From Just One Woman to 39 Percent of the Class—and Other Ways LBS Has Changed Over the Past 50 Years
The 2017-18 academic year marks the 50th anniversary of the MBA program at London Business School (LBS). Since 1968, the school has offered a two-year Master of Science (MSc) in Business Studies degree program—the original MBA—and has continuously refined its offerings since that time. In celebration of the 50-year mark, LBS is looking back at how far the program has come.
The Beginning
In 1966, two years after London Business School opened its doors, the school launched a two-year Master of Science (MSc) in Business Studies. The first class consisted of 35 men and just one woman, with the average age around 25 years old. The goal of the two-year degree was to prepare students for employment. In fact, according to the website, employment was seen as “one of the most significant aspects of the school’s progress at this stage of its development.”
After graduation, most students joined manufacturing firms, and a few went into merchant banking, management consultancy, and advertising. Their job functions included marketing and financial executives, planning personnel, and personal assistant roles.
As for the feedback on the first year of study, a report on the class stated, “The overall academic performance of the students during the year has been more than satisfactory. The course of studies is arduous and the number of hours of work required is much above average, imposing a considerable workload both on students and staff.”
The Early Years
In the early years of the program, growth was slow but steady. In 1971, the class size grew to 86 students and by 1975, 108 students were admitted, including 16 women. Throughout this time, LBS made various modifications to its program.
- In 1973, LBS introduced the International Management Program, which gave 10 students the change to study abroad in Paris or at New York University.
- In 1978, the International Management Program expanded to include Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Chicago, and top European institutions.
The 1980s
The 1980s were a time of change for LBS and the MBA program. During these years, banking and finance overtook manufacturing as the top industry for graduates. In addition, LBS continued to increase its international reputation; about half of its class comprised non-British students by the end of the decade, with more 30 nationalities represented. Most importantly, the Class of 1987 was the first to be awarded an MBA rather than an MSc degree. In an annual report, the school stated, “This more accurately and effectively conveys the spirit of the program, and the type of qualifications our students are aiming for.”
- In 1982, LBS introduced a new part-time master’s program. The first class accepted 60 people and allowed students to complete their studies over two and a half to three years while still working.
- In 1984, three more U.S. schools joined the International Exchange Program including Dartmouth Tuck, MIT Sloan, and Northwestern Kellogg.
The 1990s
In the 1990s, LBS adopted a more flexible format for its MBA program. The school added increased training in “soft skills” and introduced computer-based management simulation games. The class size also increased to 271 students, with 79 percent of students coming from outside the United Kingdom. Consulting became the top choice for graduates, and manufacturing shrunk to just 11 percent.
- In 1992, LBS introduced a language requirement where students must be fluent in English and one other language to graduate. In addition, the part-time master’s was re-launched as the Executive MBA.
- By 1996, entrepreneurship became an important part of the program, and the school launched several electives with an entrepreneurial focus, including “Small Business Management” and “Financing the Entrepreneurial Business.”
- 1999 was the first Financial Times Global MBA ranking, and LBS ranked #1 in Europe and #8 in the world—the only non-U.S. school in the top 10.
The 2000s
By the 2000s, LBS had become a global leader in MBA education—and in 2009 it became the first non-U.S. school to top the Financial Times ranking. The MBA program was reformatted for increased flexibility, allowing students to graduate in 15 to 21 months. The class size also increased to 315 students, with 89 percent of the class from 59 countries outside the United Kingdom.
- In 2001, LBS ranked as the best Global MBA by the Financial Times, and Forbes ranked LBS as #1 in Europe and #2 in the world for return on investment.
- In 2003, LBS became the first European school to join the Forté Foundation to increase women in business, and in 2005, women made up 22 percent of the class.
The 2010s
In the last decade, London Business School once again revised its MBA program to give students even greater flexibility. The school also continued to increase its size, welcoming 468 students by 2018—12 times the size of the first class in 1968. In addition, women now make up 39 percent of the MBA class, and students represent 77 different nationalities.
- In 2010, LBS started its Incubator Program to help entrepreneurs. As of 2017, 58 businesses have completed the incubator, raising more than £31 million and creating 440 full-time jobs.
- In 2012, LBS launched the Global Business Exchange (GBE), giving students the opportunity to spend a week in another country with options ranging from South Africa to the United States.
- In 2016, LBS completed its first fundraising campaign, raising £125 million.
To learn more about the 50th anniversary celebration of London Business School’s MBA, visit the school website.
This article has been edited and republished with permissions from our sister site, Clear Admit.
The Potential Impacts of Net Neutrality on Higher Education
F.C.C. Chairman Ajit Pai’s decision last week to repeal Obama-era net neutrality regulations, which inhibited ISPs from paid prioritization and interfering with users’ online experiences, could have widespread implications beyond the speed of your Netflix stream.
