This is valuable posts from Poets and Quants. I read these post last several week. Yesterday, before sleeping, I have read them again. I hope that they will be valuable too for you.
Chicago’s Booth vs. Northwestern’s Kellogg SchoolQuote:
Outside of Boston, which can boast Harvard and MIT, there’s pretty much only one other major city in the world that can lay claim to a pair of world-class graduate schools of business: Chicago. Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business are close to each other in several respects. Their full-time MBA enrollments are roughly the same size, while they both offer sizable part-time and EMBA programs as well. Both schools also frequently rank rank near each other in some of the most influential rankings. On the other hand, these are two vastly different schools in their approach to business education. Historically, Chicago has been a quant school that has placed nearly half of its graduates in finance jobs. Kellogg is a general management school, with a strong reputation for marketing. These two schools are highly competitive with each other. When Kellogg MBAs won a Real Estate Challenge competition against their Booth counterparts in June of 2010, Kellogg actually issued a press release on the victory, noting that Kellogg had beaten Booth for the second year in a row. One other similarity? Both schools have new deans. Kellogg is now led by Sally Blount, who had been dean of New York University’s undergraduate business program, while Booth’s new leader is Sunil Kumar, who had been an operations professor and associate dean for academic affairs at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. In some ways, Kumar has the tougher job because he has taken over from a highly popular dean in Ted Snyder who championed more progress at Chicago than any leader in recent memory.
The most dramatic differences between these two MBA educational giants?
Geography: You’d think that the University of Chicago would be in the center of Chicago. It isn’t. It’s in Hyde Park, about a 20-minute train ride to the edge of Chicago’s downtown. Public transporation isn’t ideal, and a crime-infested neighborhood separates the campus from downtown Chicago. Nonetheless, Hyde Park–where President Obama used to live–is a pretty and relatively comfortable place. Kellogg is in Evanston, Ill., about a 30-minute train ride into the heart of Chicago. It has the look and feel of a typical university town such as Ann Arbor, Mich., or Madison, Wis. In either case, you have immediate and quick access to one of America’s greatest cities. As the third largest city in America, Chicago is an exciting place to be, with a thriving music scene, first-class restaurants and bars, and awesome cultural attractions, including the world’s second largest art museum, the Art Institute. It’s a gorgeous place, with 31 miles of lakefront, including nearly 19 miles of bike paths and 33 beaches. The one very big downside: the winters can be absolutely brutal.
Size: Chicago and Northwestern have the largest MBA programs in the world. Chicago has a full-time MBA enrollment of 1,185 students, while Kellogg is slighly larger, with 1,241. At either place, there’s a lot going on, from part-time MBA and Executive MBA programs to significant executive education programming. Indeed, Chicago has more part-time students (1,700) than it has full-time students. Chicago, in fact, offers five full-time and part-time MBA programs, including EMBA programs in Chicago, London, and Singapore, as well as evening MBA and weekend MBA programs in downtown Chicago at its Gleacher Center. Then, there’s a PhD program with about 130 students. Kellogg’s offerings are just as broad: With 1,100 part-time MBA students, the school has both week night and Saturday part-time programs in Wiebolt Hall in downtown Chicago as well as Evanston, along with three different EMBAs, including a program in Miami, Fla., and an equally large PhD program. What all this means is that at both Chicago and Kellogg the faculty is spread awfully thin because it’s stretched across all of these obligations.
