Student Loan Blog : business school

University of Wisconsin Students Win $10K in Business Plan Competition

Student Loan Girl — Thu, 29 May 2008 01:42:00 GMT

Sky Vegetables — the brainchild of University of Wisconsin-Madison business students Keith Agoada and Troy Vosseller — was the grand prize winning idea of the school’s 2008 G. Steven Burrill Business Plan Competition, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (“High-Minded Idea,” May 23, 2008).

Agoada, a senior marketing major, and Vosseller, a graduate student pursuing his MBA, won $10,000 for their plan to construct and operate commercial hydroponic greenhouses on the rooftops of supermarkets across the United States.

Sky Vegetables would employ specially trained hydroponic farmers who would cultivate fruits, vegetables, flowers, and herbs in a nutrient-rich solution instead of soil. Since this liquid weighs significantly less than soil, the students say, the supermarket rooftop greenhouses will not cause any undue strain on the buildings.

Key components of the students’ business model involve an elimination of carbon emissions — no transportation would be required to bring the produce to market — and the use of camera-monitored greenhouses that will allow customers to see where their food is being grown.

"These farms in California — you have no idea what goes on," Agoada said. "We're saying that we're so confident in our product, we'll even show you how we make it."

Agoada and Vosseller have entered their business model into the Wisconsin Governor’s Business Plan Contest. The take-home prize of $200,000 could end up being the seed money to carry the students’ new venture forward.

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Bear Stearns Takeover Leaves Business-School Students Scrambling

Student Loan Girl — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 19:13:00 GMT

BearStearns CEO, Jimmy Cayne, seems to have been the only former Stearns employee to make it out of the JPMorgan Chase buyout relatively unscathed — at least in non-CEO terms — walking away with $61.3 million in sold shares. Even though, in his own high-priced executive world, Cayne took his buyout at a massive loss: Just a year ago, his entire Stearns portfolio was valued at almost $1 billion.

Former Bear Stearns employees, along with Cayne, saw the value of their shares plummet 85 percent in the buyout to a mere $10 a share. Bears Stearns shares were trading at about $67 two weeks before the buyout and as high as $170 a year ago.

Now add to the list of people adversely affected by the Stearns debacle, business-school students whose full-time job and summer internship offers from Bear Stearns have recently been rescinded, according to a BusinessWeek article by Alison Damast (“Bear Stearns Rescinds Job Offers,” April 3, 2008).

A spokesman from JPMorgan Chase won’t disclose how many job offers to soon-to-be college graduates and MBAs have been affected by the dissolution of the firm, at least 12 students at New York University’s Stern School of Business have already received their unhappy phone calls from the company.

According to The New York Times, the final count of rescinded job and internship offers will tally in the dozens (“J.P. Morgan Said to Withdraw Bear Job Offers,” April 3, 2008).

Students Left Out in the Cold

When JPMorgan announced its takeover of failing Bear Stearns on March 16, the status of the student jobs and internships was still uncertain. It wasn’t until April 2 that students who were offered positions in the investment banking, sales, and trading and research units of the former company were notified about the fate of their job and internship positions.

Over the next few weeks, as the school year draws to a close, these students will be frantically trying to nail down offers for replacement positions.

“I’m not sure what we are all supposed to be doing now with the few weeks before start-dates, but I would imagine that, like me, the other 25 or so students who were to start as associates are all in a mad scramble to figure out what the future holds,” one student told BusinessWeek.

In the meantime, students who had their full-time job offers rescinded will be allowed to keep their signing and relocation bonuses and will also be able to use JPMorgan’s career-service resources.

And for those students who will no longer be interning with the company this summer, JPMorgan has offered a full 10 weeks’ pay if they find a new summer position with a nonprofit organization instead.

To Fear or Not to Fear the Economy

Although Bear Stearns is the only investment firm so far this recruiting season to withdraw already-extended job offers, fears about the current state of the economy and its effect, in particular, on the financial-services sector have left business-school students and administrators wondering about the security of jobs and job offers with other firms.

