If you're thinking that now might be a good time to get off Wall Street and lay low by applying to business school, you aren't alone. Applications to business schools are booming. "It's the second-largest year-over-year surge in applications to full-time programs since 2002, and the highest level of increase in five years," Business Week reports.
The sharpest increase is in mid-tier business schools. Penn State's Smeal College of Business, saw a 39% increase in applications, for instance. But even MIT's Sloan School of Management and NYU's Stern School of Business saw double digit increases in application volume.
I've got some upsetting news to share: a bunch of white collar criminals in-training have suffered a serious setback, their dreams of one day ripping off other people for sport and possibly--if cards were played correctly-- serving time, shattered to pieces.
Morgan Stanley is said to be cutting back on its b-school tuition reimbursement, from 100 percent to 10k a year. "Sucks for those of us working through 10k/quarter part-time programs," said our tipster who just wants to learn, damn it. "This sets me back 50k or so. There goes the last of my loyalty to the company."
The Wharton School announced the death of Thomas Dunfee, former Vice-Dean of the school's undergraduate division, in an email to students yesterday. Dunfee, a professor in the Legal Studies and Business Ethics division, worked for 34 years at the school. R.I.P. Tom. (Here's a link to the memorial site Wharton set up for him.)
So what does this mean for the school housed under the Eye of Sauron, a.k.a Huntsman Hall? Let the speculation begin on who Wharton brings in to replace Dunfee and teach the up-and-coming "masters of the universe" "ethics."
--by DealBreaker intern and Senior B-School Correspondent Travis.
The story about Wharton graduate Edward Anderton and his 22 year old girlfriend Jocelyn Kirsch is, as far as we can tell, mostly about the hotness of Kirsch. We think that it's possible that both were arrested last week for identity theft but it's hard to tell because the newspapers keep running pictures of Jocelyn in a bikini. Apparently, the couple had some kind of fake ID machine in their apartment and the keys to their neighbor's apartments.
Connie and Clod Lovebirds In Stolen ID Spree [New York Post]
So John Fitzgerald, who’s getting really sick and tired of engaging in actual auto-fellatio (rough on the lower back), engages in some prose auto-f today, on his website. The topic? Online dating. He’s an expert, you know. “Let me give you a tip about internet dating,” Johnny says. Please do! “Men lie…women lie.” Let us give you a tip, John: no one ever called you a “liar,” but simply “the poster child for late-term abortions,” if memory serves. But speaking of maybe-lies? “I graduated from Penn. [But] I took my name out of the database to avoid donation solicitations .” He also lists a few not so good people (“Stalin. Hitler. Bin Laden. John Fitzgerald Page.”) and in yet another act of unjustified arrogance, ranks himself at #1. After you read about Ann, read this. The whole thing’s after the jump, because we’re guessing that the Johnster gets off on page views (can’t really blame him there), and we couldn’t live with ourselves if we gave him another sparkling accomplishment to add to his Match profile.
A note from "THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD". Stalin. Hitler. Bin Laden. John Fitzgerald Page. Somehow, I am ranked at #1. My crime - murder? treason? pedophilia? rape? No, worse. A woman winked at me on the internet. I sent her an introdutory email. She tried to rescind her initial wink by saying we weren't a "personality" match . She ascertained that from my first email without ever speaking to me. Here is my crime. Instead of just letting her float away, I let her know that I feel that if you approach me, you should meet my standards and listed facts about myself.
She took this personal email, sent to her only, and sent it out to everyone in America. In turn, every blog in America has villified me. I am being threatened with bodily harm, told to kill and neuter myself, that I am a douchebag, etc. My phone rings and email hums day and night, even the New York Times has called (Is this really an noteworthy news story)?. People feel it is okay to post my phone number, address and personal email in attack blogs.
Let me ask you this? Which friend would you rather have - a straight shooter who doesn't waste your time, or someone who can take any PRIVATE email, phone call or letter and put it out there to the world if you cross them? Anyone of you could be in my shoes overnight. Do you feel you have any expectation of privacy when you talk on the phone, send someone an email or a letter? I do. I did not threaten her in any way.
RE: John Fitzgerald, whose yet-to-be announced vasectomy will be the one good thing he’s ever done for humanity:
For what it's worth, I looked up John Fitzgerald in Wharton's alumni database and there's nobody in it that fits his description.
How in god's name will he convince women to keep not having sex with him now? Our tears are dried slightly in remembering that he still has his 8.9 rating on Hot or Not to fall back on, but, still, this is almost as bad as the time we found out Aleksey Vayner wasn’t actually a ninja.