Culture: For years, Chicago was known as a haven of sorts for quant jocks. By and large, the finance geeks dominated the student culture, while a formidable and highly acclaimed faculty ruled the academic roost. “It’s not that Chicago is all about finance and numbers,” says Sarah McGinty, a member of the Class of 2010. “It’s about thinking quantitatively, not being quantitative.” Departing Dean Ted Snyder has noted that the faculty culture “collided” with the MBA culture. The result: a great business school noted for its academic rigor (six present and former Nobel Prize winners) and some of the most distinguished professors in the business but little sense of true community. Some of this has changed somewhat over the years, particularly with the opening of the Harper Center. But the school purposely lacks core cohort groups and has no residence halls for its MBAs, factors that make it harder for real community to occur. Some Chicago students say the school still lacks the camaraderie you’ll find at many other b-schools, especially Kellogg, and that some students graduate from Chicago with only a handful of people they would call friends. Kellogg, on the other hand, has a strong student culture of involvement and collaboration. Despite its much larger size, Kellogg has managed to create a smart and down-to-earth community that is nearly as close-knit as Stanford or Dartmouth. There are many reasons for this difference but probably the most influential one is the fact that Kellogg interviews every single applicant. The result: the interpersonnel skills of Kellogg students are extremely high and get greater attention here than Chicago or many other schools. Put highly intelligent, yet friendly and outgoing people together, and you’re going to get a strong culture that approximates a sense of family. It was and still is a big part of the secret of Kellogg’s success (See profile on and video interview of legendary Kellogg Dean Don Jacobs for more insight into the interview policy). Corporate recruiters and MBA admission consultants generally say Kellogg grads are simply “nice,” certainly among the most open, accessible and damn pleasant MBA students in the world.
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Facilities: The critics will tell you that Chicago’s new, modern business school complex looks and feels more like a shopping mall than an educational environment. But this spacious and attractive building, called the Charles M. Harper Center after the retired CEO of ConAgra Foods, is a world-class MBA facility. The $125 million building, with 415,000 square feet, opened in 2004, replacing classrooms and offices that had been scattered across four traditional buildings. The center gave Chicago 60 percent more space than it previously had. All 11 tiered-classrooms are windowless and in the bottom of the building, while 31 group study rooms, seminar rooms, and offices are upstairs. The Rothman Winter Garden, a massive six-story glass atrium, is the school’s piazza, an impressive gathering space that is topped by curved steel beams that mimic Gothic arches. It is the centerpiece of the building, where the incoming 550 MBA students are welcomed by the dean each year. There are 40 interview rooms for recruiters alone in the facility, along with a recruters’ lounge that reaches outside onto a patio, next to the dean’s office. The Kellogg School, in contrast, is largely housed in two connected buildings built in 1972, Arthur Andersen Hall and Leverone Hall. A six-story addtion was added to the northeast of Andersen Hall in 2001. Now known as the Donald Jacobs Center, it’s a compact and efficient facility that could use more updating. A separate executive education facility, the James Allen Center, is a short walk away on Lake Michigan.
Teaching Methods: At both schools, there’s a fairly strong mix of lectures, case studies, experiential learning and simulation. The single biggest difference: collaborative team work. You would be hard pressed to find a school that requires more work in different teams across the entire two-year experience than Kellogg. Sure, almost all the schools talk the teamwork and collaboration game these days. But Kellogg was the first major business school to make working in teams a core part of the MBA experience. It remains a profound difference between Kellogg and Chicago. The average Kellogg grad will have been in roughly 200 team meetings by the time he or she graduates. Each student grades his fellow teammates on most of the group work and those grades go to the professor so there are no free rides. Some Kellogg grads actually think that the school puts too much emphasis on teamwork and not enough on independent thinking and study, but they tend to be in the minority.
Program Focus: The most obvious difference is that Kellogg has long been known as the business school for marketing, while Chicago has long had a reputation for finance. Kellogg routinely comes in first for marketing in numerous surveys and studies, while Chicago often is ranked just below Wharton and sometimes Columbia in finance. In U.S. News & World Report’s latest survey of B-school deans and directors, Kellogg takes first place in marketing (Chicago is tied for sixth with Columbia), while Chicago is ranked second in finance behind Wharton (Northwestern is tied for seventh with Harvard, Berkeley and UCLA). Not surprisingly, Kellogg edges out Chicago in general management where U.S. News ranks Kellogg third behind only Harvard and Stanford (Chicago is ranked 11th). Kellogg is also given the edge over Chicago in entrepreneurship (11th vs. 14th), international business (13th vs. 17th), and non-profit management (fourth) behind Yale, Berkeley and Stanford).
