Sawyer Announces High School Summer Program, US News Rankings and More – Boston News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from Boston business schools this week.
New Summer Program for High School Juniors and Seniors – Sawyer Business Blog
The Suffolk University Sawyer Business School recently announced the launch of its Stepping Stone program, which gives 11th and 12th-graders the opportunity to study with faculty, work in Sawyer’s Trading Room, Center for Entrepreneurship, or Innovation Lab, work on projects or visits to companies.
Sawyer’s director of honors programs Kim Larkin writes:
“This is a great opportunity for high school students to study at one of the area’s top business schools. Whether they’re interested in finance, international business, leadership, sports marketing, or entrepreneurship, students will discover the program is a great first step into the world of business and a wonderful way to experience campus life before they go to college.”
The program is slated to run July 9-20, 2018.
Learn more about the program here.
MIT Sloan Tops U.S. News List for Production/Operations, Information Systems – MIT Sloan Newsroom
The MIT Sloan School of Management revealed its impressive showings in last week’s U.S. News & World Report 2019 graduate school rankings. The school, which made its usual top five appearance among full-time MBA programs, came out on top in the production/operations and information systems MBA specialties.
MIT Sloan maintained its “respective second and third place rankings for supply chain/logistics and entrepreneurship specialties.” In addition, Sloan boasted an outstanding average starting salary of $148,000 for its 2017 MBA class, as well as one of the highest post-graduation employment rates at over 84 percent.
Read more about Sloan’s U.S. News accolades here.
Carroll School Surges to #25 in New Part-Time MBA Rankings – Carroll School of Management Blog
It was clearly a good week for Boston MBAs in the rankings last week as U.S. News & World Report ranked BC’s Carroll School of Management’s part-time MBA 25th—an unprecedented 21-spot climb from last year—and 48th on the full-time MBA list.
Andy Boynton, the John and Linda Powers Family Dean at Carroll, explains that the school’s online course offerings and “increased focus on part-time MBA students has led to substantial curricular changes, including a stronger emphasis on skills such as data analytics, which are heavily in demand by employers. We’re building a program around the needs of these students, with much greater flexibility in our offerings.”
Learn more about Carroll’s part-time MBA here.
BC Talks About the Wealth Divide, and More – Boston News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from Boston business schools this week.
The Wealth Divide – Boston College Magazine
With the wealth gap in the United States wider than at any point since the Great Depression, the discussion about income inequality has been hitting closer and closer to home for many. The ever-reaching effects of inequality can start right at the beginning of someone’s life, according to research from Boston College Carroll School of Management assistant professor Sean Martin.
Martin’s 2016 research in The Academy of Management Journal explores the link between social class and leadership. Entitled “Echoes of Our Upbringing,” Martin and his coauthors, University of Toronto’s Stéphane Côté and West Point’s Todd Woodruff, uncovered “connections between how much money leaders grew up with, their narcissism, and negative reviews from their subordinates” among 299 recent West Point graduates,” according to Boston College Magazine.
“To the extent that people grow up wealthy, they’re more likely to exhibit narcissistic tendencies, and narcissistic tendencies lead people to engage in fewer leadership behaviors that we would consider prototypical and more effective. And as a result, their performance suffers.”
“My own understanding is that we’re kind of in some real trouble here.” – Carroll Assistant Professor Sean Martin on the current state of income inequality.
You can read more about the study and Martin’s experience from living in his car, to earning his Ph.D. at Cornell here.
What Opening a Nonprofit Grocery Taught the Former President of Trader Joe’s – MIT Sloan Newsroom
As part of MIT’s recent Sustainability Summit, Trader Joe’s president Doug Rauch discussed how his new venture, Daily Table, attempts to tackle “food insecurity” and still keep prices low by sourcing “its food from farmers, factories, and supermarkets, through donations of excess food, ‘imperfect’ food, and reduced purchase prices.” Rauch shared some of the lessons he gleaned after receiving community feedback on his new enterprise:
“I’m told over and over again, how good they feel: I’m providing this for my family. I can now finally come in, buy the foods I’m supposed to be eating, I feel good about what we’re feeding our families. It is so fundamental to the human need we all have, which is for respect for dignity.”
Learn more about Rauch’s plans for Daily Table here.
