Business School News
$100 million for Columbia Business School
“You need to have the best faculty, the best curriculum, the best students and the best facilities. One leg has been missing, and this will round out this great school.” Henry Kravis, Co-founder of the private-equity firm KKR & Co. and co-chair of the Board of Overseas donated $100 million to his alma mater, the Columbia Business School. He believes that this country needs to be able to provide students with the best resources and facilities in order to push the economy upwards and to develop and train new entrepreneurs. For that matter the donation that is going towards constructing a new business school site is said to not only be seen as an investment in a building but as an investment in the future of this country.
“We’re not just constructing a building, we’re building a community of entrepreneurs,” Kravis said in an interview. “If we don’t get our education system right, we’re going to be going backwards. I want to make sure this campus gets built. I think it will be phenomenal.”
The Columbia Business School, which is currently ranked 6th in the world for Business Schools, is thankful for Kravis’ generosity, which is the largest one in its history. Students as well as faculty have said that the old business school restricts creativity and performance, as it requires students to share crammed, windowless cubicles with business students and students from the law school. On the other hand the new Business School building that will be named Kravis and expected to be finished in six years is going to be exclusively for business students.
Kravis as well as Dean Glenn Hubbard are convinced that this project will provide the filler for the ‘one leg that is missing’ to allow students and faculty to work with local entrepreneurs in West Harlem as well as to facilitate more open communication among students and New York’s broader business community.
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Zuckerberg’s $100 Million will support Newark Public Schools
The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has donated $100 million that are going towards launching a foundation to support the city's public schools. This donation is going to be used to improve the learning opportunities for the kids who have had test scores and graduation rates that are among the lowest in the state despite of fifteen years of state control.
The gift is the largest made to date by the 26-year-old Zuckerberg, whose fortune Forbes magazine puts at $6.9 billion, and is many times larger than any ever made to the Newark school system, which has an $800 million annual operating budget. The announcement also represents a rare moment of accord in a state long troubled by budget crises, scandals, political infighting, and, most recently, the loss of a $400 million federal Race to the Top grant because of a clerical error.
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$300 million investment in aircraft engines
The Strategic Aerospace and Defence Initiative will provide the funds to support the initiative by the federal government to invest $300 million in a project by aircraft engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney Canada. The investment by the federal government will contribute to the $1 billion research and investment venture.
In addition to new findings the investment will open up 700 jobs to highly skilled professionals in Longueuil, Que., and Mississauga. Here Pratt & Whitney, a division of U.S.-based United Technologies Corp. will develop lighter aircraft engines. To give a more detailed representation of the project and the goals, Industry Minister Tony Clement is expected to make the announcement on Monday, December 13th.
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Business School Rankings Can Be Misleading
Business School Rankings often determine the amount of funding a school gets, the interest of students in it and the difficulty these students will have to find a job and enter the work force. On the other hand, rankings can be misleading and do not necessarily have to be a true representation of the quality of the degree. Therefore MBA applicants should refrain from purely relying on rankings but instead also look at other factors that will play a role. Currently the Bloomberg Businessweek Business Schools Forum fascinates readers because they get to exchange opinions about the rankings and suggest changes they find necessary due to own experiences and data. B-schools are seeing hesitations of applicants because most would prefer an A-school. According to Linda Abraham, president of Accepted.com, an admissions consulting firm in Los Angeles, people need to see these rankings as what they truly are – subjective. "Stop thinking of them as rankings of anything," she says. "They are collections of data and surveys. They are opinions."
The best way to use these rankings is as references. They will give students an idea of where to apply and will let them, if they understand what they mean, choose the right schools. Whereas the Bloomberg Businessweek rank schools according to recruiter and student evaluations, the U.S. News focuses on reputation, selectivity, and placement success. Taking these two rankings and the Financial Times rankings as references any student will be able to make the best choice possible, without needing to rely on admission counselors.
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