A host of critics argue that the controversial new initiative essentially deregulates the Internet from a governmental vantage point and gives ISPs (internet service providers) free reign to control what you see as they see fit. That could mean offering fast lanes to the highest bidder—at the consumer’s expense, naturally—or censoring any content that might be remotely critical of, say, AT&T’s political position.
Pai believes the repeal will foster competition and ultimately benefit consumers. “Broadband providers will have more incentive to build networks, especially to underserved areas,” he told the NY Times after the F.C.C. cast its final votes on December 14. The vote split directly on party lines, with Republican commissioners winning by a count of 3-2.
After the vote was concluded, Mignon Clyburn, one of the two Democratic commissioners to vote no on the new provisions, said, “I dissent, because I am among the millions outraged. “Outraged, because the F.C.C. pulls its own teeth, abdicating responsibility to protect the nation’s broadband consumers.”
F.C.C. Chairman Ajit Pai. Photo via AP/Jacquelyn Martin
In terms of public relations, ISPs appear conflicted about which foot to lead with. According to Wired, in the months leading up to the repeal, Comcast publicly shared a net neutrality pledge and then quietly removed it once the votes were concluded, while Verizon promised not to open up fast lanes when it “already blocks mobile subscribers from accessing high-resolution video streams unless they upgrade to more expensive plans.”
It’s clear that this F.C.C. decision is a crippling blow to the utopian promise of the Internet, whose innovations were outgrowths of a level playing field. Netflix voiced disappointment last Friday, in which the company said “innovators, large and small, to oppose this misguided F.C.C. order.”
Consumer advocates are deeply concerned about the repeal’s impact on higher education, particularly in a moment where educators increasingly rely on YouTube lectures, video-chat services, and distance learning applications for their curricula.
There’s a scene in Werner Herzog’s 2016 documentary“Lo and Behold” in which he interviews Udacity founder and Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun about a robotics seminar, which was made available to the general public through open courseware technology. Two-hundred Stanford students enrolled in the class along with 160,000 students from the “open world.” Upon realizing that the highest achieving Stanford student ranked 413rd overall, Thrun remarked, “My God, for every great Stanford student, there are 412 amazingly great, even better students in the world.”
In an interview with Wired, Washington State University Vancouver’s Mike Caulfield explains, “Killing net neutrality will throw us back to the Dark Ages and the people that is likely to hurt most are actually rural populations that don’t have face-to-face access.”
In an interview with EdWeek, Consortium for School Networking Executive Director Keith Krueger explained matter-of-factly, “School systems will now face a bleak reality: reduced choices, higher prices, and fewer innovative tools.”
The introduction of “slow lanes” has the potential to impact peer-to-peer interactions like videoconferencing, as well as institution-wide adoptions of cloud-based models. Caufield explains, “Science or programming courses might require students to download large data sets that, if relegated to a slow lane, would take a prohibitive amount of time to download, or could help burn through data caps.”
There is a more pervasive worry that “education companies that rely on relatively fast delivery of content to schools could lose out to deep-pocketed vendors that can afford to pay internet service providers more for faster, higher-quality access,” according to an EdWeek article.
In a captivating Medium entry, Tressie McMillan Cottom, a sociology professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, says that while changes to how Americans use the internet might not change right away, it will likely affect the amount of resources available to students who utilize online education.
“Online education was built, and sold to stakeholders, on the premise of affordable, accessible internet access,” Cottom writes.
“The concern is that companies tend to want to maximize profit. It isn’t hard to imagine telecom companies allowing companies who can pay for premium internet space to skew what is and is not available on the internet.”
Cottom telegraphs what she calls the “doomsday predictions”: charging escalating prices for basic internet consumption, leaving poorer, disadvantaged users with worse options. And that, Cottom explains, doesn’t even consider the potential socio-political ramifications. “For many, the end of net neutrality also means the regulation-by-capital of online spaces where minority groups shut out of traditional media, politics, and economies have thrived (albeit always at the precipice of precarity),” she says.
Other critics, such as University of Michigan professor Kentaro Toyama, in an recent interview with EdSurge, says that the issue was not the repeal vote, but the “already eroding” nature of the internet itself. “Technical systems are predominantly paid for and operated by private companies, which exert a lot of control,” he notes.
Indeed, before the vote, some of the largest ISPs were already practicing speed-throttling tactics, such as Comcast’s “unlimited” phone data plans that slow down after 20GB of use, and Verizon, which was caught earlier this year slowing down user speed.
But when it comes to higher education, Toyama is not worried. “Though there might be some marginal impact on the degree to which online courses like mine could be viewed by any given student, it is unlikely to be at a level noticeable by the average user,” he says.
