New GMAC Report Gives New Warnings for Global Talent Search
A rapidly changing global economy and prohibitive immigration laws are making the search for international talent difficult for U.S. business schools.
Continue reading…H-1B Visa Challenges and Post-MBA Industry Employment Outlook
Immigration is in a precarious place in the United States. While media tend to focus on asylum and family separation, the Trump administration has taken aim at the H-1B Visa program. As Clear Admit previously outlined, the H-1B is necessary for any foreign-born individuals who want to work in the United States. Part of the Trump administration’s “America First” policy, the increased attention given to this visa program has created multiple issues for international students and the businesses that hire them.
The first issue that most international MBAs who want to work in the United States will face is the lack of companies who are interested in hiring them. According to the 2018 GMAC Corporate Recruiters Survey, only 47 percent—down from 55 percent in 2017—of all companies surveyed in the United States intended to hiring international candidates. Students interested in working in finance, health care, manufacturing, and nonprofit sectors may want to change their plans as these are the sectors least likely to hire internationals. Only 11 percent of health care firms surveyed said they plan to hire international candidates in 2018, while 14 percent were willing, but had no plans. Seventy-five percent—the highest among the reporting industries—said they would not hire international personnel. Seventy-two percent of non-profit/government agencies and 60 percent of manufacturing companies also responded that they would not be hiring international candidates. The best sectors for international graduates are consulting and technology. Thirty-seven and 39 percent, relatively, reported that they plan to hire international candidates. Over a quarter of companies in both industries reported that they would be willing to hire internationally, but did not have concrete plans to do so.
The reason that it is so hard for international MBA graduates is the nature of the H-1B visa process. If an employer chooses an international graduate and is willing to sponsor their application, neither the firm nor the employee can be sure that the employee will be chosen for the visa lottery.
A current international first-year student at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business tells Clear Admit that they haven’t second-guessed their decision to attend a U.S. school:
“I do think about visas, but I am not worried. I look at my MBA from a top school as a long-term investment. I am confident it will deliver returns in many ways throughout my future. My advice to other international students is 1) know why you want the MBA and how precisely you want to utilize it before arriving to school and 2) complete the company research and practice to be extra prepared for recruiting.”
The number of international job-seekers in the United States has declined over the last two years from its peak of 236,000 in 2016. However, the number of applicants for H-1B visas remains high—190,000 people applied for 85,000 H1-B visas in 2018, filling the slots in five days, according to a U.S. Citizenship and Immigrant Services (USCIS) survey.
In addition to the small number of slots, applicants have to deal with the fact that USCIS has increased discretion over how visas are distributed. Although they are generally three years in length, H-1B visas under Trump’s USCIS have been of increasingly bizarre lengths. As noted in the lawsuit, ITServe Alliance v. USCIS, USCIS has issued visas that last one day and 12 days. One specific visa was expired for three weeks before it was received by the recipient. This has led to increased uncertainty around international MBA students getting the cover that they need to work in the United States.
If an international MBA student has received their three-year H-1B visa and has their desired position, he or she might run into difficulty being with their loved ones in the United States. H-1B holders can bring their partners over to stay with them on an H-4 visa while they wait for permanent residency; however, the Trump administration has spoken openly about eliminating this program. While legislation has been proffered to ensure that this program stays in place, the legislation’s chances of becoming law are slim to nil.
Although the current situation is grim, there are efforts being made to improve the situation. Tech firms, a primary beneficiary of the H-1B visa program, have been lobbying Congress to increase the 85,000-person cap for the visas. In addition, there is support among both parties in Congress to ensure that the H-4 program stays in place.
However, this might be too little, too late. These various difficulties have caused a decline in the number of international applicants at U.S.-based MBA programs. According to the GMAC 2018 Application Trends Survey Report, in the two years of the Trump administration, the number of international applicants to full-time MBA programs has decreased 13 percent.
With the system as it is oriented now, being an international MBA student will remain challenging. Tuck’s Emma He T’17 suggests that fellow (and hopeful) international students “target companies early, be willing to expand your search areas, and/or leverage your background for potential visa exceptions” in order to “mitigate visa concerns.”
