Social Impact and the MBA: Business Schools Where the Two Are Synonymous

This article originally appeared in its entirety on clearadmit.com

“Oh, God yes!” replied Stacey Rudnick when asked if interest in social impact is on the rise among the MBA students she counsels. Rudnick leads career services for the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin, but her emphatic reply is a standard refrain at any number of leading business schools when asked the same question.Student participation in McComb’s annual “Business for Good Summit,” held each February, has been steadily growing, Rudnick shares, as has Net Impact chapter membership and overall career interest in social impact. “And the higher interest is not just in non-profits,” Rudnick says. “Students want to know ‘What is the ethos of the business that I am considering being a part of? Is this a company that is doing good in the world? Can I feel good about wearing its logo and its brand as a reflection of my brand?’”

The idea that the MBA can prepare you not only to do well but also to do good has taken hold around the world in a big way. Net Impact, a nonprofit membership organization formed in 1993 by a small group of socially minded MBA students in San Francisco has ballooned into an international organization of more than 80,000 members, boasting more than 300 chapters spread across business schools, undergraduate institutions and corporations. Net Impact’s 2014 “Business as UNusual” social and environmental guide to graduate programs found that 88 percent of MBA students surveyed cited learning about social and environmental business as a priority. Sixty-seven percent agreed or strongly agreed that their MBA programs offered adequate career preparation resources for impact job seekers.

Why This Increased Demand for Social Impact Focus Among MBAs?
Part of it is generational. As McCombs’ Rudnick points out, “You have a generation of students that have been taught from a very young age about consciousness of the environment, energy savings, recycling, taking care of the planet, health and wellness as part of day-to-day living,” she says. “These students want the same values at the companies where they work.”

According to Net Impact, many of those students would take a 15 percent pay cut to work for an organization whose values align with their own (87 percent); to have a job that seeks to make a difference in the world either socially or environmentally (83 percent); or to work for a company committed to corporate and environmental responsibility (71 percent).

And the focus on sustainability and social impact is expected to grow more and more mainstream—not only among MBA students but also at the companies they seek to work for. Tuck School of Business Finance Professor Anant Sundaram draws more students each year who want to take his class on business and climate change, which he says only makes sense. “At many of the companies these students are targeting for post-MBA jobs, sustainability has become very central to how they operate,” he says. “We approach it in a very hard-nosed way—if you are the CEO of a shareholder-value maximizing company, should you care about climate change and, if so, why?”

Go into any major company and you will now find a chief sustainability officer, Sundaram tells his students. “Not only is this a very senior manager in a policy-making role, but it’s also a new potential career path,” he says. “It’s exciting, and it has all happened in the last decade in a significant way.”

Schools Leading the Social Impact Charge
So if student demand is high and the need for talent on the part of potential employers is poised for growth, which schools are best answering the call for an MBA education firmly rooted in the tenets of social impact? We don’t claim to offer a comprehensive ranking of the best schools for social impact. (Net Impact devotes significant resources toward assessing the merits of different MBA programs both in terms of sustainability and social impact and tells us the next “Business as UNusual” report is due out in fall 2016.) In the meantime, over the course of two articles, we’re taking a deeper dive into some of what’s on offer at a few of the schools doing it best.Yale School of Management: A Legacy of Social Impact
Welcoming its first class in 1976, the then Yale School of Organization and Management conferred upon its graduates a master’s degree in public and private management (MPPM). From its founding, the school set out to train managers who could move seamlessly between the business, government and nonprofit sectors. “Business and government are growing more interrelated, requiring effective managers in each sector, public and private, to understand in depth the goals and operations of the other,” read an early admissions catalog.

The school changed its name to the Yale School of Management (SOM) in 1994 and began offering an MBA in 1999, but its mission—educating leaders for business and society—has remain steadfast throughout.

“The school frames from day one that no matter what you are doing you should be thinking about the intersection of business activities and positive societal impact,” says Susannah Harris, a student in the joint MBA/Master of Environmental Management (MEM) program that SOM offers with the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies (FES).

Harris did not originally enroll at SOM and was not completely sold on an MBA from the start. “I knew I wanted to be on a campus that had a strong business school option, but I wasn’t ready to commit the time and money until I knew I needed both the MBA and the MEM to get where I wanted to go professionally,” she says. “But I definitely had SOM on my mind from day one.”

Much of her coursework at FES has had a strong content focus—on water, food systems, energy—but less on skill building. “People kept telling me that the Yale SOM core curriculum was going to be invaluable to me in terms of finance knowledge, decision-making tools, and spreadsheet modeling,” she says. So over the winter break of her first year at FES, she applied to take part in the joint MBA/MEM program. She counts approximately eight students who made the transition from FES to SOM in their first year with her and another handful who did the reverse. “The community—it’s about a 60-person group now—is just a powerhouse network, support system, idea generator,” Harris says. “The joint degree is definitely greater than the sum of its parts.”

