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Harvard Business School Case Studies Refocus on Diversity

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Top business school news.

Black CEOs are underrepresented in HBS case studies, reports one professor.

Here’s the latest on the management education landscape—from the importance of MBA career services centers, to a lack of African-American representation in HBS case studies, to the challenges and rewards of attending business school as a married couple.

Career services make MBAs workforce-ready

Aspiring MBAs who want to get into a top-ranked program would be wise to do a lot of research first. The most outcomes-focused among you will want to find out how strong your target business school’s career service center is—the people whose job it is to help place students in internships and lucrative, exciting careers. But not all career services centers are created equal. And for whatever reason, not every student takes advantage of them.

“People in the office would be saying, I don’t know this person or they haven’t been in touch. We made a promise back then to try to deal with that,” said  
Regina Regazzi, the new assistant dean for the Parker Career Management Center at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, when reflecting on a recent graduation ceremony.

Word of advice: On all your campus visits, stop by the career services office and see how they are helping their students and alumni. (Poets & Quants)

Aspiring MBAs who study together…

Married couples and those in committed relationships go through plenty of trials and tribulations. For a select few, it means going for your MBA at the same time in the same school. But can you be love birds while also serving as group project team members (or competitors) at the same time?

Meet Marika and Pablo, who relocated from Montreal to Paris to attend HEC Paris. “Before the MBA, we decided that we would not work together in school for the entire program, so that we could have our own parallel, but unique, experiences. This made coming home every evening even more special because we left any possible frustrations of our respective work groups behind,” the couple said. (Business Because)

Diversity in HBS case studies

Harvard Business School, one of the world’s premier MBA programs, is well-respected for its thousands of case studies, which are essentially deep dives into the challenges companies face and how they face them. The kind of behind-the-scenes access they are given to create these case studies is something to behold. And these case studies are taught all over the world as a “how to” for business school students. But there’s one thing it’s been lacking for a while: African-American CEOs.

Steve Rogers, a senior lecturer at the school, estimates that fewer than one percent of all executives featured in HBS’s case studies have been African-American, even as nearly ten percent of all U.S. businesses are owned by African-Americans. Rogers is working to remedy the situation by writing his own case studies featuring African-American principals. “We’re showing the true spectrum of the business world,” he said. “We are now righting this wrong and being more inclusive.” (The Boston Globe)

London’s business schools face uncertainty

London is one of the world’s financial centers, rivalled perhaps only by New York City as the center of global business. With Great Britain leaving the European Union, however, London’s finance sector faces uncertainty. And although the capital city is home to dozens of fine MBA programs, including some of the best in the world, business school watchers lament that it’s reputation isn’t what it could be.

“Even within London, business schools do not seem to be in touch with Members of Parliament in Westminster,” says a new researching paper, adding that “instead, politicians are focused on economics, science and technology to boost the economy.” (Times Higher Education)

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