Is going to business school near Silicon Valley really worthwhile?
A new report sheds light on the lack of diversity among administrators, terrorism rocks a business school in Africa, and an executive director at Chicago Booth cautions against earning a Silicon Valley MBA—let’s dig into the latest headlines in business education and MBA news. Leave your comments below.
Diversity at the top of the ladder
The only thing that’s whiter than the boardrooms at America’s top companies, it seems, is the educational engine that drive them there: business school. Even worse when it comes to diversity are business school faculty and leadership. As of last month, there are just 33 African-American deans and nine Hispanic deans serving the country’s more than 1,600 MBA programs. A little math: That means that just 2.5 percent of the top positions at business schools are held by people of color. Just four percent of faculty were black, Hispanic, or American Indian, the report added. Needless to say, there’s plenty of room for improvement at the top. (Bloomberg BusinessWeek)
Terrorist attack at African business school
Suspected Boko Haram terrorists attacked a business school in northwestern Nigeria last week with gunfire and bombs. Thankfully, security forces quickly got the situation under control, but not before five students were injured from the gunfire and another 45 were wounded from jumping out of windows to escape the attackers. Luckily this didn’t turn into another Nairobi, where nearly 150 people were slaughtered during an attack on a university. (Associated Press)
Business education in Silicon Valley
Stanford Graduate School of Business’s close proximity so Silicon Valley is a big draw to prospective MBAs who want to stay in the region and work in the rapidly growing and ever exciting tech hub. As with everything else, however, there’s also a flipside to that dream. These strong ties to the tech world may also limit networking opportunities for students and young alumni who want to establishment themselves in other industries. Being too reliant on one sector for its job placement success can make a school vulnerable during an economic downturn, argues the executive director for alumni relations at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. (The Wall Street Journal)
MOOC MBA
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has partnered with massive open online course provider Coursera to provide MBA education for free. The program, dubbed iMBA, will deliver most of its business education curriculum through “specializations,” which is Coursera’s term for course sequences. Students will be able to take those sequences in several different ways—two that award credit and two that don’t award credit. Illinois is one of the company’s most most loyal partner schools, having created dozens of MOOCs since joining three years ago. (Inside Higher Ed)
Graduates look back
Take a look at your future selves. Graduating Harvard Business School students just produced a video that poignantly encapsulates what many newly-minted MBAs are feeling this month: nostalgic for all the challenges, triumphs, and friendships of the last two years. As fast-paced as business school can be, most students wish it didn’t go by so fast. Yes, it’s HBS-centric, but we think you’ll get the point, regardless of where you plan to apply. (Poets & Quants)
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