Free Republic

Business schools may be the last campus holdouts from governmental-ideological intrusion. Yet even they are beginning to surrender to current progressive obsessions with race, climate, and wealth. This capitulation was shown most recently by a pilgrimage to Washington, D.C., by some of the country’s leading business-school deans. There, B-school leaders and Biden administration representatives discussed forms of cooperation that may result in the modification of curricula. While the deans’ general obsequiousness before executive-branch officials is not a new phenomenon, this degree of systematic governmental influence in business classrooms certainly is. Alone among the “obsessions” listed above, wealth is the province...

Many professors cannot resist the temptation to smuggle their personal beliefs into the courses they teach. As long as those beliefs are “progressive,” there is little chance that higher-ups in their departments or top administrators will try to rein them in. For example, engineering has been infiltrated by activists who are concerned about social justice concerns, not just how to best design objects for performance and safety, as Michigan State professor Indrek Wichman pointed out. A recent article published on Inside Higher Ed, “B-Schools That Don’t Boast About Billionaire Alumni,” similarly informs us that some business school professors have decided...

There is a form of derangement to which professors at highly competitive elite institutions are vulnerable. Jonathan Gruber of MIT (Economics PhD, Harvard) is much in the public eye right now, but Ben Edelman of Harvard Business School (Economics PhD, Harvard, along with a Harvard Law School diploma and a masters in statistics) is beginning to join him in the ranks of infamously arrogant. Hillary Sargent of Boston Magazine gained access to an email exchange between Professor Edelman and a Chinese restaurant, which he believes overcharged him, based on the prices in their menu that was part of their...

(Poets&Quants) — What’s an MBA degree really worth? And how much more money does an MBA from Harvard, Stanford, or Wharton get you over a career than one from Texas A&M, Ohio State, or the University of Iowa?Those are questions that perplex and confound many deciding whether to get the degree and, if so, where to get it from. Not everyone can get into the most highly selective business schools. So many candidates have to face the question over whether it’s worth getting the MBA from a second- or even third-tier school.A new analysis done exclusively for Poets&Quants by...

If Columbia Business School Dean Glenn Hubbard were to advise his McKinsey-bound son on where to get his MBA, Hubbard says there are only four or five programs that he would recommend. He declines to mention the schools by name, but you can rest assured that Columbia would be on the list along with Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton. That leaves a lot of very good schools off the list. Hubbard is an economist by training. He joined Columbia in 1988, after beginning his teaching career at Northwestern. He was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George Bush...

The admissions department at Harvard Business School asked me to write a reflection on my first semester for the Class of 2015 pre-matriculation blog. Here’s what I sent in. I hope it gives an insight into what I’ve experienced the last four months. In summary, I’m loving every moment. Come visit me in the Spring semester if you’d like to see HBS for yourself! A Letter to the HBS Class of 2015 A Review of the First Semester of Harvard Business School By Ryan Allis, Class of 2014, Section F ____________________________ December 17, 2012 Dear Future Friend, Congratulations on getting...

Following the collapse of housing prices, a growing number of people have voiced concerns over a looming collapse of higher education tuition. Initial apprehensions were expressed at least as early as 2009 in places like The Economist and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Today, there is a wikipedia page devoted to the topic and, in the last week alone, articles about this issue appeared here, here, and here. As Glenn Reynolds, a faculty member at the University of Tennessee law school, points out, higher education shares some salient features with the pre-collapse housing market. (And Mark Perry, a professor of...

College isn't cheap; but if you choose wisely, the pay-off at the end is worth it. Businessweek released their ranking of the best undergraduate business schools for 2011. We sorted through to see which of these colleges helps students land the highest starting salaries. Surprisingly, some of the best salaries don't come from the best programs. CLICK ABOVE LINK TO SEE THE SCHOOLS

If President Obama had gone to Harvard Business School, instead of Harvard Law School, he might have learned this amazing lesson about American enterprise. It comes from Jill Jonnes' excellent history, "Eiffel's Tower." The greatest problem in building the Eiffel's "Tour de Trois Cent Metres" for the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition was the elevators. They would have to work safely and efficiently to handle the massive crowds expected to descend upon the City of Lights. Gustave Eiffel, being French, wanted to choose a French elevator manufacturer. But he was operating against an unforgiving deadline, and only the Yankees had the...