Relief might come in the future, but it appears that putting America first will hurt U.S. MBA programs.
This article has been edited and republished with permissions from its original source, Clear Admit.
Election Day: What Schools are Saying
It’s election day in the U.S., so for our international readers: whoops! Let’s check out some of the day’s big stories coming out of U.S. schools.
Engineered Electioneering – Kellogg Insight
“When it comes to persuading voters, the timing of a candidate’s message may be as important as the message itself,” Kellogg Insight explains.
The overall conclusion of how to approach election messaging comes from new research by Angela Y. Lee, Professor of Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management. With Concordia University of Montréal Assistant Professor Hakkyun Kim and University of Minnesota Professor Akshay R. Rao, the trio’s research finds surprising details that former U.S. President Barack Obama successfully utilized in 2008.
In short, the group’s research finds that voters are more responsive to grander, large-scale ideas the further the election is away. However, as Election Day draws closer, more concrete ideas take precedent.
“[Obama] was emphasizing abstract themes and capturing the imagination of caucus goers, while his opponents were capturing the attention of the D.C. establishment, who then spent a fair amount of time dissecting and critiquing their various plans to fix health care, get out of Iraq, and what have you,” Rao says of Obama’s 2008 campaign.
Northwestern Kellogg research finds that sweeping campaign messaging is more effective when Election Day is further away; a campaign tactic utilized heavily by Barack Obama in 2008.
The trio note that this approach goes beyond politics. In fact, they argue, the methods can be utilized successfully by marketing in other industries.
Insights from the study, Lee notes, may help consumer goods marketers develop more persuasive messages and may also help public health officials design more effective campaigns against such health threats as obesity and smoking. For example, she says, messages that urge people to lose weight or quit smoking as an immediate goal should provide concrete information on how the objective can be achieved.
You can find out more about the research here.
Even a Few Bots Can Shift Public Opinion in Big Ways – The Conversation
As the political landscape rapidly shifts in the U.S. and elsewhere, the internet bot game becomes increasingly important. In The Conversation, Tauhid Zaman, Associate Professor of Operations Management, MIT Sloan School of Management analyzes just how much of an impact these elements may have on Election Day.
His research found that bots had a much smaller presence than others may have speculated: “less than 1 percent of the active Twitter users.”
In addition, Zaman’s work, with his students net another surprising result: Twitter bots helped Hillary Clinton in 2016 more than Donald Trump.
The reason for this, Zaman concludes, is that the effectiveness is not due to the volume, but rather how much individual bots perform. The research finds that there were more Trump-supporting bots in ’16, however, Clinton bots tweeted more on average. He does, however, note that the research only gives a small window into the potential impact bots have.
It’s worth noting that our analysis looked at a relatively small number of users, especially when compared to the voting population. And it was only during a relatively short period of time around a specific event in the campaign. Therefore, they don’t suggest anything about the overall election results. But they do show the potential effect bots can have on people’s opinions.
Click here to read more about Taman’s work.
The Election Just Ahead – The Harvard Gazette
Harvard staff writer Christina Pazzanese, in her newest piece for The Harvard Gazette, details the relative uncertainty of what may happen on Election Day this year. “With polling often inaccurate in the last election, no one can confidently predict what the results will be this time, despite any evident trend lines going in,” she writes.
The focus of her piece lies on three principle elements: youth turnout; hacking; and ideology. On youth turnout, Pazzanese immediately notes that youth demographics have the worst statistical rates of turnout cycle after cycle in the U.S. With infused commitment to voter registration at the Boston university, turnout could reach a record high. However, like Pazzanese says, polling can be “often inaccurate.”
If results from a new Harvard Institute of Politics (IOP) Youth Poll are accurate, turnout among Harvard students could reach a high. Forty percent of voters age 18‒29 say they will definitely vote in the midterm, according to the findings released Oct. 29. Though poll director John Della Volpe said the organizers don’t expect that many to turn out, past trends indicate that, even accounting for the usual gap of -7.5 points between those who say they will vote and those who actually do, the figure suggests young voters will turn out in significantly greater numbers than in many years past. The only midterms in which young voters turned out at a greater rate than their typical 18‒20 percent were in 1986 and 1994, he said.
