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Apr 23, 2018

School v. School: Berkeley Haas or UW Foster?

With all the options for incredible business schools throughout the country, it can be a tall order to narrow down programs and choose the right degree for you. In our School v. School series, you can compare and contrast some of the best programs around the United States, helping to cut through the noise and find the best MBA for you on the West Coast.

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Mar 13, 2018

March Madness Begins: Consortium MBA Draft Takes Place Today

mba draft

Clear Admit recently highlighted this year’s Consortium for Graduate Study in Management MBA Draft, which is offering huge scholarship payouts for a lucky few. Check it out below.


No, it has nothing to do with basketball. A draft of another sort will take place today, but for some MBA applicants it could be as big as getting by  the Golden State Warriors. We’re talking about the annual draft for the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management. Each year, the group’s member business schools offer tens of millions of dollars in fellowships to hundreds of MBA applicants, most under-represented minorities.

Held annually in mid-March, the draft is a complex matching up of leading business schools and applicants based on the order of preference expressed by each. Consortium member schools include the University of Michigan’s Ross SchoolUVA’s Darden SchoolUC Berkeley’s Haas SchoolDartmouth’s Tuck School, and NYU Stern, to name just a few. When applicants apply as part of the Consortium Fellowship process, they benefit from being able to apply to six of the 19 members schools using a single application (with volume discounts for multiple schools). But then comes the tough—and critical—part.

The Importance of Ranking Your Consortium Schools Carefully

You have to rank your selected schools in order of your desire to attend, which will determine the order in which you’ll be considered for the Consortium Fellowship, a merit-based, full-tuition award. (There is the pesky little detail about needing to gain admission to a school or schools on your list.) Provided you are admitted to some or all of the schools on your list, your ranking then comes into play. If your first-ranked school declines to award you funding through the Consortium, the opportunity will be passed on to the next school on your list, and so on. According to a Consortium employee, the order in which applicants have ranked their choices is not revealed explicitly to the schools. Instead, each school is just not given an opportunity to offer you the fellowship until theirs is the top remaining school on your list.

Of course, another important part of the Consortium application is demonstrating a proven commitment to increasing the ranks of African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans in business education and corporate leadership. The Consortium was founded in 1966 by Washington University professor Sterling Schoen around the mission of equipping more African American men with the requisite business skills to succeed in corporate America. Three schools and 21 men took part in the first year. Additional schools began to join as members, and in 1970 applicant membership was widened to women, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans. In 2004, in compliance with a Supreme Court ruling a year earlier, membership was opened to all U.S. citizens and permanent residents who demonstrate a track record of supporting the Consortium vision.

Today’s Consortium MBA Draft Day

Fast forward to today, draft day. Representatives from the member schools are gathering with Consortium staff to begin the complicated matchmaking process, which at least in recent years has taken place in a St. Louis hotel room near the Consortium’s Chesterfield, MO, headquarters. Unless things have changed dramatically with recent additions to the number of member schools—the group has grown from 17 in 2011 to 19 this past July—the process includes six rounds and takes about four hours to complete.

Schools come in with their draft picks in hand, and the school designated as first choice by the most applicants gets to choose as many of those students as it wants to offer the fellowship. And so it continues, passing on to each successive school to select from its first-round applicants. If a school passes on an applicant at any time in the process, another school can then select that applicant in a later round.

From the applicant’s point of view, here’s what it looks like: Let’s say that Yale SOM is your first-ranked school and you are admitted into its MBA program. In today’s draft, Yale SOM will have first dibs on offering you the Consortium Fellowship. If Yale SOM does offer you the fellowship, everyone’s happy and you can choose to attend with the benefit of the fellowship. You may still be admitted to other programs on your list, but these programs cannot offer you the Consortium Fellowship.

But say you were admitted to Yale SOM but it doesn’t offer you the fellowship—or you don’t get into Yale—then the opportunity to offer you the fellowship is made available to your second-ranked school, and on down the line.

While only one school can offer you the Consortium Fellowship, that does not preclude the other schools on your list from offering you other school-specific scholarship funding. Once awarded by one school, the Consortium Fellowship is not transferable to another.

Regardless of whether you ultimately accept the fellowship and attend the school that offers it, you retain your Consortium membership status, granted as part of the application process. As long as you attend a school within the Consortium, you’ll get take advantage of a wide range of membership benefits, including valuable recruitment and networking events, webinars, and chats.

Why Would Anyone Turn Down a Consortium Fellowship?