That said, there’s a strong contingent of what Harris calls “pure SOMers” who enter focused on building a social impact brand for themselves in just the two years of business school. “If someone is coming in with either a really strong base of business skills or a previous background in some sort of social impact area, it’s totally manageable to build out the other half in two years,” she says.

After completing the SOM core—which itself is steeped in corporate social and environmental themes through case studies, readings and guest lecturers—MBAs can choose from more than 30 SOM electives, including courses in nonprofit management, corporate social responsibility, education, environment, social enterprise and more. Beyond that, SOMers can take any of 188 courses at FES, and the greater Yale University offers another 100 relevant courses. The ease with which graduate students can take classes at Yale’s other schools is one of the university’s unsung benefits, Harris says. She took a class at the law school on chemical controls because of its relationship to the environment. “People really bounce around and cherry pick what they need as a second-year business school student.”

SOM highlights for Harris included the school’s signature Global Social Enterprise (GSE) class, in which students spend a semester consulting directly to social enterprises in a foreign country. Harris worked with a healthcare startup in Sao Paolo, Brazil, consulting for a full semester on a social impact challenge it faced and traveling there for 10 days over a school break for an in-person session. “It’s great to have that travel element—to interact in person and make sure you are on the same page,” she says. For Harris, whose previous work experience involved consulting to the Environmental Protection Agency on how to make the most of a set budget for a range of national partnership programs—the chance to work on a social issue outside of the environment and to advise someone on how to actually have a social impact and make money doing it were also pluses.

Harris also sang the praises of a class taught by visiting professor Richard Kauffman, New York State chairman of energy and finance. “The class was on financing green technologies, digging into how well the goals of venture capitalists (VCs) do or don’t align with renewable energy projects,” she says. (The verdict: renewable energy projects often prove too resource intensive and cost too much up front for VCs to get excited.) “It was really fun to learn from such a cutting-edge practitioner.” Another standout course was a supply chain elective taught by Sang Kim. “It was great because it was made up of cases that each highlighted a major faux pas in supply chain management, and many were related to sustainable supply chains. His key takeaways really stuck with me.”

Outside of the classroom, SOM students can also take advantage of the Social Impact Lab—a Wednesday lunch session in which alumni, experts in the field and current students who have previously held social impact roles talk about what they learned, challenges they faced, new frameworks they developed. “I presented one of my own,” Harris says. “It’s a great place to incubate ideas.”

Clubs—such as SOM’s Net Impact Chapter, Business and the Environment Club or Global Social Enterprise Club—are also great resources for MBA students interested in social impact at Yale SOM, though less so for Harris. “I am less included to join clubs and more inclined to start new things,” she says, noting that she helped write two online courses for social impact at Yale. The Center for Business and the Environment (CBEY), a research center convening resources between SOM and FES, helped her facilitate and fund one of the classes she wrote on corporate water risk and strategy.

When pressed, Harris conceded that part of the reason she didn’t apply from the beginning to both SOM and FES may have had to do with her image of who a business school student was. “I was really pleasantly surprised when I walked into my cohort the first week and found that there were all sorts of people you can interact with and explore with and learn from,” she says. “I didn’t really realize how many environmentalists and other social change makers would be pure SOMers. That was a really big and positive experience.”

Even so, she knows that building a business and protecting the environment can still often be at odds. “For me, there continues to be a tension between my interest in protecting the environment and some of the tenets that you learn in business school. The way I think about it, I now have the language and the skills to engage with businesses on these issues without being an outsider,” she says. “I hope there will be people coming out of all of these programs who go deep enough both in science and business courses to weigh those tradeoffs productively in the real world. I do think people are becoming more creative and open minded about how to put business and social impact together.”

The 29-year-old Harris, for her part, will take what she’s learned at Yale SOM and put it into practice as a consultant in Washington, DC, working for Deloitte Consulting’s social impact service line.  

NYU Stern School of Business: Championing Sustainability at Home and Abroad
Just last month, New York University’s Stern School of Business doubled down on its commitment to social impact with the launch of a brand new Center for Sustainable Business. The Citi Foundation put $1 million of its money toward the cause, and leading environmentalist and former Rainforest Alliance President Tensie Whelan came on board to lead the new center. It will offer expanding sustainability course for undergraduates and graduate students, work with companies interested in specially designed courses to help their executives learn sustainable practices and, in time, establish consulting projects with partner firms to help students take what they learn from the classroom to the boardroom.

