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"(Poets&amp;amp;Quants) &amp;#8212; Ever since Yale University launched its School of Organization and Management in 1976, the place has been something of an unconventional business school. Its founders envisioned a school that would be small, communal, unorthodox, and steeped in theory and research, able to groom leaders for both business as well as the public and non-profit sectors.\nBut the decision to avoid creating another me-too business school has had some unintended consequences. For years, SOM has unsuccessfully battled the misperception that it is merely a school for non-profit management, a haven for do-gooders outside the MBA mainstream. And despite basking in the glow of one of the world\u2019s most valuable educational brands, the school has never been able to develop the stature of any of its Ivy League rivals.\nEnter Edward \u201CTed\u201D Snyder, the 58-year-old veteran dean who signed on as SOM\u2019s new leader last fall. He arrived with extraordinarily high expectations. \u201CI like what I do so I don\u2019t feel pressure,\u201D says the soft-spoken Snyder. \u201CI feel really good about the prospects here. I\u2019ve been at business school deaning for awhile so it gives me the credibility to say, \u2018Folks, this is what we face.\u2019\u201D\nSnyder is more than just another dean in a hot seat. Having served as dean at two other major business schools &amp;#8212; the University of Chicago and the University of Virginia &amp;#8212; he\u2019s something of a business school physician. He worked magic at Chicago\u2019s Booth School of Business, bringing in the largest gift to any business school ever &amp;#8212; $300 million &amp;#8212; nearly doubling the school\u2019s endowed professorships, tripling scholarship assistance, and moving Chicago to the very top of BusinessWeek\u2019s influential rankings.\nWhat\u2019s the matter with Yale? \nAfter seven months at Yale, what\u2019s his diagnosis?\nSnyder believes the school has been under-funded and under-marketed. There\u2019s been too little effort devoted to leveraging the university\u2019s formidable brand, no advertising budget, and mediocre scholarship support to get the best students. The small size of the school has made it difficult to gain critical mass, so its alumni network isn\u2019t as strong as it should be and many corporate recruiters find the MBA pool too small to fish in.\nAnd, like most other U.S. schools, SOM lags in getting up to speed on globalization.\nA good comparison is Cornell University\u2019s Johnson School, a similarly sized Ivy League institution. Although SOM\u2019s $536 million endowment is more than three times the size of the endowment at the Johnson School, its annual operating budget is roughly the same: about $60 million. If Yale spent at the same ratio of endowment to budget as Cornell, SOM\u2019s operating budget would be more than triple its current outlays. That money could be spent to improve the quality and size of its faculty, to provide a more sizable support staff, to fund more scholarships to entice the best applicants, and to more aggressively promote Yale\u2019s strengths via marketing and advertising.\nSee also: Gen-Y looks to developing economies for biz training\nCornell\u2019s money, moreover, has been put to better use over the years. Both the school\u2019s faculty and career services office regularly outperform Yale\u2019s in student satisfaction surveys. And Cornell has consistently outperformed Yale in several key MBA rankings, especially the BusinessWeek list, which currently ranks Yale at No. 21 versus Cornell at 13.\nAnother problem. Yale is woefully behind in scholarship funds to get the best talent in the door. Currently, SOM has a scholarship kitty equal to 6% of its gross tuition. That comes to less than $1.5 million. Harvard Business School, by comparison, doles out $28 million annually in scholarships, accounting for 30% of its gross tuition. Vanderbilt University\u2019s Owen School, with nearly 100 fewer full-time MBAs than Yale, is providing $3.9 million in scholarship support this year, equivalent to 26% of its gross tuition. Concedes Bruce DelMonico, head of admissions, \u201CWe\u2019re playing with a BB gun when some schools have bazookas.\u201D\nWith all that said, Snyder is working with some very strong assets, including the Yale brand, a modern MBA curriculum launched four years ago, a new home for the school that will open late this year, and a handful of faculty stars and exceptional students who come to SOM with credentials not all that different from those at Harvard, Columbia, Wharton, Dartmouth, and Cornell.\nGetting credit where it\u2019s due\nSo his plan to gain the recognition he believes Yale deserves is rooted in fixing the underlying fundamentals of the school and charting a new course. Snyder says he plans to increase the size of the school\u2019s class to 300 from 225, increase the size of the faculty to the low 80s from roughly 65 professors now, and to increase scholarship support to about $3.2 million from $1.4. Scholarship funding will become the new priority in fundraising. \u201CWe lose a lot of our great applicants. I want to win more of these people,\u201D he says.