In regards to voter ideology, Pazzanese paints a more ambiguous outlook.
“Amid such rapid change, political analysts and practitioners have struggled to keep pace, especially since 2016 showed how off-track most had gotten. Many hoping to understand how voters think and behave now recognize that polling and opinion data aren’t delivering a rich enough portrait of where the electorate is moving ideologically, and why.”
Tackling ideology movement in 2018 is endearingly challenging, but left-leaning political data service Catalist, co-founded by current CEO Laura Quinn, a visiting fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at HKS, may have a new approach. The company organized voters into less-than-traditional groups, by approaching potential voters in a different manner.
“So instead of asking questions about expected topics like the Affordable Care Act or gun ownership, which cause people to self-sort into partisan groups, Catalist asks about things that don’t signal an obvious right or left response, but gets at someone’s values. These are queries like ‘Is it morally good or bad to leave a dog out in the rain, or for a soldier to refuse to obey a potentially illegal order from commanders?'” Pazzanese writes. The results are as follows:
Quinn notes the grouping is not a total encapsulation of the electorate, however. “None of these things perfectly explains why people are the way they are. People are complicated, and they change. It’s the constellation of things that you believe that give you a sense of the person.”
You can read more about election day from The Harvard Gazette here.
Supreme Court Ideology, Deniability, and More – Chicago News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from Chicago business schools this week.
Supreme Court Justices Become Less Impartial and More Ideological When Casting the Swing Vote – Kellogg Insights
In a new paper coauthored by Northwestern Kellogg Associate Professor of Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences Jörg Spenkuch and Emory University’s Tom S. Clark and B. Pablo Montagnes, the trio found that “the effect of a justice’s ideology on how he or she votes essentially doubles when the vote is pivotal.”
Spenkuch explains, “”Our idea of a good judge is that of an impartial umpire. But justices in some cases disregard the role of the umpire in favor of that of the politician.”
“During confirmation hearings, no justice ever admits that they’re interested in making policy. There is a nontrivial number of cases that would be decided differently if justices did not vote strategically. It draws into doubt the notion of the Supreme Court as an institution where litigants come to get justice.”
You can read more about the trio’s research here.
Sidestepping the Pitfalls of Overconfidence with Plausible Deniability – Mendoza Ideas & News
In Notre Dame University Mendoza College of Business postdoctoral Research and Teaching Associate Nathan Meikle’s forthcoming Journal of Personality and Social Psychology paper, he illuminates how people in positions of power—politicians, business leaders—can successfully toe the line between confidence and arrogance.
According to the article, “expressing confidence non-verbally through making eye contact, gesturing, adopting an expansive posture or speaking in a strong voice allows people to enjoy the social benefits of expressing confidence while simultaneously reducing the risk they’ll be punished for overconfidence.”
The key is to leverage plausible deniability — “the ability to deny responsibility due to a lack of concrete evidence.”
Meikle explains, “The plausible deniability hypothesis explains why overconfidence sometimes, but not always, is punished. For example, verifiably overconfident claims, void of plausible deniability, will face consequences. However, there are a number of ways people can create plausible deniability.”
“Future claims necessarily enjoy some degree of plausible deniability because they cannot be proven wrong in the moment,” Meikle continues. “Thus, individuals boasting about future events would be expected to enjoy the benefits of expressing confidence while simultaneously sidestepping the potential costs. However, even if overconfident claims are eventually proven false, people can still create plausible deniability by undermining the messenger, such as calling it ‘fake news.’”
“One strategy is to make audacious claims about future events. President Trump frequently makes bold claims, such as he alone can bring coal mining jobs back to West Virginia,” Meikle explains / Photo via DOMINICK REUTER/AFP/Getty Images
You can read the full article from Mendoza Ideas & News here. “Is Overconfidence a Social Liability? The Effect of Verbal Versus Nonverbal Expressions of Confidence” is also available here.