Those Taxing New Tax Laws – Sawyer Business School Blog
The Suffolk University Sawyer Business School recently published an interview with professor of taxation Michaele Morrow, Ph.D., CPA, who offered a nuanced analysis of the changes people can expect as a result of the recent tax reforms. She writes:
“Congress is only focused on short-term effects. In fact, the tax cuts for individuals are scheduled to expire in seven years, so this isn’t true reform. First, Congress limited the dollar amount of state and local taxes that can be deducted to $10,000. At the same time, Congress increased the standard deduction to $12,000 for a single person and $24,000 for a married couple. Essentially, this means that fewer people will have expenses that exceed those standard deduction amounts, so many more will itemize.”
You can read more about Morrow’s take on the new U.S. tax reforms here.
School v. School: Harvard Business School or MIT Sloan?
When selecting an MBA program, it can be difficult to cut through the fog to make the best long-term decision. For elite schools, the veil of prestige casts a long shadow. For lesser-known schools, it’s often a question of how much bang you’re getting for your buck. Allow our School v. School series to do the heavy lifting for you and present an in-depth comparison. Let’s consider the distinctions between Boston’s best: Harvard Business School and MIT Sloan.
Harvard Business School
Located in the Allston neighborhood of Boston, Harvard Business School’s 40-acre campus is “the only top business school in the United States with a self-contained, residential campus,” steps away from the downtown area of the city. HBS is famously one of the first MBA programs in the world. It also boasts one of the largest total student populations, with a grand total of 1,871 enrolled students.
HBS Full-Time MBA
For many, HBS is the crème de la crème of MBA programs. U.S. News and World Report ranks it as the best in the country. HBS offers only one type of MBA degree: full-time. The program lasts a typical two years, with the first summer break reserved for an internship or internships. Due to the large student body, incoming students are divided into groups of 90 who will take the same coursework for a year’s time. Each segment represents the diversity of the incoming class.
Why HBS?
- The FIELD Foundations program (Field Immersion Experience for Leadership Development) helps students develop an awareness of their leadership styles by interacting with their “team” through intimate workshops. The program, which intends to build emotional intelligence, is unique for its personalized approach to business training.
- The Case Method was first established as the primary method of instruction at HBS, and many students cite it as a highlight of their time at HBS. The Case Method puts students in the position of the decision makers by presenting scenarios written by HBS staff themselves.
- HBS offers six joint degree options for students looking to expand into additional fields, such as law, medicine, and engineering.
- HBS routinely tops MIT when it comes to domestic and global MBA rankings.
Harvard vs. MIT MBA Rankings
| Harvard Business School | MIT Sloan School of Management | |
|---|---|---|
| U.S. News & World Report (U.S.) | 1 | 4 |
| The Economist (Global) | 3 | 19 |
| Financial Times (Global) | 5 | 9 |
| Forbes (U.S.) | 3 | 8 |
| Bloomberg Businessweek (U.S.) | 1 | 3 |
What Is Missing?
- There’s a hefty price tag for a HBS education: estimated at $106,800 annually, including tuition, room and board, materials, and healthcare.
- Outside of the U.Ss, starting salaries for international positions tend to be lower, despite Harvard’s reputation in the States.
- Harvard’s employment rate after graduation trails slightly behind MIT: 91 percent vs. MIT’s 93 percent.
- Out of 273 faculty members at HBS, only 70 are women; about 25 percent.
MIT Sloan School of Management
Situated in nearby Cambridge, the Sloan School of Management campus is “surrounded by biotech companies, tech giants, startups, and research labs.” MIT Sloan has a compact center for its MBA students, which revolves around a newly built facility called E62. Here, you’ll find the entire faculty and most academic programs. Its population of full-time MBA students hovers around 800, while 500 additional students are completing alternative post-baccalaureate business degrees.
Sloan School of Management Programs
Unlike HBS, MIT Sloan offers three kinds of MBA programs: the two-year, full-time MBA degree; 20-month Executive degree; and 12-month Sloan Fellows Program. The full-time MBA degree stands out for its Sloan Innovation Period (SIP), a full-immersion learning experience that occurs in the middle of each semester. Students take a week-long hiatus from classes to attend lectures, travel abroad, visit host companies, and more.
Why Sloan?