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Curriculum: Chicago has one of the most open and flexible curriculums of any business school in the world. There is only one required course for all MBA students: it’s Leadership Effectiveness and Development, known as LEAD, a series of classes and exercises on such core management skills as negotiation, team-building and giving feedback. Other than that, each Chicago student choices what courses to take and when to take them based on his or her experience, previous education, and goals. So you don’t have to sit through elementary accounting or basic finance if you already have an undergraduate background in them. The downside of this approach, of course, is that there is relatively little bonding with your incoming classmates, each of who has different class schedules. At Kellogg, the incoming class is divided into cohorts of some 65 students, each dubbed a specific name, from “Poets” and “Cash Cows” to “Jive Turkeys” and “Bucket Heads.” You can opt out of one of the nine fundamental courses in the core and take a higher-level offering, a so-called turbo class, but you pretty much move through the core curriculum with your section. About half of Kellogg’s students waive at least one course. Both schools’ offerings are based on the quarter system in which you’ll take between three and five courses per quarter (with three quarters a year). Chicago requires a minimum of 21 courses for graduation; Kellogg requires a minimum of 24.5 courses.
On-Campus Recruiting: Both Kellogg and Booth attract the top MBA corporate recruiters in the world and, just as importantly, both schools have best-in-class career services offices to help with job searches. Pretty much any recruiter who comes to Chicago visits both schools–not one or the other. So you’re exposed to an amazing array of world-class companies that actively recruit large numbers of MBAs. The only key difference is that Chicago tends to be stronger on the finance side (see table below for which companies hired the most MBAs from Chicago and Northwestern), while Kellogg has a very significant advantage on the consumer marketing side. As much as half of Chicago’s graduating MBAs often head for finance. Before their collapse, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch were both among the largest recruiters at Chicago. In fact, in the year that Lehman went bust, the investment banking firm hired more than 20 Chicago MBAs. Kellogg grads tend to go into more diverse fields. They also seem to do very well with the top management consulting firms, including McKinsey, Bain, BCG and Booz, probably because of the high level of interpersonnel skills Kellogg MBAs are known for thanks to those mandatory application interviews. The consulting industry as a whole hired an astounding 38% of Kellogg’s Class of 2009.
Alumni Network: Chicago probably has a clear and convincing edge if you want to work in investment management, commercial banking, or Wall Street. Its alums are all over the big firms and far more concentrated as a force in finance than Kellogg grads. The downside is that Chicago hasn’t done all that much in the department of bonding so that some grads have less affection for or loyalty to the school as alums. Chicago has a global network of more than 42,000 alums (that number includes part-time and Executive MBAs) in 101 countries. The school claims 5,400 CEOs and top officers at such companies as JPMorgan-Chase, ITT Industries, Pfizer, Gilette, Suzuki and John Deere, as well as entrepreneurial alums who have founded such companies as ZipCar, Harpoon Brewery, and Morningstar. Even though these are schools with awesome international reputations, the strength of their alumni networks is most apparent in their home territory of Chicago. Booth, for example, claims 12,656 alums in the Windy City alone, compared with just 2,300 in New York, 782 in San Francisco, and 783 in Boston. Kellogg, meantime, has 22,438 alums (a number that includes 3,315 who graduated from Kellogg’s one-year program and 970 MMMs). Of the total, Kellogg says 4,862 live in chicago, 2,733 are in New York, 1,955 are in the San Francisco Bay area, 300 in London, and 175 in Paris. Kellogg’s alums are chief executives of Campbell Soup, T-Mobile, Mattel, Target, Allstate, Room to Read, among other business and social enterprises.
02 Sep 2015, 17:00
