Schools With Top CEO Alumni - Poets&Quants

Harvard Business School

If you want to be a CEO of a venture-backed company, you may want to attend Harvard or Stanford.

Crunch Base found that these two schools are among the top educations affiliated for CEOs of startups that raised $1 million or more in the past year.

“Business schools are big. While MBA programs may be seeing fewer applicants, the degree remains quite popular among startup CEOs,” Joanna Glasner, a contributor at Tech Crunch, writes. “At Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, more than half of the CEOs on our list graduated as business school alum.”

Harvard fares better than Stanford when it comes to education future CEOs than founders, Glasner says.

Here Are The Top Schools That Startup Ceos Attended.

Among the data, Ivy Leage schools and large research universities tend to be popular schools for graduation successful CEOs.

Another interesting finding from the data is that a number of these top business schools enroll only a small percentage of students at their respective universities. Yet, these schools produce the mass majority of CEOs.

“Wharton School of Business degrees, for instance, accounted for the majority of CEO alumni from the University of Pennsylvania,” Glasner writes. “Harvard Business School also graduated more than half of the Harvard-affiliated CEOs. And at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, the share was nearly half.”

Methodology

It’s important to note that the data is based on an entire school and not just solely MBA programs. While this doesn’t significantly impact rankings, Crunchbase notes that it does create some margin of error.

In addition, a number of business schools also issue advanced or executive MBA degrees. While Crunchbase includes both MBAs and advanced MBAs in the total number of funded startups, it doesn’t include short-term degree recipients for the largest rounds in the listing of funding totals.

Sources: Crunch Base, Tech Crunch

Continuing Business Education As An MBA Alumni

Business schools are working overtime to get their MBA alumni back on campus again.

For example, Harvard Business School offers advanced management programs aimed at senior executives and MBA alumni. According to Financial Times, more than a quarter (26.1%) of respondents who studied in their advanced management programs and 21.5% of those on lower-level general management programs already had an MBA.

“As market volatility, socioeconomic trends, and disruptive innovation reshape the playing field, visionary companies are turning to business leaders who can think globally and compete strategically,” the Harvard Business School’s website reads. “The Advanced Management Program (AMP) empowers senior executives with the analytical skills and cross-functional perspective to drive performance across domains, industries, and borders.”

Business Schools Attempt to Keep Alumni Close

The idea behind such advanced management programs is to keep alumni close.

In December 2010, Wharton announced “tuition-free” courses every seven years for its MBA alumni, Financial Times reports. UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business announced a similar initiative of two free days of executive education for all its MBA alumni within five years of graduation.

“As this is our pilot year, we are actively monitoring alumni selection and experience, so that we can tweak the parameters to better address the alumni population,” Jane Simons, head of life-long learning, tells Financial Times.

At Pepperdine’s Graziadio Business School, the MBA Plus program is offered to MBA graduates with a 75% discount on tuition for the first four units and a 25% discount on additional units taken per academic year.

Gaining Knowledge and Expanding Networks

For many MBA alumni, continued education beyond an MBA can come at a cost. That’s especially true when they are expected to pay for executive programs out of their own pocket, rather than being funded through an employer. But the benefits from an executive education are worth it to some.

Sung-Joo Lee, an MBA graduate of University of New South Wales Business School in Australia, paid for Stanford’s six-week executive program out of her own pocket. For her, the boost of confidence from an American degree and the expanded network she gained were worth the price

“I always had this chip on my shoulder about not going to a top US university,” she tells Financial Times. “To be really frank, I didn’t learn anything [on the program], but I had two people approach me with [job] offers.”

Kanika Gupta Shori, an MBA graduate from Dehli’s AIMA, started her own cross-border brokerage. In hopes of gaining more knowledge to improve her company, Shori enrolled in a five-week Advanced Management Program at Wharton.

Shori says her Wharton education gave her time to reflect as well as an expanded network and overall perspective.

One of the most important lessons from the course was about human resources and “connecting much more with my employees”, she tells Financial Times. “One area I can work on is understanding what people are trying to say and reading between the lines.”

Sources: Financial Times, Harvard Business School, Pepperdine University

The GMAT Prep Crunch

What GMAT Score Do You Need?

A GMAT score can likely make-or-break your acceptance to B-school, but what exactly separates a good score from a bad score?

Find MBA recently broke down how various schools gauge GMAT scores among applicants.

“The GMAT is one of the few ways we can evaluate the entire pool of candidates with the same measuring stick, as we deal with people from all around the world,” Brandon Kirby, director of MBA admissions at the Rotterdam school, tells Find MBA.

A Breakdown Of The GMAT Score

The GMAT consists of five actual scores, according to Find MBA

• A total score, ranging from 200-800
• A math sub-score, ranging from 0-60
• A verbal sub-score, ranging from 0-60
• A score for your AWA, ranging from 0-6
• An Integrated Reasoning sub-score, ranging from 1-8

Additionally, Find MBA also breaks down what scores will put you in the top 10% of all test takers.

