA and whether the market would ever come back,” through the recovery, to the present, when MBA graduates are beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. “We are seeing an extremely sharp uptick from virtually every sector that recruits our MBAs,” says director of Stanford’s Career Management Center, Pulin Sanghvi. “Most employers are coming back with sharply higher hiring numbers. There are parts of the economy right now that are really booming, particularly in tech, and that boom is creating even more jobs from the ecosystems around these companies.” The article provides survey data that suggests that on-campus recruiting and hiring is on the rise with significant increases from last year to this year. The last section of the article, “Harvard Now Teaches MBAs How to Fish and Doesn’t Fish for Them,” is particularly interesting—it focuses on the steps HBS has taken to equip its students with job-searching skills and resources. The job market may be improving, but the days of taking job offers for granted are long over

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MBA Recruiting Increases for Some Top Companies

December 29, 2010 by

A Poets & Quants article highlights the hiring statistics reported by the MBA class of 2010. Here are some highlights from the 2010 employment reports at several top business schools:

  • McKinsey & Co. was the number one recruiter at Wharton, Columbia, Chicago, and MIT, despite the slight decrease in the number of MBAs hired this year compared to last year. The company hired 44 MBAs from Wharton (down from last year’s 50), 38 MBAs from Columbia (12 fewer than last year), 15 grads from MIT (compared to 24 last year), and 24 from Chicago Booth (a slight increase from 2009′s 23 grads).
  • The P&Q article calls the Boston Consulting Group “the most aggressively expanding MBA hirer.” The company hired 43 MBAs from the Wharton class of 2010 (a significant increase from the class of 2009′s 31 hires), 19 MBA from Chicago Booth (up from last year’s 9 grads), 25 from Columbia (up from last year’s 21), and 14 from MIT Sloan (an increase from 2009′s 8 graduates).
  • McKinsey hired 32 MBAs from Kellogg (an increase from last year’s 26), but the school’s top recruiter was the Boston Consulting Group, hiring 35 graduates this (versus last year’s 23 hires).
  • Other companies like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs showed significant recovery in their hiring this past year from the economic recession in 2008-2009. Morgan Stanley doubled its hiring at Columbia and Chicago Booth.
  • Deloitte Consulting’s heavy hiring grounds in 2010 were at Columbia, Duke Fuqua, Berkeley Haas, and Michigan Ross.
  • The highest salary reported by a member of the MBA class of 2010 was $330,000 a year from a Stanford graduate who landed a job at an unidentified private equity firm.
  • The median salary for a graduate in private equity was $135,000, with a median signing bonus of $35,000 and “median additional guaranteed compensation was a whopping $155,000. Very few MBA candidates per year go directly into private equity.

MBA applicants who have a clear idea of the professional direction they want to go in should find this data (and rest of the data in the P&Q article, “BCG Expanded MBA Hiring This Year“) helpful.

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Where do Ph.D. Students Go After They Graduate?

December 22, 2010 by

Well…no one really knows. According to a Chronicle of Higher Education article, most graduate schools don’t keep track of their Ph.D. graduates. Many schools admit that job placement post-Ph.D. is so mediocre, that it is just not worth it to put the energy and money into following those trends. No program wants to the only one with not-so-impressive data published. Furthermore, Ph.D. prospective students rarely ask about post-graduation jobs and life, and so schools don’t bother collecting it.

That is, until recently. More programs are showing interest in tracking program quality, and in order to do so, academic departments are being encouraged to follow up on their Ph.D. graduates and publish their findings online. Where their Ph.D.s find jobs is a huge indicator of program quality, explains Patrick S. Osmer, vice provost and dean of the graduate school at Ohio State University, one of the schools advocating Ph.D. tracking.

But school administrators believe that even with this information available, they don’t believe that prospective students will pay any attention to it. They are more interested in what they will receive and the quality of their lives during their years pursuing a Ph.D., not after. Many students recognize that the job market is poor (particularly in fields like English), but prefer to ignore such statistics in favor of studying for the sake of learning.

“If one is rational, a look at the job statistics would never provoke anyone to try and become a professor—it’s an irrational pursuit,” says Nicholas A. Richie, a Ph.D. student in English at Michigan. “It had to be self-justifying.”

David D. Perlmutter, director of Iowa’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, says that many Ph.D. students resemble “the hundreds of thousands of inner-city kids who believe they are going to be playing in the NBA.” Despite the slim odds, “they still think they’ll be the exception.”

For more information on the current Ph.D. scene, see a related article in Inside Higher Ed, “Ph.D. Pipeline Expands Slightly.” You’ll see that despite the poor job market for Ph.D. students (in both the sciences and the humanities), the number of students enrolling in Ph.D. programs is actually on the rise. The attitude of Ph.D. students is very similar to that of law school students regarding the dismal legal job market.?

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Filed Under: Grad School Admissions, Job Search

Job Security Matters — Just Ask Early Applicants at Top Colleges

December 21, 2010 by

A Bloomberg.com article discusses the record high number of early applicants at MIT, Duke, Dartmouth, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania and other top colleges. MIT, for example, accepted a record high 6,405 early applicants; Duke saw an unprecedented 2,260 early applicants.

What is the main criterion for picking a college these days? According to the article, “Students for the class that will graduate in 2015 are picking a university they think will help them land higher-paying jobs than their parents now have.”

Kids are much more interested in their post-college job security than in pursuing the “lazy, four-year undergraduate experience,” explains Darby McHugh, college coordinator at New York City’s Bronx High School of Science.