The F.C.C. responded in defense of their new initiative that ISPs will have to publicly disclose any practices that block or throttle access to online resources, but Ed-tech advocates believe these so-called “transparency requirements” will simply force education officials to accept whatever terms are placed in front of them.
Harvard Business School Tops Bloomberg Businessweek Ranking
For the third straight year, Harvard Business School reigned supreme in the annual Bloomberg Businessweek “Best Business Schools” ranking, topping the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and MIT Sloan School of Management. In joining HBS on the medals podium this year, those schools both saw significant gains over last year, climbing from sixth and seventh respectively.
Rounding out the top five this year is the University of Chicago Booth School of Business —holding steady year over year at fourth—and Stanford Graduate School of Business, which fell from second place in 2016 to fifth this year.
The methodology Bloomberg Businessweek uses to arrive at its annual MBA ranking involves weighting each of five principle factors. Employer surveys account for 35 percent of a school’s score. Alumni surveys account for another 30 percent. And a combination of current student surveys, salary rankings, and job placement together account for the remaining 35 percent of the final score.
High Risers
Ten out of the top 20 ranked schools in the 2017 Bloomberg Businessweek ranking advanced at least one spot over last year. Wharton and Sloan each managed to leap four spots, boosted by high praise from employers and hefty salary benefits for recent graduates. The University of Washington Foster School of Business also managed to jump from 19th to 15th overall this year, thanks largely to its top ranking as the nation’s best business school for job placement.
The Cornell S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management and the UCLA Anderson School of Management both saw a rankings jump of three spots, with Johnson moving up to 13th and Anderson coming in at 19th.
The year’s biggest winner, however, may be the Penn State Smeal College of Business, which jumped a whopping 12 spots from last year’s 37th to come in at 25th in 2017. It wins the award for the year’s biggest overall rankings increase. The USC Marshall School of Business also saw a momentous climb this year, sidling up eight spots from 38th last year to 30th this year.
In the latter half of the rankings came another one of this year’s biggest risers, with the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia jumping 11 spots from last year, up from 65th overall to 54th. Elsewhere, the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah, the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University, the C.T. Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston, and the Pepperdine University Graziadio School of Business and Management all saw a jump of at least seven spots in the new ranking.
Once Mighty, Now Fallen
Stanford GSB, Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, and Jones School of Business at Rice University may all be feeling a wee bit dizzy. Last year Stanford shot up to second from seventh the year before, but this year it finds itself demoted to fifth. Duke’s Fuqua School, which last year celebrated a momentous jump from eighth to third, this year fell back down to seventh. Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, which had one of last year’s biggest gains, rocketing up nine spots to break into the top five from a mere 14th place finish the year before, this year finds itself at seventh. Similarly, Rice Business, as the Jones School likes to be called, which last year catapulted 11 spots to number eight, this year slipped to tenth. But at least all maintained their footing within the top 10.
Emory’s Goizueta Business School and the Texas A&M Mays Business School, for their part, slipped out of the top 20 altogether. Goizueta slipped just slightly, from 20th to 21st, and Mays slid from 18th to 22nd. The University of Virginia Darden School of Business also stumbled, slipping from 12th last year to 17th this year. But the Charlottesville school at least managed to remain in the top 20, thanks in part to strong scores in the student survey and salary categories.
No school, however, lost more ground than the George Washington University School of Business, which fell an eye-popping 14 spots from last year, losing its place among the top 50 business schools in the United States.
Bloomberg BW has made multiple changes to its methodology in recent years, resulting in significant volatility in terms of where schools fall on the list even when not much has changed year over year at the individual schools themselves. This has led many to question the credibility of the ranking overall. That said, Clear Admit’s Alex Brown found this year’s results easier to swallow than some in recent years. “This ranking seems more reasonable to me this year,” he says. “Each of the M7 programs are in the top 10, and the schools I would consider in the top 16 are all in the top 20.”
You can view the complete 2017 Bloomberg Businessweek rankings here.
This article has been edited and republished with permissions from Clear Admit.
Where Did Tex-Mex Cuisine Come From, Anyway? Stanford GSB Investigates
Cultural crossover consumerism often as hard to define as it is to track down. From the origins of craft beer, to new styles of cuisine, tracing the origins of these now normalized products can be a never-ending quest.
The Stanford Graduate School of Business recently dove into that calls the authenticity of the Tex-Mex category into question and explores how the mysterious cuisine came to be.
In a new study coauthored by Lane Professor of Organizations Glenn R. Carroll and former Chicago magazine dining critic Dennis R. Wheaton, the duo analyzed how so-called “Tex-Mex” food emerged. They point to an influential 1972 cookbook entitled “The Cuisines of Mexico” by Diane Kennedy.