Is probably what corporate financier/thespian John Fitzgerald would say to girls in bars, if he could find the blank space to add “repel females on dry land” to a To Do list already jam-packed with higher-priority pursuits, like acting as the poster child for late-term abortions and bench pressing, by his own estimation, over 1200 lbs, 4 times a week, at LA Fitness. For now, he’s relegated to doing so in this glorious land we call the internet, where totally unjustified arrogance is encouraged, and saying stuff like “I have an MBA from the top school in the country” and was rated an “8.9 on Hot or Not” can get you laid. Or, maybe, not. Here’s one little correspondence Fitzy—who is more than likely a friend and sometime wingman of “golden child” Chip Bierbaum—had with young lady not too long ago.
From: [redacted]
Sent: Thursday, October 04, 2007 11:01 AM
To: [friends]
Subject: Match Nightmare
So I winked at this guy on match.com. Should have known better considering his screen name was "IvyLeagueAlum."
The Illinois State University College of Business is implementing a dress code that will eliminate the schleppiness of T-shirts, sweats, jeans, hoodies, life-partner-beaters, baby-tees, pleather vests, banana hammocks, juicy couture and cargo thongs found in most college classrooms these days.
ISU is going strictly business casual (the range of which is pictured), instead of student-chic. The punishment for not adhering to the fashion police will be expulsion from class (or the Cabo "case-trip"?) and academically punitive in nature (you get a pass-minus), which seems a bit over-the-top.
In another move to increase "overall professionalism" at the school, ISU may take its own generic-looking "Red Bird" mascot and finally formalize it into the "Cardinal" that it has been ripping off for ages.
Thomas Robertson was named the new dean of Wharton late last week. Some details on the marketing man, myth and legend, from the Penn press release:
Robertson, the Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Marketing at Emory, is an expert in marketing strategy and innovation with extensive international experience in higher education and the business community. He was dean of Goizueta from 1998 to 2004 and is widely credited with building it into one of the strongest schools at Emory, positioning it as a leading international business school.
Robertson was a professor at Wharton for 23 years and head of the Marketing Department before taking the Emory post, after a brief stint as deputy dean of London Business School. During his tenure the endowment of Emory’s B-school doubled.
Does Robertson’s appointment and marketing expertise signal a shift in Wharton’s focus from corporate finance, or at least from bankers who correct you when you say they went to Penn (it’s WHARTON, alright!)? Robertson is already talking about fluffiness like becoming more “global” and bolstering the school’s position in the international market, which does not bode well for people who prefer a few more hours of default swap price modeling to intramural basketball.
Wharton is ranked #3 behind Harvard and Stanford in the very meaningful U.S. News and World Report Rankings.
Believe it or not, there are a bunch of prominent businesspeople who did not go to Harvard. Some of these people were even rejected, according to the most recent feature in 02138 Magazine. Here's a profile of the famous Harvard rejects in business:
Warren Buffet –
Since Warren Buffet grew up before college was invented, he could not experience the thin envelope from Harvard College. Instead Buffet got rejected from HBS in 1950 at age 19 for being “too young,” and for being a prominent sharecropper (seriously – Buffet used his paper boy proceeds as a youth to start a “farmland leasing” racket).
Jann Wenner –
Wenner got rejected by Harvard College in 1964 and went on to drop out of Berkeley to construct the ultimate college application essay – Rolling Stone (at least originally). The magazine’s first few years certainly captured a great “unique journey of self-discovery” narrative like the ones fawned over by college admissions officers.
Ted Turner –
Little Ted got turned away from Harvard College in 1957 for being “an average student,” which, if you’re rich, means “fucking retarded.” After getting a 470 on his SATs, Ted ended up sailing at Brown, where he was eventually kicked out for rich-kid antic misbehavior and an unhealthy love for swabbing the poop deck. What on earth do you have to do to get kicked out of Brown?
Scott McNealy -
McNealy, the chairman and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, is one of those rare Harvard take-backs. McNealy graduated from Harvard with an A.B. in economics but was rejected from HBS. McNealy, who had a notoriously crap work ethic and a penchant for hockey (buggery on ice), eventually went to Stanford Business School, but not before the Cardinal rejected him twice.
Read more about some prominent non-businesspeople after the jump...