\nSnyder also wants to have an advertising budget that better promotes the school and dispels enduring perceptions that SOM is a non-profit school, largely focused on soft skills. \u201CWe spend more time doing than amplifying,\u201D he says. \u201CI want to change the ratio of doing to telling people about what we\u2019re doing.\u201D\nThe new dean also wants to slightly increase the ratio of students to faculty. Currently, Yale SOM has one of the lowest ratios of any major business school, with eight students for every professor. At what he calls the \u201Cfull scale, full scope schools,\u201D such as Wharton, Columbia, Chicago and Kellogg, the student to faculty ratio is closer to 20-to-one. He wants to retain the school\u2019s intimate culture but get more value out of the faculty by upping the ratio to about 11-to-one, still below MIT Sloan\u2019s 14-to-one ratio.\nThe bigger strategy is to more closely align the school with the university and to drive a bold stake in the ground on both globalization and entrepreneurship.\nMost business schools, he believes, are isolated from their universities, a separation that comes as a consequence of their desire to build better facilities, have the newest technology, and pay faculty significantly more than in other disciplines. \u201CThat is now a manifest mistake for our business schools to have done that,\u201D says Snyder. \u201CBut it\u2019s a huge opportunity for us given what the world needs.\n\u201CWe will be the exact opposite of the standalone business school. We will be part of this place.\u201D\nDual degrees and joint faculty appointments are one part of the strategy, but Snyder is especially attempting to promote other cross-school interactions in and out of the classroom. SOM students are more likely than MBAs at other schools to take classes across the university. They serve as associates for the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute and contribute to the university\u2019s Climate and Energy Congress, a large, annual, student-run energy conference. Snyder is working to set aside course sections specifically for non-SOM students and increase the number of non-SOM speakers the school hosts.\nBuilding a global alliance\nThe most ambitious of his many ideas has to do with the B-school topic du jour: globalization. Snyder believes most U.S. schools are well behind the curve, playing catch-up mainly with their European counterparts. Most U.S. schools have attempted to \u201Cglobalize\u201D merely by partnering with other non-U.S. schools to deliver joint-degree programs.\n\u201CWe\u2019re the most decentralized industry in the face of globalization,\u201D he says. \u201CWe haven\u2019t figured globalization out. All U.S. business schools have done is a little bit of green field but mainly joint venture partnerships in tuition-rich markets. Wow.\u201D\nHis solution? A clever program modeled after the University\u2019s Yale World Fellows, an initiative that allows international students to study at Yale for a full year in a non-degree capacity. It\u2019s one of the most selective educational programs in the world, with some 5,000 applicants for just 18 seats.\nSnyder\u2019s version is quite different. He has organized a network of more than a dozen business schools outside the U.S. and plans to use this group to put SOM at the forefront of globalization by accelerating the sharing of research, case studies, students, and faculty. As he puts it, \u201CThe joint venture model is very overused and those partnership degrees are really tricky. Networks are better than partnerships because it provides more immediate and deeper access to existing resources.\u201D\nSee also: UCLA rejects 52 MBA applicants for plagiarism\nAmong other things, freshly minted MBA graduates from the network schools will be able to apply for a new one-year master of advanced management degree at SOM. Snyder plans to accept no more than one student from each network school for a total of up to 20 students a year. The program, which is only open to graduates of schools that sign up for the network, debuts this fall.\nThis cohort will join the typical contingent of international students who now make up slightly over a quarter of the MBA students at SOM.\nThe network, which includes schools in Asia, Europe, South America and Africa, will share research and case study materials to more quickly globalize the SOM curriculum. A Fellows Program for faculty is being formed to allow member schools to send their professors to Yale for short spurts. And the network will be used to connect the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute with other groups of entrepreneurs at member schools.\nFinally, Snyder hopes to get SOM students far more engaged in the university\u2019s existing Entrepreneurial Institute, where Snyder has been named one of three people overseeing the center.\nAll told, it\u2019s an ambitious agenda, designed to get Yale the attention and influence that has long eluded the business school. How long will it take? \u201CI don\u2019t know if it will take five years or so, but it\u2019s been a very good start,\u201D says Snyder. \u201CWe\u2019re part of a purposeful, eminent family at Yale and the convening power of the place is palpable.\u201D\nMore from Poets&amp;amp;Quants:\n\nYale&amp;#8217;s Big, Audacious Global Bet\nThe Best 100 U.S. MBA Programs\nHow NOT To Blow Your Harvard Business School Interview"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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