Posted on 12/24/2009 6:20:17 AM PST by SeekAndFind
To call 2009 an interesting year for management education is perhaps an understatement bordering on the extreme. With the global financial crisis taking its toll on everything from the MBA job market and endowments to financial aid and the reputation of the MBA degree itself, 2009 promises to go down in history as a year to forget.
For students and graduates of MBA programs, 2009 was the year that jobs and internship offers became harder to find, even at the top schools; a year when the scarcity of student loans and visas for international students threatened to derail even the best-laid B-school plans; and a year when programs began to rethink the way they teach such subjects as ethics and corporate responsibility. Business school endowments were hit hard and the high cost of tuition was at the fore of every prospective student's thinking.
Of the 10 most popular business school stories on Businessweek.com in 2009, seven directly related to the financial crisis. The others looked at a new competitor on the B-school admissions test front, a GMAT cheating alert in China, and three top MBA programs currently without deans. Take some time to go back over the biggest stories of the year and reminisce. For better or worse, 2009 will be a year that the B-school world won't soon forget.
1. Job Market: The No. 1 concern this year for current MBAs, applicants, and recent grads was the job market. Students worried about finding internships and jobs after graduation, applicants wondered if joining the ranks of the unemployed to enroll in an MBA program was a good idea, and newly minted BBAs and MBAs wondered if their post-B-school jobs would hold up.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessweek.com ...
Top business school of all time: The School of Hard Knocks
OTHER TOP STORIES :
* Loan Crisis: International students who planned to study at U.S. business schools had to scramble to find a student loan provider in 2009, when many of the loan programs they had used to fund their education disappeared.
READ ABOVE LINK FOR MORE
* MBAs: Public Enemy No. 1? Were B-schools responsible for the global economic crisis? It’s a question that has consumed much of the B-school world for the better part of a year. In a story we ran in May, experts from inside and outside MBA programs weighed in on the debate. Philip Delves Broughton, a Harvard MBA and author of Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School (Penguin Group, July 2008), directed blame at B-schools, calling the three-letter acronym, MBA, “scarlet letters of shame,” and suggesting they stand for “Masters of the Business Apocalypse.” Others, such as Richard Cosier, dean of Purdue’s Krannert School of Business (Krannert Full-Time MBA Profile), defended MBA programs, saying, “It is my opinion that business schools will continue to produce students who will be part of the solution, rather than the problem.”
CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR MORE
* GRE vs. GMAT: For years, the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) had a virtual monopoly over the admission testing arena at business schools. Its well-known entrance exam, the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), was the standard test used to get into business schools in the U.S. and many other schools around the world for decades. That all changed this year when the Educational Testing Service (ETS) started to encroach into GMAC territory, courting business schools and encouraging them to allow students to submit the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) for admissions. ETS’ efforts are starting to pay off.
CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR MORE
* The Best Part-Time B-Schools: It was an interesting year to survey part-time and executive MBA students. For many prospective students, the thought of spending tens of thousands of dollars on a graduate business degree was frightening.
CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR MORE
* The Harvard MBA Oath: As a way to get MBA students talking about ethics, 33 students from Harvard Business School’s Class of 2009 approached classmates and asked if they would be willing to sign an oath to “act with utmost integrity” in their professional lives.
CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR MORE
* GMAT Cheating in China: China is the latest frontier in GMAC’s campaign to prevent students from cheating on the GMAT. In November, a Chinese court barred a Beijing-based Internet site from selling materials such as questions from the GMAT, test prep materials, and PDFs of actual test books.
CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR MORE
* College Affordability: With college costs spiraling out of control and family financial resources strained to the breaking point, it’s no surprise that the issue of college affordability was front and center this year. Nowhere was that more apparent than in a story we published in March about student debt.
CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR MORE
* B-School Cutbacks: Business schools were hit hard by the Great Recession, with many facing a series of painful declines in endowment earnings and gift-giving, along with state- and university-mandated budget cuts. The ripple effect of endowment declines was even felt at the richest of institutions.
CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR MORE
I didn't know about this move...but our son graduated last weekend with his M.B.A. The speaker at the hooding ceremony gave a talk about ethics in the workplace, and being true to your "moral compass." He emphasized doing the right thing, not the expedient thing. I was expecting a "go forth and conquer" type of speech, but was pleasantly suprised with the talk on ethics in the business world.
A couple of years ago I had an MBA talk me out of going to business school for my own MBA. His rationale: "You've already got about 75% of the knowledge and business sense of an MBA, and you haven't even paid a dime for it to an overpriced business school."
I hope all of the students now realize their degrees no are worth maybr if they are lucky 30,000 a year.
Graduating from college is a wonderful goal; but not if you give up your freedom and life to become a slave.
The “worth” of a degree includes more than monetary return.
I believe I said a degree is a wonderful thing.
I was working on my MBA in 2001 - 2002. I was a 40 year old working stiff in a group of 20 somethings. I felt like Rodney Dangerfield in “Back to School” listening to college professors talk about fantasyland scenarios.
It was very expensive and I was running short of cash. During one of my finance classes, I did a cost benefit analysis of the degree and figured I would not make back my investment. From then on, the only reason to be in the program was for the sheepskin (ego thing).
I dropped out.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.