Q: My son is a freshman and a competitive athlete at a top Division III university. But the school's basketball team has lost every game this season, and he wants to transfer out. He is interested in business and expects to get his M.B.A. He wants to know if it will negatively affect his chances for acceptance into a top business school if he transfers to a college with a less-competitive academic environment so he can play great basketball.
----Rosemarie Montagna, Northport, N.Y.
Rosemarie,
There are two types of people in the world. The first type play basketball at schools with great teams. The other type listen to their mothers. We’re guessing your son is the second type—or else his mother wouldn’t be writing to Career Journal to ask for advice—and this, Rosemarie, is a problem.
Many factors figure into success in business, including a young man’s ability to make controversial decisions and march confidently along a road paved by his own strengths. Your son may be good at basketball but he lacks the confidence to pursue the sport at the highest level without permission of his mother. We’re sorry, Rosie, but he’s not exactly going to be an inspiring figure in the board room. Do you think Mitt Romney asked his mother whether or not he could start up Bain Capital? Sadly, you probably do.
But the damage has been done. Your constant meddling has crippled your son. What can be done to rescue him from a life of sad sack drudgery in the second or third tier of corporate life in America? Well, you already know the answer to that question: business school. Business school will teach your son all sorts of important skills, including talking a good game about ethics while engaging in non-stop cheating. What’s more, many of the titans of American finance went to business school and have a psychological investment in believing that an MBA is a sign of greatness. Hiring your MBA’d son will make them feel better about themselves.
So by all means, we hope you will finish the job you started when your son was just a tyke. Take away his dreams. Tell him he has no hope at a Division I school. Keep him down at Division III and get him into a business school. When he lands that job as an associate at an investment bank and starts working 100—hour weeks, when he has developed an anti-social personality accentuated by a semi-functional drug habit, when his relationships with women consist mostly of pouring cocktails of overpriced bottle service vodka for girls with low-cut dresses and even lower self-esteem…well, he’ll always have his Mommy. And that’s all you really wanted anyway.
Fortune just published the results of its annual “Where do B-school students want to work?” poll and, not surprisingly, many of the respondents wouldn’t mind being employed by a company that let’s you play Guitar Hero on the job (Google) or one that doles out sizeable bonuses (Goldman). Many of the banks’ places on the list seem to be trying to tell us something. Bear Stearns, for instance, clocked in at the not very impressive rank of 46. Could that have anything to do with the fact that those polled aren’t exactly jumping at the chance to work in conditions modeled after those at Walter Reed? And Citigroup—Prince’s Palace went from a respectable 2006 6th place finish to a 2007 slap in the face at 8th. Anyone want to take a gander at what that’s about?
The list isn’t exclusive to banks—apparently in addition to being cheaters, there are some M.B.A. students who care about humanity and whatnot (Toyota: 28, Mayo Clinic: 99)—but we’re not really interested in talking about PepsiCo or FedEx so we’ve ignored the others and compiled a new list, for your viewing (and heated debating) pleasure. Later, we’ll determine where in particular college seniors would like to be verbally abused and berated on a regular basis in front of their colleagues (“At Which I-bank Do You Want To Be An Analyst Peon”), upon graduation.
The headline and the lede sentence of Bloomberg’s coverage of the Duke cheating scandal make it clear that the chattering classes are reading this as an indictment of the much-touted ethics courses that proliferated in business schools following the business scandals of the turn of the century. “Duke Cheating Probe Shows Failure of Post-Enron Ethics Classes” Bloomberg’s headline shouts. “The cheating episode at Duke University may cause academics to conclude the post-Enron emphasis on teaching ethics in graduate business schools is a failure,” the lede declares.
But was any of this as surprising? These ethics courses have long struck us as misconceived. First, as we said earlier this morning, business students probably don’t pay very much mind to ethics professors who regard business as an inherently shady activity. Second, the goals of these ethics courses seem to be either impossible or undesirable. The impossible: sometimes it seems the ethics courses aim at changing the behavior of business students—and, given time, the broader business community—with pop platitudes cribbed from Kant, a project that imagines that human behavior is far more malleable to rhetoric than the evidence demonstrates. In a great article protesting the state of business education in the Chronicle of Higher Education last year, Kauffman Foundation president Carl Schramm wrote that “Presumably the goal is to prevent future Enron-like scandals, but how likely is it that human behavior can be changed for the better by tacking on a course on ethics?”
Schramm went on the describe the other more achievable but even less desirable goal of the ethics courses: convincing students to put politics over the business.