Applicants, particularly early applicants, are approaching colleges like they approach designer clothes, says Jeff Haviland, a college counselor at Strath Haven High School in Wallingford, Pennsylvania. “Kids believe these schools are going to give them the edge for everything, for social connections, economic connections, and careers,” he explains.

According to Lloyd Thacker, executive director of Education Conservancy, a nonprofit that works to promote equality in admissions practices, “Early programs don’t’ give everybody the same chance.” He continues to explain that the growth and spread of early admissions cater mainly to students from wealthier families; students in a lower income bracket can’t afford to take a chance on a binding early decision application as it won’t allow them the opportunity to compare financial aid options. Some top schools (like Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Virginia) have eliminated or altered their early admission programs because of the concern that such programs were unfair to lower income students. A non-binding early acceptance is one such way of addressing this concern.

To cater to applicants’ increased focus on post-college job opportunities, many schools are putting a stronger emphasis on resume-strengthening opportunities. At Northwestern University, for example, undergraduates can earn a certificate from the Kellogg School of Management to help boost their job opportunities after they graduate.

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An Optimistic Look at 2011 MBA Hiring

December 20, 2010 by

GMAC’s Year-End Poll of Employment shows an improvement in MBA hiring in the last year and provides an optimistic look at 2011 hiring trends as well.

Here are some key findings from the survey:

  • 64% of the 210 employers who participated in the Corporate Recruiters Survey said they would likely hire MBAs in 2011. In 2010 that number was 60%.
  • One in four employers plans on increasing starting salaries for 2011 MBA hires. (For all other candidates, starting salaries are expected to remain at 2010 levels.)
  • 85% of employers plan to hire direct-from-industry applicants, up from last year’s 73%.

View the GMAC press release for more on the GMAC survey results.

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MBA Hiring on the Rise on Wall Street

December 17, 2010 by

Banks and brokerages on Wall Street have increased their MBA hiring, reports a Fins.com article from last week.

Maryellen Reilly Lamb, senior associate director of MBA career management of Wharton, explains, “Two years ago, I couldn’t get a bank to take our calls, last year they were taking them and this year, they’re calling us. That speaks a lot to the cautious optimism of Wall Street at the moment.”

In 2008, about 59% of companies in all industries hired MBAs. In 2009 that number dropped to 50%, and this year, that number is likely to bounce back up to 55%.

Also trending back up are signing deals and salaries, which increased 3.2% this year to $89,200.

More recent statistics:

  • Wharton saw a 20% increase this year over last in the number of students offered summer banking internships.
  • NYU Stern hosted 10% more recruiting events this fall for full-time and summer banking positions.
  • Columbia Business School recorded a 45% increase in full-time job postings.
  • Harvard Business School, which as of last week had not published their totals, expects “a flurry of offer letters for MBA candidates approaching graduation.”
  • JPMorgan and Credit Suisse plan to visit more schools and increase their hiring this year. Credit Suisse has already hired about 10% more people than it did last year.

How have the hiring changes affected MBA students and graduates? For one, explains the Fins article, candidates are showing more devotion to their chosen industry; fewer students are undecided in their career paths by the time they graduate. They are also not taking for granted what few job opportunities come their way.

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Filed Under: Columbia, Harvard HBS, Job Search, MBA Admissions, NYU Stern, Wharton Tagged With: , , , , ,

The State of the 2010 MBA Job Market

November 18, 2010 by

Almost 90% of MBAs from the class of 2010 were employed after graduation, compared to 84% from the year before, reports a GMAC press release on the 2010 job scene. The press release also points out that these post-recession graduates are “faring better than their counterparts did following the last recession;” in the 2003 GMAC Alumni Perspectives Survey, only 72% of graduates were employed.

The class of 2010 also reported higher starting salaries than did the class of 2009. The median starting salary for this year’s graduates was $78,820, compared to last year’s $75,000.

“Companies are managing through an unprecedented economic environment,” said Dave Wilson, president and CEO of GMAC. “It is precisely because of these pressures that they place such a high value on newly minted MBAs to help them survive and thrive.”

Now let’s compare this to the less optimistic picture that Businessweek draws for us in the lead article to its 2010 MBA rankings. The article begins by focusing on the difficult job market as it affected students pre-graduation (in February), not as the GMAC release discusses, at the time of graduation. This past year, for example, only 64% of UVA Darden students had secured jobs by February, a drop from the previous year’s 69%, and considerably lower than the 81% who had landed jobs in 2008, pre-crash.

The article does, however, let some optimism seep in, especially when it comes to the role alumni played in generating job leads for the class of 2010. Alumni were encouraged to step up and generate job leads. By graduation, 77% of the class had received job offers; three months later, the job rate surged to 87%.  

The article continues to explain that difficult economic times call for non-traditional job seek methods, such as the alumni call to action above. On-campus recruitment visits by major companies are on the decline; there are fewer jobs out there and more MBA grads to fill them. Regional companies are now “on the radar” for top MBAs, as well as jobs outside of a top choice industry and/or location. Networking is more important than ever. “I had to expand my job search to include potential jobs and industries I would otherwise have never considered,” says Tyler Fenelon, a 2010 UCLA Anderson graduate.

Another hint of optimism—the article concludes by stating that “[h]appily, there are signs that the job market for MBAs is picking up.” More second year students returned to campus this fall with firm job offers from internships than did second year students last year. Also, certain industries (such as health care and energy) are increasing their job recruiting activity. That should, at least, be good news for the class of 2012.

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Filed Under: Job Search, MBA Admissions, UCLA Anderson, UVA Darden Tagged With: , , , , ,
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