Last October, fresh from the collapse of Lehman Brothers, there were signs that the financial crisis was driving a bull market in business school applications. A year later, the picture is a bit different. While aspiring bankers and would-be chief executives continue to apply to M.B.A. programs in large numbers, there are signs that the rush to the quad may be easing. On Thursday, the Graduate Management Admission Council, a business school trade group, reported that applications for business schools seem to have leveled off after a record-setting 2008. Schools participating in the council’s survey reported that 2009 applications for...

How do you run a hedge fund? U.S. colleges are showing how By Stephanie Strom Thursday, December 25, 2008 Jaison Ipe was about two minutes into his introduction of Silk LLC, a mock hedge fund, when the questions started flying. Why was the fund focusing only on biotechnology and not specialty pharmaceuticals? What was behind its name? Who were the scientists the fund planned to work with? Ipe, a second-year student at the Yale School of Management, gamely gave answers, but the panel of bona fide hedge fund insiders gathered to judge his team's presentation kept peppering them with questions....

The Master of Business Administration degree has been a holy grail for decades. If you wanted a career that mattered and didn't have the aptitude for medical school, an MBA was a good ticket to prestige and riches. But things aren't so clear anymore. If the MBA used to be the entrance fee to climb the corporate ladder, there are few corporate ladders to climb anymore -- and people are increasingly experimenting with ways to speed up that climb anyway. One way is to skip the MBA altogether. So if you're thinking of getting an MBA, you should probably think...

George W. Bush is the first president with an MBA (from Harvard Business School, no less), but it's not clear that being a master of business administration has made him a better chief executive.[...] Business schools are a relatively new institution. The MBA was invented in the Progressive era as a way to abort future generations of robber barons. The idea was to train a class of business administrators (the ethos was anti-entrepreneurial) who would expiate capitalism's sins by managing their corporations in keeping with higher morality. The higher morality was whatever the spirit of the age revealed to professors...

They still call them presidents. DeVry University recently changed head honchos. The old president, John Skubiak, 56, stepped down and a new president, David Pauline, 49, was appointed to succeed him. Honcho, by the way, is a Japanese word. Each neighborhood is divided into small sub-units or groups of residents. On a rotating basis, people are appointed to collect community funds, organize community events, and such. These people are called the honcho. DeVry presidents do much more than preside over small community events, to be sure. But, they are not called CEOs-- even at fopros. DeVry is one of the...

Apparently PepsiCo's President and CFO, Indra Nooyi, thinks the USA is giving "the finger" to all the world. That's right, she was heard to claim that the USA is flipping the bird to every other nation on earth in a commencement address she gave to the graduates of Columbia Business School on May 15th. All commencement speakers have the singular problem of finding a way to give their address a "hook", a way to grab the audience. Indra Nooyi chose as her "hook" an analogy of the five fingers of the hand as representing the five major continents. With apologies...

We have been inundated with messages responding to our posts on the graduation remarks by PepsiCo president Indra Nooyi at the Columbia Business School MBA recognition ceremony of this past Sunday. Many readers (approximately a third) have written to comment that, unlike our rapporteur -- graduating Columbia MBA Wes Martin -- they did not find Ms. Nooyi's remarks objectionable. I am grateful that PepsiCo posted the remarks today (together with the accompanying statement) and that we can all determine the issue for ourselves based on "the ocular proof." The Harvard-Yale game this year was played in Cambridge. Consistent with some...

The Young Conservatives of Texas target professors over ideology By Sharon Jayson AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF Friday, October 31, 2003 A University of Texas student group has put the names of 10 faculty members on a watch list designed to warn students about professors that the group thinks push a political agenda in their classrooms. UT's chapter of the Young Conservatives of Texas created its Professor Watchlist in time for spring registration, which began this week and continues through Nov. 7. The group distributed the list Thursday at a West Mall table. The list also is posted on the group's Web site....