Another misguided trend is that of offering courses in the nebulous area of social responsibility. The implicit message of those courses is often that business goals should be subordinate to political goals. Business serves society by creating wealth — that is its true social responsibility. Business schools do their students and society a disservice by teaching that corporations should pledge primary allegiance to political ends, which could harm their ability to create the wealth upon which civil society depends.
So if the latest scandal at Duke helps us do away with the myth that the ethics course requirements for an MBA were going to ameliorate business corruption, fraud or reduce agency costs, we might all have those 34 cheaters to thank for peeling the scales from our eyes.
Thirty-four first-year MBA students at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business have been disciplined for cheating, the school disclosed yesterday. Nine may be expelled, while the others face a year suspension. The names of the students involved aren’t being released due to federal student privacy restrictions.
As Bloomberg points out, business schools students are the biggest cheaters.
Business students are more likely to cut corners than those in any other academic discipline, several studies show. A Rutgers University survey last year found that cheating at business schools is common, even after ethics courses were added following scandals that bankrupted Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc.
“What is taught in a business program sometimes reinforces” students’ tendencies to be entrepreneurial and results-oriented, said Timothy Dodd, 50, executive director of the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke, in an interview from Durham, North Carolina. “Those sometimes aren't the people who understand that moral means have to be used to achieve moral ends.”
Or the problem might be that the people who are running the ethics and academic integrity programs at our major university believe that being “entrepreneurial” undermines ethics. Or that human behavior—yes, strangely, even business school students respond like ordinary humans—can be changed with Kantian platitudes rather than incentives. At least one business school we know of avoids these cheating scandals by refusing to release its students' grades, which greatly reduces the incentive to cheat.
The Post reports that U.S. News and & World has been raked over the coals for accidentally swapping two plebian grad schools in place of two prestigious ones in its most recent graduate school Top 10 list.
Where Carnegie Mellon and the University of Texas at Austin should have been, Mort Zuckerman’s previously esteemed publication placed Portland State University and the University of Texas at Arlington (in the No. 9 and 10 spots, respectively). Thanks to the “data glitch,” these low-rent schools were “put…in league with Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and the University of California at Berkeley.”
Apparently PSU was so shocked and delighted to hear it had made the Top 10 for the first time ever that it “rushed out a press release” which is kind of amusing/kind of sad. Meanwhile, MIT, Stanford and Berkeley have been busy scrubbing the stench of third tier education off themselves ever since.
If you think your school’s been the victim of misrepresentation (this has happened to HBS at least once or twice), take a second to shoot us an email today at noonegivesafuck@dealbreaker.com. Thanks!
Remember when somebody proposed that we could predict a market downturn by the percentage of Harvard Business School graduates heading toward law school? Well, we passed that marker last year and things still seem to be humming away. So is the HBS business cycle broken?
Or has it changed? Sure lots of HBS's class of 2006 headed into finance but for perhaps the first time the most popular finance destination for last year's graduates was private equity. Even investment banking took a second to the KKRs, Blackstones. Tommy Lees and Bains of the world. And that shift could indicate that the HBS metric no longer measures what it once did, and decision to go into "finance" may no longer be telling us the same thing about the capital markets as it once did. Since these young financiers aren't going to work for investment banks whose clients are publicly traded operating companies, we may not learn much about the direction of the stock market by their job decisions.
We don't have a big enough sample size to know exactly what the shift of HBS grads toward private equity tells us about the broader ecnomony. Other than that HBS grads like to earn lots of money. But it seems to jive with something we mentioned here yesterday—a general shift away from the public corporation toward the New Model Corporation, the operating company owned by a private equity company which itself may actually be a publicly traded company.
Or, you know, it might indicate what everyone in their hearts always hopes a flood of Harvard Business School graduates in to a field means: that it's already over.
The English have a strange thing for Monica Lewinsky, and vice-versa. Maybe it's just that they've got their own sex scandals to worry about, scandals involving genuine royals, and can't be bothered to worry about whether the president of the United States was messing around with a White House interns. We actually ran into Monica in Oxford once, back when she was touring around with her memoirwriting Brit ghost writer. Seemed nice enough, if not terribly bright.
Well, she just got a degree from the LSE:
Former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, whose sexual relationship with U.S. President Bill Clinton led to his impeachment, has graduated from the London School of Economics, her publicist said on Wednesday.
Lewinsky, who was 21 when she became involved with Clinton, is interviewing for jobs in Britain, publicist Barbara Hutson said.
When Lewinsky, 32, received her Masters of Science degree in Social Psychology last Thursday "the audience of students and parents erupted in spontaneous applause. ... It was a very emotional moment for her," Hutson said in a statement.