To some, the rescinded Bear Stearns offers recall the results of a similar economic downturn in 2001, Damast writes, when several companies that had hired students were forced to scale back.

Tom Kozicki, board president of the MBA Career Services Council, says he believes the Bear Stearns situation doesn’t necessarily foreshadow what lies ahead for the financial industry, but is definitely something business students need to keep in the back of their mind as they prepare for this particularly shaky job market.

“It sounds like the shoe has dropped. I think it’s unfortunate, but I don’t think it comes as a surprise to most people,” Kozicki told BusinessWeek. “The economy is shaky, [Fed Chairman Ben] Bernanke has indicated that he thinks we are going into a recession and I think that students need to be prepared for some uncertainty in the market.”

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By the Numbers: Top 10 Undergraduate Business Schools

Student Loan Girl — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 18:53:00 GMT

Are you a future MBA who sees yourself building the next Trump–like empire or heading up the new 21^st-century tech giant that will finally unseat Microsoft?

If you’re planning on joining the 20 percent of college students who major in business and you’re on the hunt to find the best business school for undergrads that could give you your head start on mega-mogul success, here’s some help.

We’ve got the vitals on the 10 best from BusinessWeek’s list of the country’s Top 50 Undergrad Business Programs for 2008.

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia

The world’s first collegiate business school, established in 1881, and BusinessWeek’s number-one program for the third year in a row.

Previous Rank: 1
Tuition: $35,916
Full-Time Enrollment: 2,519
Undergraduate Admission Rate: 16%
School Mascot: the Quakers

McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia
Charlottesville, Virginia

Previous Rank: 2
Tuition: $8,690
Full-Time Enrollment: 652
Undergraduate Admission Rate: 34%
School Mascot: the Virginia Cavaliers

Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame
South Bend, Indiana

The Mendoza College offers undergraduate degrees in accountancy, finance, marketing, and management (with your choice of management track in consulting, entrepreneurship, or information technology).

Previous Rank: 7
Tuition: $35,187
Full-Time Enrollment: 1,626
Undergraduate Admission Rate: 29%
School Mascot: the Fighting Irish

Cornell University
Ithaca, New York

Previous Rank: 10
Tuition: $19,291
Full-Time Enrollment: 708
Undergraduate Admission Rate: 37%
School Mascot: the Big Red Bears

Goizueta Business School at Emory University
Atlanta

Previous Rank: 4
Tuition: $34,336
Full-Time Enrollment: 622
Undergraduate Admission Rate: 44%
School Mascot: Dooley, the Spirit of Emory

Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan

Combining a liberal arts and business education, the three-year Bachelor of Business Administration program allows you to apply during your freshman year of college and begin the BBA program as a sophomore. If you’re a high school senior, you may be still be able to apply for the Ross BBA program through the Preferred Admissions process.

Previous Rank: 5
Tuition: $12,585
Full-Time Enrollment: 1,069
Undergraduate Admission Rate: 49%
School Mascot: the Wolverines

Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University
Provo, Utah

Earn your Bachelor of Science in accountancy, management, or information systems.

Previous Rank: 8
Tuition: $3,840
Full-Time Enrollment: 1,616
Undergraduate Admission Rate: 74%
School Mascot: Cosmo the Cougar

New York University Stern School of Business
New York

Previous Rank: 9
Tuition: $36,524
Full-Time Enrollment: 2,335
Undergraduate Admission Rate: 24%
School Mascot: the Bobcats

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Previous Rank: 6
Tuition: $34,986
Full-Time Enrollment: 246
Undergraduate Admission Rate: 12.5%
School Mascot: the Beaver

McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin
Austin, Texas

Choose a major in accounting, finance, international business, marketing, management information systems, management, supply chain management, or engineering route to business for your BBA.

According to the McCombs website, more current CEOs in the S&P 500 have graduated from McCombs than from any other public business school.

Previous Rank: 13
Tuition: $8,908
Full-Time Enrollment: 3,969
Undergraduate Admission Rate: 52% (in 2006)
School Mascot: Bevo the Longhorn

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Listen up, M.B.A.s: Omarosa = Bad, People Skills = Good. So Why Are “Soft Skills” Such a Hard Sell?