- The Global Entrepreneurship Lab is one opportunity that MBA students shouldn’t miss. Students act as advisors for start-up companies in markets around the world, delivering insight on topics such as “strategic growth, new market entry, pricing, marketing, benchmarking, fundraising, and financial strategy.”
- The Leaders for Global Operations caters to students interested in a dual degree in Engineering and Business. This two-year curriculum “places students in research internships at elite partner companies.”
- Sloan’s MBA class is made up of a larger international student base compared to Harvard; 39 percent, as opposed to 35 percent at HBS. This isn’t a significant gap, but it does show MIT’s commitment to diversity.
What Is Missing?
- According to Forbes, Sloan has a lower median base salary after graduation at $125,000. HBS grads average around $135,000.
- Unlike the HBS environment, not all students on campus are earning full-time MBA degrees. If you’re someone who enjoys working with the same student body throughout your degree, prepare for a bit more cross-section here.
- The current tuition and full cost for the MIT Sloan MBA is slightly higher than HBS (regarding non-married single students with no children).
Harvard vs. MIT MBA Cost
| Harvard Business School | MIT Sloan School of Management | |
|---|---|---|
| Tuition | $73,440 | $74,200 |
| Full-Cost | $109,124 | $111,570 |
When all is said and done, both MBAs are extremely cutting-edge programs that any ambitious prospective b-schooler would salivate over. Both Harvard and MIT offer a similar urban setting, as they exist in the same tightly packed university community in Boston. Additionally, both have the same acceptance rate (11 percent). For a final push, be sure to read up on faculty leading the way both at Harvard and MIT.
MIT Sloan Lays Bare Potential Environmental Impact of Biofuel
By 2030, the EU hopes renewable energy will be, at a minimum, 35 percent of its entire energy consumption—a landmark goal is shared similarly among major economies like India and China. With global governments looking beyond traditional energy initiatives, the future of biofuel is as crucial as ever, according to MIT Sloan research.
Sloan Professor John Sterman explains, “Declaring that biofuels are carbon neutral, as the EU and others have done, erroneously assumes forest regrowth quickly and fully offsets the emissions from biofuel production and combustion.”
Sterman, along with Juliette Rooney-Varga, Director of the University of Massachusetts Lowell Climate Change Initiative, and Lori Siegel, Senior Modeler for the nonprofit Climate Interactive, published a new report, which argues, “burning wood pellets for power is worse than coal” and zero-carbon energy sources like solar and wind are “the safest, easiest, and cheapest ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions.”
The report explains, “While biofuel might sound good on paper, instead of using fossil fuels to inject eons-old carbon into the air, it recycles carbon from the atmosphere—in practice the research points to a much more negative impact on the environment.”
“The neutrality assumption is not valid because it ignores the transient but decades to centuries-long increase in carbon dioxide caused by biofuels. Because combustion and processing efficiencies for wood are less than coal, the immediate impact of substituting wood for coal is an increase in atmospheric (carbon dioxide) relative to coal. The payback time for this carbon debt ranges from 44-104 years after clear-cut, depending on forest type—assuming the land remains forest.”
Sterman elaborates, “It’s like an investment in which you give your bank $1,000 today. They promise to pay you back, but only over 80 years, and only if they don’t go out of business first or decide there’s something else they’d rather spend your money on.”
He concludes, “In the same way, it’s better to keep the trees on the land and keep all that carbon out of the atmosphere. You’re better off if you keep your money.”
The Next Big MBA Career: Global Supply Chain Management
It’s no secret that the world of business is global, fast-paced, and dependent on the movement of goods from one location to another.
As these given features of the business world continue to become more pronounced, those who prefer their “i’s” dotted and “t’s” crossed have started taking their rightful places in boardrooms. Supply chain managers, once considered a secondary or tertiary level of management, have risen to the executive level. In the process, they have become one of the most interesting and lucrative positions in business today.
In a U.S. News article quoting John Fowler, Professor of Supply Chain Management (SCM) in the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, he assuredly states that “the average starting salary for our full time MBAs with a specialization in Supply Chain Management was almost $96,000, with a couple of students in the $120K range.” The question remains, though: what exactly does a supply chain manager do?
