BBA class in China

Just wanted to note here that I will be accompanying 35 students from Jim Walsh's BBA class to China during the next two weeks. I figure that my recent furious rate of posting will decrease and someone might notice and wonder what's going on. I will try to post some comments in my other blog (for those of you who might care).

Our changing admissions rate

I recently received a question from a student related to the recent change in the admissions rate from 47% (for the class of rising juniors that we admitted last summer) to 30-35% (for the class of rising sophomores that we will be admitting this summer). The question is the following: “Does this mean the average GPA is going to go up and getting in is going to get a lot harder really fast?”

Short answer (that probably doesn’t answer the intent of the original question): I have no idea if the GPA is going to go up this year and I won’t until the end of June when we’re all done.

I would be really surprised if it’s going to get that much harder to get in that quickly. The rate changed so much this year because our whole structure for accepting applications from UM students changed. We used to accept applications from sophomores. These students had taken Econ101, Econ102, Math115, and one (or both) intro accounting classes. By the time these courses were done, it was pretty clear to students 1) whether or not they were interested in business, and 2) whether or not they could succeed in and would like taking business classes. The result of these two factors was that students self-selected themselves out of applying to business by the end of their sophomore years. There are now fewer classes for convincing students not to apply to Ross, so the end result is that Ross receives more applications. I believe it’s currently the case that there are no more students entering UM at the beginning of their freshman year who are interested in business than there were a couple of years ago. The difference in the number of applications is that fewer of these students have been convinced not to apply to Ross. I hope this changes in future years (that is, I hope that the number of applications goes up because more students are interested in business), but I don’t believe it has happened yet (though it may have).

Now, in several years if my plan for global domination succeeds (evil laugh echoes off the walls of my imposing maize & blue castle), then it might be the case that applications will be up because there simply are more students entering UM with a plan for studying business. But I don’t think we’re there just yet.

So, what does this all mean? To me, it means that students this year competed with basically the same number of UM students that they did in the past — it’s just that more of them hadn’t removed themselves from consideration by Ross.

What’s the end result of this in the short run? I believe that the UM GPA of admitted students won’t change by a significant amount this year; it didn’t change much last year. Further, I don’t believe that getting into Ross is going to be any harder than it was in the past — as long as you take into account the fact that we now have a two-phase admissions process. I believe this might have made it slightly more difficult to get in for the average student because we might have (I hope) gotten the attention of more highly attractive high school students and subsequently gotten them to apply to Ross simply because they could get in right out of high school. But the data for this certainly isn’t in yet. We probably won’t have an answer to this question for another couple of years.

So, if you assume that half of our preferred admit class are made up of applications from students who would not have applied to or chosen to attend UM/Ross without the PA program, then that would mean that we have 50 fewer spots for our usual set of (historically, very high quality) applicants. Given that, you might think that next year it would be harder to get into Ross.

But have you considered the fact that we have already thought through this and might be thinking of increasing the size of the BBA Program? If that were to happen, then it might not end up being any more difficult to get into Ross than it was before — it might just end up being a larger (really high quality) program than it was before. (We of course would like, in this scenario, to be both larger and higher quality.) Now, don’t go thinking that the Dean or I have approved this change for next year. We haven’t even discussed it. I am simply saying that this type of change is at least going to be considered. (I haven’t presented the reasons for not getting bigger — and these are fairly reasonable — so don’t think it’s a straight-forward case for increasing the size.) And what matters to you is that it is a complete and total unknown at this point so don’t think that you can guess what we’re going to do by deciphering my writing. (“Oh, he’s clearly not going to make it bigger! I should give up!” or “It’s definitely going to get bigger. I can just cruise from here and wait for my acceptance letter.” No. Resist the temptation!) Because even I have no idea what we’re going to do.

So, don’t despair. Just do what you think you should do in order to increase your chances of getting in. Continue to get advice. But do what you can to ensure that your record is high quality, apply to the program, and let the chips fall where they may. You won’t help anything by worrying about this type of detail.

Preferred admit activities

My attitude to the preferred admit (PA) program might surprise some people. (And I’m writing about it here so that incoming students don’t end up being surprised.) My goal for the PA students is that they use their freshman year to immerse themselves in the activities and culture of the university while at the same time becoming acquainted with Ross. The University of Michigan is a complicated enough place without us overwhelming the PAs with a bunch of Ross-related requirements. The diversity of options (programs, people, events, classes) at the university is probably our greatest strength. I want the PAs to be comfortable about all of the resources outside of Ross available to them so that they can take advantage of them during their time at UM.