Student Loan Girl — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 06:09:00 GMT

Maybe Donald Trump was onto something with The Apprentice, his reality TV show that brought together M.B.A.-wielding execs-in-the-making and street-smart entrepreneurs without a formal education to compete for a $250,000 job running one of his companies.

Trump pitted teams of contestants against each other in offbeat challenges like grooming dogs, running a carwash and renovating a motel, that allowed viewers (occasional eye-rolling aside) to observe, along with the judges, which candidates possessed more than just business savvy and truly had the leadership skills needed to get the job done and motivate their team to victory.

Being a personable leader and a strong communicator are qualities that corporate recruiters want to see in their new M.B.A. hires. But a report out of DePaul University shows business students don’t believe these “soft skills” will help them get jobs, according to an article by Katherine Mangan that appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education (“Companies and Business Students Differ on What Skills M.B.A. Programs Should Teach,” Aug. 2, 2007).

M.B.A. Students Sabotaging Themselves

Didn’t The Apprentice teach us anything? Remember Omarosa? Just seeing her name may bring on an involuntary cringe. Obviously intelligent, not only did she not get the Trump job, but she was on the receiving end of the infamous “You’re fired!” pretty early in the game.

In booting her off the show, Trump saw the same thing Omarosa’s teammates and the audience at home did: She had horrendous people skills and failed miserably at team-building. In fact, some of the contestants on her teams would stop trying to do well in their challenges—they would have rather lost as a team and risked one of them being sent home than seen Omarosa be successful.

Despite the snippets of real-life lessons imparted to us by reality TV, the two assistant professors of management who conducted the DePaul study say students want no part in acquiring people skills.

“Research shows that students increasingly harbor negative attitudes toward” courses that teach or accommodate people-oriented skills because students don’t believe these types of soft skills will make them more marketable, the two DePaul professors say. But their study also found that these abilities that M.B.A. students are dismissing are exactly what recruiters are looking for.

Study Reveals Disconnect Between Students and Recruiters

The DePaul professors, Robert Rubin and Erich Dierdorff, took their information from a U.S. Department of Labor database compiled from the interviews of 8,600 managers in 2006. “The managers, who represented 52 occupations, including funeral-home directors and corporate chief executives, were asked what skills they valued most in their new employees,” Mangan writes.

“The researchers then compared those answers with the results of their own study of 373 M.B.A. programs and responses from 118 business-school administrators,” Mangan elaborates.

Rubin and Dierdoff’s study, “How Relevant is the M.B.A? Assessing the Alignment of M.B.A. Curricula and Managerial Competencies,” found that most business school administrators agreed that people skills were important but noticeably absent in graduate school curricula—conceivably, because students don’t want courses that emphasize those skills.

“This finding supports recent assertions that students’ general disdain for people-focused course work drives considerable policy decisions regarding curricula,” Rubin and Dierdoff write. But since it’s that very “people-focused course work” that could give M.B.A. graduates the skill set employers are looking for, Rubin and Dierdoff warn, “this finding may suggest that with respect to designing a relevant M.B.A., the customer is not always right.”

People Skills as Crucial as Boardroom Prowess

So business students hate soft skills and corporate recruiters want to see candidates with them. What’s an M.B.A. program to do?

Maybe they should invite past winners of The Apprentice to come speak to business grads about the perils of being unapproachable and so stuck on textbook and technical learning that there’s no room for learning how to interact as part of a team, how to manage conflict, or how to bring disparate people together to problem-solve on the fly.

While reality TV and real life can be vastly different, the underlying truth is that no one likes a jerk, even if that jerk could improve your bottom line.

The Education Finance Advisors at NextStudent can help you figure in all your college expenses so that you get the student loan that best suits your needs. Don’t get caught short. Go to www.nextstudent.com for all your student loan needs.

Check back here next Friday for my next blog on Campus Life.

Student Loan Girl

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