New Book From MIT Professor Explores The Evolution Of Finance
MIT Sloan School of Management professor Andrew Lo has revealed his newest book, which uses principles from evolutionary biology to illustrate how financial markets behave like living organisms.
What Women Want in an MBA: Financial Aid and Flexibility
In honor of last Wednesday’s International Women’s Day, the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) today released a new report entitled “What Women Want: A Blueprint for Change in Business Education.” For readers who may be too young to remember the 2000 romantic comedy also called “What Women Want,” it starred Mel Gibson as a chauvinistic advertising executive who suffers a blow to the head that renders him suddenly able to hear everything women around him are thinking. Though first instinct would be to assume that the two—Gibson’s rom-com and GMAC’s research—have nothing at all to do with one another, that’s not entirely true.
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Data Science Courses Increasingly Find Their Place in MBA Curriculums
Five years ago, MIT Sloan School of Management debuted a new course its professors believed to be the first of its kind. Called “The Analytics Edge,” the course gave students access to large quantities of real data that they could use to hone their analytic skills. “Our focus is on the application and the story, and how to use it in real life,” Allison O’Hair, one of the course’s co-instructors, said as part of a news article on the school’s website at the time. “To our knowledge, this is a new way of teaching … the only class here that teaches analytics through applications. We let students get their hands dirty with real data and applications of analytics.”
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Harvard, Stanford Earn Most Annual Business School Applicants
There are so many factors to consider when applying for an MBA program, it can often be overwhelming. Between cost, admissions requirements, location and program quality, narrowing down a select few to focus on for the application process is a challenge within itself. Nonetheless, between the time required to complete an application and the expense of application fees, it’s simply impossible to apply to every program you find interesting. Narrowing your focus to only your top choice schools can save time, money and a load of heartache.
While factors such as those mentioned above, like cost and location, are great ways to help narrow down your options, it is also helpful to take into consideration the competitiveness of each program. For many high-regarded MBA programs, the applicant pool can be so large that only a very small minority of applicants are accepted each year. While it may seem encouraged to “shoot for the stars,” understanding the real probability of your admission to a program can be a crucial factor in deciding whether or not to apply.
Thankfully, the U.S. News Short List, which focuses on particular data points from schools and degree programs around the country, recently compiled a list of MBA programs with the most applicants. As expected, these include some of the top programs in the country all ten programs with the highest applicant numbers were also included among the top 20 schools in the U.S. News 2017 Best Business School Rankings, and eight of them in the top ten.
While these are some of the top programs in the country, more applicants also means more rejections. All ten of these schools have acceptance rates lower than 25 percent, which means the majority of applicants are rejected. For many of these schools, the numbers are staggering. Of the 129 schools ranked this year by U.S. News, the average applicant number was 917. At Harvard Business School, which tops the list of largest applicant pool and the publication’s top-ranked business school in the country, there were 9,686 applicants for the fall of 2015.
Following HBS with the second most business school applicants is the Stanford Graduate School of Business with 7,899 applicants in the fall of 2015 and an acceptance rate of just 6.1 percent. The University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) placed third with 6,590 applicants and a 19.8 percent acceptance rate. Columbia Business School, ranked tenth best business school by the publication, received 5,829 applicants in the fall of 2015 and accepted just 18 percent of its applicants.
Also among the schools with the largest applicant pools were:
- Northwestern University (Kellogg): 4,300 applicants, 5th (tie) in ranking, 20.6 percent acceptance rate
- University of Chicago (Booth): 4,284 applicants, 2nd (tie) ranking, 24.4 percent acceptance rate
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan): 4,254 applicants, 5th (tie) ranking 14.6 percent acceptance rate
- New York University (Stern): 3,696 applicants, 20th in ranking, 20 percent acceptance rate
- University of California—Los Angeles (Anderson): 3,533 applicants, 15th in ranking, 19.8 percent acceptance rate
- University of California—Berkeley (Haas): 3,506 applicants, 7th in ranking, 13 percent acceptance rate
Certainly, if you have an extensive resume and strong GRE scores, among other factors, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be part of the small percentage of accepted applicants to these schools. However, full awareness of the probability of acceptance and competitiveness of each program can be important in narrowing down the schools you choose to apply to. Although these are schools with the largest pools, tracking down information about acceptance rate is a great idea for any program you are considering. For example—the Muma College of Business at the University of South Florida, which had the fewest applicants in 2015, had a 100 percent acceptance rate. If your goal is to save as much time and money as possible as you begin your degree, focusing on schools with high acceptance rates such as this can only make this already complicated process that much simpler.
The Top 10 Business Schools Where MBAs Leave With A Job
U.S. News & World Report has just unveiled its findings on the best business schools in the country for MBAs to earn a job upon graduation.
Inside the FinTech Industry
Finance has always been one of the hottest MBA industries. In fact, at many top schools such as the Booth School of Business and NYU Stern, over 30 percent of MBA graduates go into the financial industry each year. Why? Because it’s lucrative—the average Finance MBA earns $121,000 a year compared to $104,000 for other specialties—and well respected. However, until now, one thing that an MBA in finance did not offer was innovation.
The finance industry is one of the oldest and most prestigious industries around. It’s built on a foundation of history and careful research; after all, no company wants a CFO who makes decisions based on gut instinct. But, recently, a new side of the financial services industry has started to gain traction: FinTech. Continue reading…
