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Applicant Bulletin: Crisis At Columbia, Cuts Threaten UK Courses & Pre-Christmas Rankings News!
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We bring you everything you need to know about the world of biz-ed before you settle down for the festive season
Written by Amy Hughes
We deliver some need-to-know-news before Christmas
The festive season is fast approaching, but that's no reason to fall behind on your business school news! Here's everything you need to know about this December…
In the UK, cuts to apprenticeship levies are looming over MBA courses
Proposals announced by the UK government on Thursday would see £5,000 ($6,373) be axed from the funding limit for chartered manager degree apprenticeships, according to the Financial Times.
This would make the funding limit around $28,000—less than many of the business schools currently providing these courses charge their students.
The move has been criticized by policymakers, although the UK government says that the intention is not to discourage particular apprenticeships, but merely to standardize levy-funded apprenticeship funding limits with pre-levy apprenticeship options.
Columbia is criticized for its response to a sexual assault allegation
It may have been a whole year since the start of the #MeToo movement, but sexual misconduct is still a regrettably current topic at business schools.
A first-year MBA student at Columbia Business School, named by Poets & Quants as Katie Brehm, recently alleged that she was drugged and raped by a classmate at an off-campus MBA party, and has criticized the dean of students at the school for their lack of response.
After a meeting with the dean, whose behavior she described as cold and accusatory, Katie says that she has not heard from the administrator, which she sees as a failure to appropriately support a student in need.
After a similar scandal earlier this year, in which a tenured professor was convicted of retaliating against a female faculty member who accused him of sexual harassment, it would seem that Columbia needs to improve its treatment of gendered harassment.
Did you see this? 1 Year Of #MeToo: Have Things Changed For Women In Business Schools?
There's a new MBA ranking on the block!
… The trouble is, not everyone's totally on board.
The Wall Street Journal and Times Higher Education in the UK teamed up to create a new MBA ranking system, and the much-anticipated results were released this week.
Unfortunately, the big reveal turned out distinctly lackluster as many of the best-known business schools around the world declined to participate.
Big schools like Wharton, Harvard, Columbia, and London Business School are all missing from the ranking, which instead lists Stanford, Cornell, Vanderbilt, Chicago Booth, and Duke Fuqua among the best two-year MBAs in the world.
We dug into the ranking, and even spoke to an anonymous source from a non-participating school, to find out why the WSJ's efforts didn't go as planned.
Read the full coverage here: Wall Street Journal Releases Ranking Of World's Best Business Schools—But Nobody Really Likes It
Bloomberg is back
Meanwhile, the more established outlet Bloomberg Businessweek has just released its own b-school rankings.
Reportedly surveying 26,699 MBA students, alumni, and recruiters, plus data provided by each school, the abridged list is available now, and sees Stanford, Wharton, MIT, and Chicago Booth sitting pretty on top.
The full ranking will be released on December 11th.
The rankings get ranked
As if this ranking frenzy weren't enough, Fortuna Admissions have released the eighth edition of their 'Ranking of MBA Rankings', in which they compile the results of the 'big five' MBA rankings to give their own aggregate review.
Fortuna combine the results of the rankings published by US News, the Financial Times, The Economist, BusinessWeek, and Forbes in the hopes of giving applicants a 'wide-angle view' of how the schools they're interested in perform across ranking systems.
Despite not earning the top spot in any individual ranking in 2018, Wharton has held onto its number one position in Fortuna's ranking due to its strong overall average, while the other M7 schools continue to dominate high up the list.
Something for the holidays: 5 Things Business School Students Should Do Over The Holiday Season
That's it for December—have a great festive break, and we'll see you again in January for the New Year edition of the Applicant Bulletin!
Cornell University: Johnson Two-Year MBA Duke University Fuqua School of Business Harvard Business School (HBS) Columbia Business School MIT Sloan School of Management Stanford Graduate School of Business The University of Chicago Booth School of Business University of Pennsylvania: Wharton School Vanderbilt University's Owen Graduate School of Management
MIP Politecnico Di Milano EMBA