Consortium member schools will typically select more students than they have fellowships for to account for the fact that some fellowship recipients will ultimately turn down their offers. What would make a fellowship applicant turn down a free ride to a top-ranked business school, you ask? Sometimes it’s admission to an even higher-ranked business school not part of the Consortium (HarvardStanfordWhartonColumbiaKelloggMIT Sloan, and Chicago Booth don’t play the Consortium game). This becomes an easier decision if these other schools offer their own attractive financial aid enticements, which they often do. So in the coming Decision Week(s), keep in mind that schools that have picked you now get to anxiously await word of whether you pick them. It’s nice when the tables get turned, right?

The official Consortium Fellowship notification deadline is March 23rd, but we’d guess many schools will be eager to share the news of the fellowship award in tandem with the news of acceptance. It should be fun to watch on MBA LiveWire! Those of us here at Clear Admit are wishing luck to the applicants and schools involved in today’s Consortium MBA Draft and hope some terrific matches are made, resulting in hundreds of successful MBA careers and further expansion of the Consortium mission’s reach.

To those on MBA Livewire who have speculated about why some Consortium applicants learned of decisions from certain schools before stated decision deadlines, that’s also related to today’s draft. Consortium member schools will have needed to make admissions decisions for their potential drafts picks by today, regardless of the school’s own decision deadline. Some schools may choose to communicate those decisions to applicants early since they already will have been reached.

Learn more about the Consortium application process hereApplications for the Class of 2021 open in August 2018 are due in two rounds, the first in October 2018, and the second in January 2019.

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Mar 12, 2018

U.S. News Reveals Sneak Peek of Its 2019 Business School Rankings

US News Business Schools

With just over a week before U.S. News & World Report reveals its eagerly-anticipated 2019 best business school rankings, the publication offered a sneak peek of the business schools that managed to earn spots within the top 10.

Unsurprisingly, the top 10 of the 2019 rankings resembles the publication’s 2018 edition, with nine out of the top 10 schools nearing the top of the annual list. The lone ranking variation from 2018 to 2019 will be the University of Michigan Stephen M. Ross School of Business, which came in 11th in the previous year.

The top ten business schools for the 2019 U.S. News rankings are as follows (unordered):

The one school left out of the newest rankings from the previous edition was the Yale School of Management.

The publication will release the full list of the 2019 best business school rankings will officially arrive on March 20, 2018. Stay tuned for more updates on the rankings on MetroMBA.

Posted in: Featured Home, MBA Rankings, News, US News | 1 comment

Mar 6, 2018

Inside the Relaunch of the Berkeley Entrepreneurship Association

Berkeley Entrepreneurship Association

Entrepreneurship at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley is getting an upgrade. Right now the university is working to rebrand and relaunch the Berkeley Entrepreneurship Association (BEA). While the newly updated BEA isn’t available yet, it’s in the works and will have many exciting announcements over the next weeks and months.

We were lucky enough to get an inside look at what’s coming to the BEA in a talk with Luca Cosentino, MBA’19, the President and Co-Chair of the BEA and the man behind the re-launch. Here’s the inside scoop!

MetroMBA: What is the Berkeley Entrepreneurship Association (BEA)?

Luca Cosentino: The Berkeley Entrepreneurship Association is meant to be the one-stop shop for entrepreneurship at Berkeley. Ideally, everything that happens around entrepreneurship should be coordinated or monitored by the BEA. It’s not just for business school, but also for students across the campus. It’s the umbrella under which all entrepreneurship initiatives, partners, mentors, funding, and resources will rest.

The BEA has been at Berkeley for a while as a collaborative effort, and it did a great job before, but we are adding to it. Prior to this relaunch, the BEA focused on one-off events and bringing founders to school. They did a great job regarding inspiring people to entrepreneurship. We want to keep doing what they did—the education side—but add the practical side. In this sense, the innovation is massive.

We are rebranding BEA. We are moving from one-off events to something that the potential to be around for twenty years and could be translated into a core university program matching what the University currently offers on entrepreneurship.

The one thing I want to underline is that is that every university has entrepreneurship programs where you’re matched with other people, but the value here is that we’re connecting people from different schools around the community of entrepreneurship. We are working to build the entrepreneurial community at Berkeley. The value of this community is that it won’t be agnostic to one specific initiative but will serve as an umbrella for all.

MM: Why is the BEA important and what is its goal?