Supply Chain Management
What’s most interesting about a supply chain manager position is how it has changed over the years— as J. Paul Dittman writes in Supply Chain Management Review, “Ten years ago, the supply chain leader … was a largely functional role that relied on technical proficiency in discrete areas: knowledge of shipping routes, familiarity with warehousing equipment and distribution-center locations and footprints, and a solid grasp of freight rates and fuel costs.”
And while a supply chain manager must remain on top of such functional knowledge today, the position has become infinitely more demanding, with the supply chain manager dealing with processes, inputs, and outputs both upstream and downstream in the creation of a finished product. Thus, supply chain managers must orient themselves toward traditional logistical concerns, but also concerns about raw materials, manufacturing systems, procurements, and marketing/sales. At its heart, the supply chain management position is holistic and complex, and demands a lot from whoever fills it.
Skills Necessary to Succeed in Global Supply Chain Management
While professionals in the global supply chain management field must hone various skills depending on their companies’ needs, the following are some necessary skills for anyone wanting to get into SCM:
- Thinking Globally: Supply chains are increasingly multinational in scope, and so the global supply chain management professional must have deep knowledge of suppliers and customers that span continents.
- Work Sustainably: As sustainable processes become more profitable and more consumers become aware of corporate environmental practices, it is increasingly paramount for SCM professionals to foster and commit to sustainability both upstream and downstream, particularly in the gathering of raw materials.
- Lead Effectively: As SCM positions become more central to organizational leadership structures, the need for charismatic, savvy, friendly, and collaboratively-minded individuals in such positions grows—and the need for such individuals to be able to work cross-company and cross-industry grows, too.
- Have a Tireless Work Ethic: As the demands of the global economy never sleep, SCM professionals should expect to work anywhere between 55 and 80 hours per week, though be compensated handsomely for such non-traditional hours.
The Best Supply Chain Management MBA Programs
There are many wonderful programs in supply chain management, but the following are three of the best, according to U.S. News rankings.
- Michigan State Broad: Eli Broad’s Masters in Supply Chain Management (MSSCM) is a unique program, as it combines onsite courses and learning with online modules, allowing for a more seamless integration of SCM principles into already-existing work schedules and professional commitments.
- MIT Sloan: the Leaders for Global Operations MBA/MS track is among the most elite SCM programs offered, with a defined track for those students who wish to delve deeper into SCM. Companies in the Boston area clamor for students to work on global supply networks after graduation.
- ASU Carey: The W. P. Carey Master of Science in Global Logistics (MS-GL) degree is a nine-month program that prepares those interested in SCM for the complex world of global operations and multicultural perspectives.
How Can We Respond To A Crisis Better? An MIT Alum Has a Few Suggestions
In the wake of Hawaii’s false emergency threat last week, MIT Sloan recently discussed the two key lessons that will make countries more “efficient when responding to a crisis.”
Miyamoto International’s Elizabeth Petheo (MBA ’14) whose career has focused on international urban disaster and risk reduction and resiliency programs believes that countries in which disasters occur should drive resiliency efforts, but “international actors can act as a catalyst for knowledge transfer.”
Petheo explains that the national actors “who know the area best, understand what capabilities their community already has, and what needs to be strengthened” are the ones who need to drive the conversation. She advises communities to develop a checklist of sorts and ensure they have firm handles on questions related to the necessary equipment, whether there’s a control structure in place to make decisions, “who else in their ecosystem will be respond to disasters, and how their specific work area impacts other areas.”
Photo via Caleb Jones/AP
Part two of disaster relief involves the perspectives—and efforts—of the international community, which are necessary for communities to “understand links—how different actors who respond in a time of crisis can help and support each other,” according to Petheo.
Miyamoto, for instance, uses data to “help local first responders understand what different scenarios would be if an earthquake did strike their area, then help communities identify the gaps in their readiness and what areas could be strengthened.”
“To prepare for a crisis, there are a number of questions that communities can ask themselves. ‘This is not an exhaustive list,’ Petheo said, ‘but there are a couple of different buckets: the logistical and operations side of things; overall administrative management of how things get executed; and the players themselves.'”
Petheo concludes, “There is the economic, societal, social, and individual impact that’s happening all at the same time, which is what makes these kinds of emergencies so complex [but] the more you can think through what possible scenarios would be, what the situation that the community or government face would be, the better they are in coping when a crisis actually happens.”
Check out the recent of MIT’s article on disaster relief here.
