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It's been a busy week in the world of MBA and college admissions. Check out some of this week's highlights with an exciting Accepted.com round up!
- A recent survey conducted by Public Agenda shows that high school guidance counselors are not quite as effective at helping students get into college as they once were. The reason, according to Inside Higher Ed: First budget cuts have increased the student-to-counselor ratio, so counselors spend less quality time with each student; and second, the counselors are just not as good as they used to be. College advisors, on the other hand, received much more positive reviews. (Click here for a critical response from a veteran high school counselor.)
- Even the most prestigious of MBA programs (like HBS) have been called under scrutiny since the recent financial crisis, reports the Financial Post last week. And yet even with such criticism, top MBA programs (like Harvard) are receiving more and more applications. One reason for such an increase in popularity, explains the article, is Harvard's position in the published rankings. But how reliable are these rankings? With so many ranking reports out there, so many ranking methodologies floating around, and so many surveys and questionnaires that tackle different sorts of questions, how can anyone attribute any justifiable weight to rankings? Surveys show that university adcoms, professors, and students all agree that the rankings are subjective and should not be relied upon, and yet the media seems to continue going rankings-crazy.
For more information about the value (and lack thereof) of rankings, check out MBA Rankings: An Accepted.com Special Report now.
- The Chronicle offers highlights from the career of USC's now retired president Steven B. Sample, particularly his campaign to find a successful leader to replace his iconic role. Sample, who was president of University of Southern California, is praised for his enthusiasm and success at marketing and has "engineered one of the great recent transformations in American higher education" with his rebuilding and rebranding work at USC which in turn affected the economy and culture of Los Angeles. The new president, who will be named sometime next month, has large shoes to fill, especially since USC’s endowment took a hard hit by the recession. .
- More than one-third of university faculty members saw a dip in their 2009-2010 salaries, reports a recent Chronicle article. Faculty salaries at private doctoral institutions, on the other hand, actually saw a salary increase of about 1.7%.
- CNN Money's Fortune Magazine ran an article recently on the strengths that military veterans bring to the business world. Wal-Mart U.S. is making particular strides to recruit junior military officers. Jennifer Seidner, senior recruiting manager at Wal-Mart, explains: "The thinking was that we could bring in world-class leadership talent that was already trained and ready to go. And then we could teach them retail, because we know that pretty well." The result of such an endeavor: Wal-Mart has "tapped into a good mine of talent." Other companies, as well as business schools, are also beginning to place a higher premium on military veterans in the workforce.
- In a BusinessWeek article entitled "Business Schools Revamp the Application," author Francesca Di Meglio discusses three major changes to the MBA application process: GRE scores are now accepted by many b-schools instead of just the traditional GMAT; for non-native English speakers, the IELTS is accepted in addition to the traditional TOEFL test; application deadlines are earlier; and last but not least, b-schools will now accept video and/or audio components to the application. Chicago Booth is considered a pioneer is the multimedia aspects of admissions. UCLA Anderson picked up on the trend, offering applicants with an option to present an audio submission, and 70% of applicants accepted the challenge. As Mae Jennifer Shores, assistant dean of admissions at Anderson says, "A lot of business schools have concerns about authenticity. This was a way to get a more authentic view of a candidate."
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