LC: Before getting started with BEA, I spoke to a number of people from different business schools around the country. I wanted to know how each school dealt with entrepreneurship and how it was defined. What I noticed was that there were a bunch of great resources for helping students understand what entrepreneurship is, but it was really hard to find programs that helped students move from zero to one—from a basic idea to “Okay, let me try.” Students have access to many great initiatives where they can brainstorm and talk about their ideas, but to move from an idea to start effectively doing something around that idea is a completely different story.

We believe that if we give business students all the weapons and tools they need to start working from day zero, it’s going to have a massive impact on everyone’s career.

We also noticed that, too often, schools separate skills. For example, the computer science department is separated from the data scientist group and the information group. But we all know that entrepreneurship, great ideas, and great companies come from different skill sets, backgrounds, and diverse teams. We want to encourage that.

A student’s life is busy. Their schedule is packed, so going out and finding people that you like and that you want to work with that are aligned with your ideas is pretty difficult. We want to make this process faster. We believe that this is a great value we’re going to bring to students.

The application of the BEA is very big and far-reaching. There’s a strong impact on entrepreneurship itself, but also for employers and students. We all know that employers are keener to hire people from an entrepreneurial background. There’s a definite advantage for companies who bring on employees who have gone through capitalist discovery, testing, etc. This program really offers 360 degrees of benefits.

CA: What will the BEA offer?

MM: As an organization, we have a few missions starting this year and moving into next year.

  • Encourage Entrepreneurship

Our first mission is to encourage people to start companies. When you think about the typical MBA student who takes two years off to come to school and study, their main goal is to gain more experience and skills. Many MBA students also come to business school because they want to do something different, or possibly, follow their passions. But, when it comes to business school, entrepreneurship, generally, has a less relevant place compared to companies who offer internships or full-time positions. What we’re trying to do is encourage students to start companies and give entrepreneurship a try.

  • Create Entrepreneurial Collaboration

The main innovation that I’m most excited about and what we’re working hard to start in the fall is a program that connects students and individuals from across different schools and different backgrounds. For the first time in Berkley’s history, it will be an initiative led by students and coordinated across different schools. I believe it will be the largest program ever created at Berkeley connecting technical and business students, student clubs, VCs, mentors, funding sources, and institutions.

The goal of the program is to take great ideas and start them along the process, through customer discovery to business model evaluation. The steps are as follows:

  1. First, the program will allow people to present their innovative ideas.
  2. From there, the BEA would match the idea to a team of three or four people with different interests.
  3. Then, over three to four months, that team would work together to gather every resource they need to transform the idea into a workable concept company.

Currently, the program name has not been announced, but it will be released in a few weeks. For now, everything has already been put in place, and Berkeley is ready to launch their first cycle in Fall 2018.

  • Connect the Entire Entrepreneurial Community

The next focus for the BEA is to connect students with startups. There are many students and MBAs who are not 100 percent keen to start their own company but are curious about what it’s like. Our goal is to offer them a part-time experience, while in school, that offers them a unique chance to test their skills in a start-up environment.

Part of this focus will also be to connect the startup ecosystem at Berkeley. That means connecting startups, accelerators, VCs, etc. Already, we have collaborations with many different communities including:

  1. Participating Clubs: Computer Science Undergrad Association (CSUA), Computer Science Graduate Association (CSGSA), FemTech, Mobile Developers at Berkeley, Data Science Society, Upsilon Pi Epsilon Computer Science Honor Society, and many more coming.
  2. Collaborations: Xoogler community (community of ex-Googlers), Google Launchpad, Startup Grind, Dorm Fund, Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship, SkyDeck Startup Squad, Citris Foundry, Food Club, and more.
  • Entrepreneurial Education

Finally, the last thing we’re launching is an educational program that will include courses, a new website, a new blog, and a new podcast (all launching soon) that will include information from entrepreneurs, venture capitalist, product managers, blockchain, and more.

Other educational programs that we will be launching include:

  • A cross-schools educational event that we hope will help bridge the cultural gap between students in different schools.
  • Life as an Entrepreneur: a seven-week class with a variety of speakers including founders, VCs, etc.
  • Educational events around hot technical topics.

Currently, the Berkeley Entrepreneurship Association is still in its early relaunch phase. The newly updated website will be up in the next few weeks so check back on the school website and the Berkeley Haas Entrepreneurship Program regularly to catch its launch.

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Mar 1, 2018

Berkeley Haas Celebrates 8 Years of Defining Leadership Principles

Berkeley haas leadership

If you want to get a feel for the culture of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, look no further than its four Defining Leadership Principles (DLPs): Question the Status Quo, Confidence Without Attitude, Students Always, and Beyond Yourself.