At first glance, NYU Stern might seem an unusual pick to serve as a nexus of sustainable business. Historically, the school has sent massive percentages of its graduates into finance at nearby Wall Street banks or to the major consulting firms. In fact, that’s a huge plus in Whelan’s eyes. “We need more business leaders in finance who are looking to incorporate sustainability into their investment decisions,” she told us in an interview when the center first launched. “On the consulting side, I believe that more and more consulting efforts will be focused on helping companies transition to become more sustainable,” she added. “It is exciting to have students going into these sectors where they will have real impact.”

But to think that Stern’s focus on social impact is new or that it’s an attempt to woo would-be bankers and consultants away from more traditional paths would be folly. There is a strong contingent of Sternies who come in deeply passionate about social impact and look to get involved in many ways. Some choose a specialization in Social Innovation and Impact, taking courses on topics ranging from impact investing and microfinance to energy and the environment and global poverty alleviation. Others take part in numerous clubs on campus related to sustainability and the environment or social impact.

Violeta Stolpen, 29, was drawn to Stern because she saw it as a place where she could be part of a growing social impact and sustainability movement. “I thought at Stern I could make a mark rather than getting lost in the crowd,” she says. She saw a ton of social impact courses that interested her, but she also knew she wanted to have a well-rounded management education that wasn’t solely focused on social impact. “For me, I found that at Stern.”

An undergraduate geology major who did government environmental consulting after college, Stolpen wanted to learn more about corporate sustainability and specifically how she could transfer some of her knowledge and passion for water usage and clean water issues to the private sector. She interned this past summer at NBC Universal, working in something of a double role with the company’s CSR and sustainability teams to detail and outline current sustainability practices. She’s still considering options for her post-graduation job. “Right now, I’m really interested in the corporate sustainability space in tech,” she says.

Helping prepare Stolpen for her chosen career path have been courses like “Corporate Branding and CSR,” which addresses the corporate need to protect brand image—which can get especially tricky when companies with large segments of affluent, ethically sensitive consumers come up against lax law and regulation in global markets. Stolpen was particularly impressed by Alice Tepper Marlin, president and founder of the Social Accountability International (SAI), who was a frequent guest lecturer throughout the course.

Another highlight among her Stern coursework so far has been a unique course focused on global sustainability issues and challenges. As part of the course, called “Doing Business in (DBi),” students travel for one to two weeks during traditional break periods to gain international experience in a rapidly changing global economy. Stolpen traveled to Costa Rica, where she got to interact with students and professors from Incae Business School, experience the country’s culture, visit the free trade zone and gain a better understanding of the business opportunities and challenges in the country and region. “Every single lecture at Incae stressed the importance of sustainability in business,” Stolpen says.

In time, Stolpen would like to see even more sustainability courses on offer at Stern. There are a lot of social impact courses, she says, but fewer sustainability courses. She is very encouraged though by a recent conversation she had with new CSB Director Whelan, who notes that expanding the sustainability curriculum is one of her first orders of business.

Beyond the classroom, Stolpen also serves as vice president of sustainability for the Social Enterprise Association (SEA) MBA club, which got its start at Stern more than a decade ago. As of spring 2015, it counts more than 2000 active alumni. “We are really geared toward getting a lot of students interested in social impact,” she says—from the investment bankers and consultants to the environmentalists like herself.

Though Stolpen eventually hopes to help other companies enhance their sustainability practices, she recognizes that there’s no better place to start than your own back yard. The sustainability branch of SEA has spearheaded a range of initiatives right on campus, including the introduction of a Stern-branded recyclable cup designed to promote waste reduction. Working closely with Stern Chief Operating Officer Neil Rader, SEA is also looking for other ways to reduce Stern’s own environmental impact. The biggest of these initiatives is a planned overhaul of Stern’s recycling practices, to include redesigning the placement, design and signage for the current recycling mechanism to make it easier for people to recycle campus wide. Late this year or next, there are also plans to revamp some of the Stern stairwells, retrofitting them with LED lighting, Stolpen says.

Stolpen also calls attention to the wealth of support Stern offers to students pursuing jobs in the social impact space. One example is the Social Impact Internship Fund (SIIF), which supports MBA students who choose to pursue summer internships with a social impact focus between their first and second years. Through the newly founded CSB, Whelan is also planning an upcoming job fair, put on with Collectively and VICE Media and slated for March 30th, to showcase social impact job opportunities. “This fair will help show students that there are companies interested in hiring graduates who have these skills—and that they can combine their values and meaning and purpose with their business career,” Whelan said when we spoke with her back in February. “That is going to be really critical to success with the students—showing them that there are viable employment options.”

“Stern really has a lot of offerings in terms of job search and internship search, which I expect will only grow,” Stolpen says.

Stay tuned next week for the conclusion of this two-part feature on social impact and the MBA.