According to the authors, Kennedy “drew a bright line between the types of Mexican food served on either side of the U.S.-Mexico border.” Her intention was to “protect the purity of the Mexican category [and] advance the idea that Americanized Mexican food was inferior and inauthentic compared to the cuisines of Mexico.”
Carroll and Wheaton noted some major sociological factors that influenced the emergence of Tex-Mex, namely the cross-border race and class tensions between “Mexicans and poor Mexican-American immigrants, as well as between white Americans and Mexican-Americans.”
Despite Kennedy’s assessment of Tex-Mex as a derogatory and denigrating label, the cuisine—loosely defined by corn chips, crispy tacos, burritos, chili con carne, nachos, fajitas, and combination plates slathered in yellow cheese—flourished in restaurants that catered primarily to non-Mexicans e.g. Taco Bell, Chipotle, Chi-Chi’s, and El Torito.
The study incorporates a quote from Texas food writer Robb Walsh, whose defends the legacy of Tex-Mex, offering a more optimistic take on the mass-produced foodstuff.
“We can all thank Diana Kennedy for inadvertently granting Tex-Mex its rightful place in food history,” Walsh says.
“By convincing us that Tex-Mex wasn’t really Mexican food, she forced us to realize that it was something far more interesting: America’s oldest regional cuisine.”
You can read more about Stanford’s look into the history of Tex-Mex here.
McMaster Nobel Laureate Myron Scholes Shares Insight with Students
The DeGroote School of Business at McMaster Unviersity recently hosted Myron Scholes, a McMaster graduate and nobel laureate who has built a career on the unknown.
In Search of San Francisco’s Best Nonprofit MBA Programs
Even though San Francisco may be thought of as the place to be for entrepreneurship and technology, the city is home to a diverse community of organizations both private and public, both for and not-for-profit.
Business professionals in the city can apply their business acumen and education in a number of ways, whether helping a new venture get on its feet, contributing to some of the largest tech firms in the world, or supporting a mission they’re passionate about. And though such mission-driven organizations center around the cause and not of profit-making, having a strong business leader at the helm is crucial in helping these organizations to achieve their mission.
Students interested in gaining critical operations and management skills to apply in the nonprofit sector may be interested in pursuing an MBA in Nonprofit Management. Professionals with this degree have moved on into major leadership roles in the nonprofit field, whether working as a Nonprofit Program Director, Development Director, or Community Outreach Coordinator. Nonprofit managers are able to flex their muscles in finance, marketing and a number of other areas of business while still focusing their passion on a broader mission of change or aide.
A few business schools in the San Francisco metro area offer the chance for students to focus their MBA in the field of Nonprofit Management, offering a diverse skill set of nonprofit experience combined with a strong business foundation. Below, you can explore the San Francisco MBAs in Nonprofit Management.
San Francisco Nonprofit MBA Programs You Need To Know
Haas School of Business – UC Berkeley
The Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley offers an MBA concentration in Social Sector Leadership through the university’s Center for Social Sector Leadership. Ranked second overall among business schools with a nonprofit focus by U.S. News & World Report, the Haas program trains up-and-coming business leaders to make a social impact and inspire collaboration between sectors.
The Center for Social Sector Leadership offers students a wide variety of courses to take that can help shape various careers in the social sector, such as nonprofit consulting, board leadership, and strategic or financial nonprofit management. In addition to learning inside the classroom, the center also provides a number of opportunities for experiential learning, such as the Berkeley Board Fellows, which places graduate students on nonprofit boards of directors, or the Haas Impact Investing Network, which offers first-hand experience in impact investing for socially-minded MBAs around the country.
San Francisco State University College of Business
The College of Business at San Francisco State University offers at MBA Emphasis on Nonprofit and Social Enterprise Leadership. With the goal of preparing students to take their business skills to mission-driven organizations, the program will teach students to create a coherent organizational vision, apply innovative solutions to address needs, and evaluate the effectiveness of an organization’s programs in meeting goals.
Students in the Nonprofit and Social Enterprise Leadership emphasis will take the core MBA course requirements as well as three courses for their major: Nonprofits, Policy and Society; Innovation for Sustainability; and Seminar in Social Entrepreneurship, or Strategies in Emerging and Developing Economies. Students will also select two electives that can help further shape their education in leadership and creativity.
Stanford University Graduate School of Business
The Stanford Graduate School of Business offers MBA students the opportunity to pursue a Certificate in Public Management and Social Innovation as part of their degree. Through the university’s Center for Social Innovation, MBA students can explore the social sector and prepare for roles as forces for social change throughout the nonprofit, philanthropic, government, or corporate spheres.
To pursue the certificate, MBA students must complete a social innovation experience that allows them exposure to populations affected by a particular social or environmental issue. Students may also work alongside leaders making contributions in the field to fulfill the requirement.
For more on how MBAs are making a greater social impact, check out how these students are making a difference in their own unique way.