Introduced eight years ago, the DLPs have become a part of the fabric of the school. In fact, 75 percent of students from all three MBA programs and the undergraduate program cite them as a major reason they chose to attend. Not only that, 90 percent of Haas alumni surveyed from the past decade report being familiar with them and using them to navigate both their professional and personal lives. Earlier this month, as part of Haas Culture Day, the school celebrated the DLPs’ eighth birthday, complete with cupcakes. 

In an interview with the Haas Newsroom, Dean Rich Lyons talked about the impact the principles he helped introduce have had on the school. “I’d say that we are seeing stronger data every year that the DLPs are affecting what we really care about. For example, we have clear data on how the Defining Leadership Principles are helping us win yield battles (i.e., when students choose Haas over other schools they’ve been admitted to). The DLPs are also motivating our donors. Alumni awareness of the principles is way up, and their engagement based on them is way up.”

To build on these successes, the school has launched a new initiative, the Haas Culture and Leadership Fund, designed to further extend the reach and impact of the DLPs even after Lyons steps down as dean to return to the faculty at the end of this academic year. Among other things, money from the fund will enhance culture-focused content in the curriculum; financial aid, awards, and research support for students and faculty who exemplify the DLPs; and support existing centers and institutes that uphold the principles.

Dean Lyons has a difficult time choosing which DLP most resonates with him. “It has always been hard for me to look at them as anything but a ‘system’ taken all together,” he said. “The one principle that still seems like it sets us apart the most externally versus our top competition is Confidence Without Attitude. But for me personally, the one resonating the most right now is Beyond Yourself. There’s so much in that one that it’s inexhaustible.”

Haas also reached out to its community to find out which DLP they preferred. See what they had to say in the video shared below.

This article has been edited and republished with permissions from our sister site, Clear Admit.

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Jan 31, 2018

What are the Greenest Business Schools in the U.S.?

Greenest Business Schools

Earlier this month, the Global Hub at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management earned LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum certification, becoming only the second building on the Northwestern campus to earn the U.S. Green Building Council’s highest green building rating.

The 415,000-square-foot Global Hub, which opened in March 2017, was designed with a low carbon footprint in mind. It is the largest of Northwestern’s 12 LEED-certified buildings. “Achieving LEED Platinum certification for the Global Hub underscores Kellogg’s strong commitment to sustainability,” Kellogg Chief Operating Officer William Garrett said in a press release. “A world-class facility demands world-class practices, and the Global Hub checks all of the boxes: It minimizes its carbon footprint, is comfortable and healthy for its occupants, and encourages collaboration and a sense of community.”

The building is a marvel of modern architecture and design. It taps into geothermal energy systems underneath the ground for efficient heating and cooling and uses nearly 6,000 fixtures of LED lighting to reduce energy use. The building also has an advanced ventilation system to circulate fresh ar and uses daylight sensors to minimize the need for artificial lighting.

Overall, the Global Hub earned 85 out of a possible 110 points on the LEED scale, including:

  • 26 out of 35 points for energy and atmosphere,
  • 7 out of 14 points for materials and resources,
  • 8 out of 10 points for water efficiency,
  • 23 out of 26 points for location,
  • 11 out of 15 points for indoor environmental quality, and
  • 10 out of 10 points for the design process and regional priority categories.

“We are proud to have successfully integrated best-in-class sustainability with a stunning architectural design, proving that excellence in design and sustainability are not mutually exclusive,” said Bonnie Humphrey, director of design for facilities.

Of course, Kellogg isn’t the only business school to embrace environmentally conscious building practices for its new facilities. It’s a practice we’re seeing across the board at various top schools.

For example, Harvard Business School has a Sustainability Plan that was adopted in October 2014 to reduce greenhouse gases, improve energy efficiency, reduce water usage and waste, and more. Already, the university has cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 49 percent, its energy use by 33 percent, and its water use by four percent.

MIT Sloan School of Management’s newest building, the Joan and William A Porter 1967 Center for Management Education, also known as E62, was designed with energy efficiency in mind as well. Among its sustainable features are light-sensitive window shades, a green roof, and an irrigation system that minimizes water use by responding to changes in weather.

And not to be left out, UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business designed its recently constructed Chou Hall to become the nation’s greenest academic building. In addition to LEED Platinum certification, Chou Hall was designed to attain WELL certification, an added accolade given to buildings that promote user health and well-being. Toward this goal, its design includes rainwater cisterns and 24,300 square feet of exterior windows in addition to efficient heating, cooling, and lighting systems.  


This article has been edited and republished with permissions from our sister site, Clear Admit.

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