• Total score: 710 – 800
• Quantitative sub-score: 51+
• Verbal sub-score: 40+
• Integrated reasoning: 8
• Essay: 6

At Rotterdam, Kirby says the verbal score is taken highly into account.

“Because our cohorts are 97% international, it is vital for a student to have a good command of English. First, to be successful in the program, but especially for job placement opportunities afterwards,” Kirby tells Find MBA. “Also, if a score isn’t as high as we’d like it to be, we tend to look really closely at each section. There have been times when we have rejected candidates because of scores in the individual sections – even if the overall score is in line with our acceptance criteria.”

GMAT Scores on the Rise at Top B-Schools

At top B-schools, it seems that GMAT scores are continuously increasing. P&Q found that only seven schools in the top 50 have seen a drop-off over the last five years, while two have remained flat and data for two others data is incomplete.

According to the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), which administers the GMAT, the mean GMAT score over the last three years was 556.04. In 767,833 tests taken between 2015 and 2017, no one scored lower than 220.

Dennis Yim, director of academics at Kaplan Test Prep, says prospective applicants should follow a few general guidelines when it comes to looking at GMAT scores.

“Our biggest piece of advice is do your research,” Yim tells Find MBA. “What is the average GMAT score of accepted students at the schools you’re interested in? What do the admissions departments have to say about required minimum scores? Once you’ve done your research, use these numbers in your goal-setting process.”

Russ Morgan, senior associate dean for full-time programs at Duke Fuqua, says that while the GMAT is an important element of the application, it is just one component of many.

“Our admissions team has long had a commitment to looking at a candidate holistically, beyond a test score alone,” he tells P&Q. “Ultimately, our admissions team is most interested in if a candidate’s passions and purpose align with our leadership philosophy and approach. We feel that’s a much stronger predictor of a student’s success at Fuqua and beyond than a test score alone.”

Sources: Find MBA, Poets & Quants, Poets & Quants

MBA Programs Embrace STEM

If you’re a STEM professional looking to get an MBA, you’re in luck.

Find MBA reports that MBA programs for STEM professionals is on the rise.

Shortage of STEM workers

Over the next decade, the need for STEM professionals will outnumber supply to the tune of 1 million in the US will according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics.

To make matters worse, researchers found that for every two students graduating with a US STEM degree, only one is employed in STEM.

“There is a shortage of skilled workers in many different STEM fields, and there has been a particular explosion in demand in recent years for students with skills in analytics,” Greg DeCroix, director of the Supply Chain Management specialization in Wisconsin’s STEM-designated MBA course, tells Find MBA.

Business Schools Training STEM Professionals

To combat the shortage of STEM workers issue, a number of business schools are accepting more students with STEM backgrounds and offering MBAs and master’s programs specifically geared for STEM professionals.

At Wharton, a record 32% of the school’s incoming MBA students in 2017 had undergraduate degrees in STEM. In 2016, the number was 28%. The school also decreased the number of students with financial backgrounds to only 33% — down three percentage points a year earlier, according to P&Q.

The Wisconsin School of Business MBA program was the first in country to receive STEM designation for its two-specialized MBA programs. Specifically, Wisconsin’s operations and technology management and supply chain management specializations were recognized for their “strong STEM orientation and focus on quantitative learning approaches.”

“This designation is a direct result of enhancements we have made to these specialized programs and our specialization model of the Wisconsin MBA that provides intensive career preparation and real-world learning experiences for our MBA students,” Enno Siemsen, professor of operations and information management and academic director of the Wisconsin School of Business’s Erdman Center for Operations and Technology Management, says in a media statement. “This designation highlights the unique capability of the Wisconsin Full-Time MBA Program to spur innovation, promote creative approaches, and generate advancements in our career specialization areas.”

MIT offers a MBA Entrepreneurship & Innovation Track, which MIT says focuses on “launching and developing innovative and emerging technology companies and emphasizes the integration of academic lessons, team practice, and real-world application in entrepreneurship.”

Through this track, students can gain access to initiatives and experiential learning opportunities such as the Silicon Valley Study Tour, where students visit leaders in the Silicon Valley in industries like venture capital, startups, and successful enterprises in STEM fields.

Ultimately, the goal of these programs is to create more STEM workers who will go on to work in STEM fields and create more STEM opportunities for those who follow.

For MIT, applications to its certificate course have already increased by 30% this year. Bill Aulet, managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, tells Find MBA that roughly 10% of MIT’s MBAs go on to start their own enterprises.

Sources: Find MBA, Bureau of Labor and Statistics, Economic Policy Institute, Poets & Quants, Wisconsin School of Business, MIT

 

The post Schools With Top CEO Alumni appeared first on Poets&Quants.

from Poets&Quants
via IFTTT