Hutson said Lewinsky spent the past year studying and "staying away from the London social scene."
Okay. Fine. That’s probably not the way the Harvard Business School market signaling metric described below works at all. But we still kind of like the idea of too many HBS graduates getting a little to aggressive with those pitchbooks and tanking the market.
Everyone has his own method of timing the market. When Joseph Kennedy's shoeshine boy began asking him for stock tips in 1929, old Joe had a hunch it was time to sell.
Ray Soifer, a retired executive from Brown Brothers Harriman, has his own system. And it's proven itself to be a splendid long-term indicator of the American equities market.
Mr. Soifer tracks how many Harvard Business School graduates choose market-sensitive jobs each year. If 10% or less of that year's class take jobs in investment banking, investment management, sales & trading, venture capital, private equity, or leveraged buy-outs, it's a long-term ‘buy' signal.
If 30% or more take such jobs, it's a long-term ‘sell.'
This year, some 37% of Harvard Business School's graduate found work on Wall Street, up from 30% a year ago and 26% for the Class of 2004. The trend suggests that Wall Street is becoming bloated and the American economy is ripe for a slowdown.
The story about Wharton graduate Edward Anderton and his 22 year old girlfriend Jocelyn Kirsch is, as far as we can tell, mostly about the hotness of Kirsch. We think that it's possible that both were arrested last week for identity theft but it's hard to tell because the newspapers keep running pictures of Jocelyn in a bikini. Apparently, the couple had some kind of fake ID machine in their apartment and the keys to their neighbor's apartments. 
So John Fitzgerald, who’s getting really sick and tired of engaging in actual auto-fellatio (rough on the lower back), engages in some prose auto-f today, on his website. The topic? Online dating. He’s an expert, you know. “Let me give you a tip about internet dating,” Johnny says. Please do! “Men lie…women lie.” Let us give you a tip, John: no one ever called you a “liar,” but simply “the poster child for late-term abortions,” if memory serves. But speaking of maybe-lies? “I graduated from Penn. [But] I took my name out of the database to avoid donation solicitations .” He also lists a few not so good people (“Stalin. Hitler. Bin Laden. John Fitzgerald Page.”) and in yet another act of unjustified arrogance, ranks himself at #1. After you read about 
Is probably what corporate financier/thespian John Fitzgerald would say to girls in bars, if he could find the blank space to add “repel females on dry land” to a To Do list already jam-packed with higher-priority pursuits, like acting as the poster child for late-term abortions and bench pressing, by his own estimation, over 1200 lbs, 4 times a week, at LA Fitness. For now, he’s relegated to doing so in this glorious land we call the internet, where totally unjustified arrogance is encouraged, and saying stuff like “I have an MBA from the top school in the country” and was rated an “8.9 on Hot or Not” can get you laid. Or, maybe, not. Here’s one little correspondence Fitzy—who is more than likely a friend and sometime wingman of “golden child” Chip Bierbaum—had with young lady not too long ago. 
The Illinois State University College of Business is implementing a dress code that will eliminate the schleppiness of T-shirts, sweats, jeans, hoodies, life-partner-beaters, baby-tees, pleather vests, banana hammocks, juicy couture and cargo thongs found in most college classrooms these days. 
Believe it or not, there are a bunch of prominent businesspeople who did not go to Harvard. Some of these people were even rejected, according to the most recent feature in 
Q: My son is a freshman and a competitive athlete at a top Division III university. But the school's basketball team has lost every game this season, and he wants to transfer out. He is interested in business and expects to get his M.B.A. He wants to know if it will negatively affect his chances for acceptance into a top business school if he transfers to a college with a less-competitive academic environment so he can play great basketball.
The headline and the lede sentence of Bloomberg’s coverage of 
Thirty-four first-year MBA students at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business have been disciplined for cheating, the school disclosed yesterday. Nine may be expelled, while the others face a year suspension. The names of the students involved aren’t being released due to federal student privacy restrictions.
Remember when somebody proposed that we could predict a market downturn by the percentage of Harvard Business School graduates heading toward law school? Well, 
The English have a strange thing for Monica Lewinsky, and vice-versa. Maybe it's just that they've got their own sex scandals to worry about, scandals involving genuine royals, and can't be bothered to worry about whether the president of the United States was messing around with a White House interns. We actually ran into Monica in Oxford once, back when she was touring around with her memoirwriting Brit ghost writer. Seemed nice enough, if not terribly bright.