Hurricane Victims Face Long, Uncertain Road to Recovery – Gies College of Business Blog
U. Illinois Gies College of Business Professor of Finance Tatyana Deryugina, who studies the financial impacts of natural disasters on families, explains that “even after the floodwaters recede … families displaced by Hurricane Florence will face months and months of financial hardship.”
Deryugina explains, “If you have kids, there’s the school closures—so parents might have to figure out what to do with their children in the meantime. Even if your workplace is open, you may not be able to go back and work. Building materials will be expensive in the short-term. A lot of people rebuilding causes supply issues.”
“Even if you rebuild, and it looks nice and new, people are going to remember this event. Not only are you going to face building and repair costs, but now your home is worth less than it was before”
She adds, “What we’re seeing with Florence is rivers overflowing, which is worse than just having the floodwater accumulate from the heavy rain because that’s going to be longer-lasting.”
“New Orleans was below sea level, so the flooding just persisted. The longer areas stay uninhabitable, the more people are going to leave and just not return. If you’re somewhere for a couple months, it becomes much easier to stay there.”
You can read the full article here.
Top Business Schools Respond to Repeal of Diversity Guidelines
Diversity in the college admissions process was dealt a blow in early July when the Trump administration withdrew a guidance that encouraged affirmative action in regards to enrollment. The move was announced when the departments of Justice and Education retracted several letters and memos that advised schools on how they could consider diversity in admissions and other various decisions. Continue reading…
MIT Examines the Appeal of Lying, and More – Boston News
Let’s explore some of the most interesting stories that have emerged from Boston business schools this week.
When the ‘Lying Demagogue’ is the Authentic Candidate – MIT Sloan Newsroom
One of the major questions in the post-Trump U.S. public discourse is how voters could possibly support a political figure that so brazenly bends the truth at every possible turn. In a new paper published in February’s American Sociological Review, MIT Sloan School of Management professor and deputy dean Ezra Zuckerman Sivan attempts to rationalize the appeal of a lying demagogue:
“When a candidate asserts an obvious untruth especially as part of a general attack on establishment norms, his anti-establishment listeners will pick up on his underlying message that the establishment is illegitimate and, therefore, that candidate will have an ‘authentic’ appeal despite the falsehoods and norm-breaking.”
Read more about Zuckerman Sivan’s research here.
What Most People Get Wrong About Men and Women – Harvard Business Review
The ongoing pay gap dialogue has inspired both men and women to step up and pressure the organizations that employ them to commit more aggressively to gender parity. In a recent Harvard Business Review article, HBS researchers Catherine H. Tinsley and Robin J. Ely explore the harmful rhetoric that drives many of these well-meaning initiatives and offer a four-step alternative approach for people to:
1) Question the narrative
2) Generate a plausible alternative explanation
3) Change the context and assess the results
4) Promote continual learning.
“The solution to women’s lagged advancement is not to fix women or their managers but to fix the conditions that undermine women and reinforce gender stereotypes. By taking an inquisitive, evidence-based approach to understanding behavior, companies can not only address gender disparities but also cultivate a learning orientation and a culture that gives all employees the opportunity to reach their full potential.”
“When people are less embedded, they are also less aware of opportunities for stretch assignments and promotions, and their supervisors may be in the dark about their ambitions. But when women fail to “lean in” and seek growth opportunities, it is easy to assume that they lack the confidence to do so—not that they lack pertinent information.” – Catherine H. Tinsley and Robin J. Ely
You can check out the full article here.
Unity in Diversity: The Babson Latin American Forum – Babson Blog
The Babson College F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business recently hosted its Latin American Forum, which featured esteemed guest speaker and Open English founder Andres Moreno, whose online platform teaches English, and Santa Teresa rum CEO Alberto Vollmer.
Moreno and Vollmer both used their lectures as an opportunity to examine how entrepreneurship can co-exist with social impact. Vollmer discussed the Alcatraz Rugby Project, a recognized program of social reintegration for young people with behavioral problems. Moreno chose to focus on how his delivers the best product and service to its consumers.
You read a more in-depth survey of the Babson Latin American Forum here.