We don’t let the PAs simply roam around the campus without interacting with us. We started off the year with a short orientation whose purpose was generally to allow the PAs to meet each other and to get introduced to our staff. Starting soon thereafter we offered a series of weekly seminars (attendance required) just for the PAs. The purpose of these seminars is to introduce the PAs to business and to Ross. The following are those seminars that we offered this year. Next year will most likely be somewhat different but the general structure and purpose will be the same.

Introduction to stock trading Time management Using the school library Self-assessment workshop Retailing Career assessment Strategy

Accounting Dual degrees Financial services company Clubs and Internships Marketing Microsoft

Medical device manufacturer International Business Entrepreneurship Global Sustainable Enterprises Finance Global equipment manufacturer

We will be updating this series of seminars over this summer so don’t hold up this list to me as some kind of promise for future services to be rendered.

In addition, during the year PAs can use both their LS&A advisors and their Ross advisors to help them put together their academic plan. Given that many of these students are planning on working toward a dual degree or minor, these academic plans need to be constructed fairly carefully.

What we are trying to do is to give PAs a bit of a head start into business and Ross since they are “our” students. For those sophomores who do not get into Ross as PAs, the information that we provide to PAs is not something that they wouldn’t be able to pick up during their time at Ross; however, this does allow PAs to learn about business and Ross without being under the academic pressure of upper-level classes. We think this low-key introduction to business provides a reasonable place to start for students who we want to integrate fully into the university’s life.

Tonight’s graduation ceremony was a good one

The graduation ceremony for the BBA class of 2007 (and other programs) was tonight. It was actually a fairly nice program. Steve Case, formerly of AOL Time Warner, was the main speaker. He made four main points:

• Business is about people, passion, and perseverance.
• Business is a great vehicle for bringing about social change.
• The next big opportunities are in health care and the environment.
• Business people should take bigger risks than they are accustomed to taking.

Lots of good points can be made here. Given his background these points carried additional weight. I enjoyed listening to him. Before him there were some pretty good speeches by students — funny, passionate, and insightful. Good stuff.

Trying to describe the Ross & UM experience

One of the more difficult tasks that I have as BBA Program Director is to answer the question “What is it about Ross & UM that makes it so special that I (or ‘my son’ or ‘my daughter’ or...) should go there?” Well, it’s not hard to answer — it’s just hard to answer in any kind of succinct and compelling way. The difficulty is that our strength is in the diversity of options that a student has when he or she is here. A student has many different paths that he or she might take:

• Finance is our most popular option but we also have significant numbers of students who go into accounting, consulting, marketing, and general management development programs.
• Chicago is a popular destination for students, and so is New York. But when a student says that she is going to work in Atlanta, Cleveland, or Washington, D.C., no one is really that surprised.
• Many students go directly to work for a large company, but we also have a significant number of students who go to law school or to work in more entrepreneurial environments.
• When students are here, they can be involved in classes or programs that take them to Washington, D.C., Shanghai, Hong Kong, or Central Europe.
• Many students are involved in dozens of different community service events around southeastern Michigan while they are here.
• Student summer experiences range from working on Wall Street or consulting companies to going through Domestic Corps to work with not-for-profit companies.
• About 10% of our students have a dual major or minor in subjects ranging from Economics to Spanish to History of Art to Political Science.
• For some students, their favorite class was their business statistics class (if you can imagine) or their business law class or their finance class or their Bottom of the Pyramid elective or their Corporation & Society elective... The list is quite long and shows how many different types of students we have.

I think you can see how hard it is to describe the Ross and UM experience in one short simple sentence. So, what we’re doing to try to help this process along is to make videos about specific experiences that BBAs have had during their time at UM and Ross. The first one (that we just posted) is about Neal Uppal and the fantastic Domestic Corps/internship experience he had during the summer between his junior and senior years. You can see this movie if you go to the BBA home page. We will be posting more of these during the coming year.

BusinessWeek ranks us #5

The BusinessWeek undergraduate business rankings came out today. We moved up to #5 this year from last year’s #6. It is quite an honor to be ranked as high as this among this group of top notch schools. We are pleased that we have moved up but, as competitive as we are, we would like to receive a higher ranking — but only if it is an accurate reflection of our status. We are continuing to do all that we can to improve the experience of Ross students while they are here and hope that these improvements are reflected in the next rankings.

There are several parts of the survey that are of immediate interest to Ross students:

• The best undergrad b-schools: This is the lead article for the survey. It highlights four schools including Ross.
• Undergrad Rankings 2007: the rankings themselves. Ross is ranked #5.
• Ross profile: there are some errors that I am going to try to get fixed
• Business immersion the U of M way: a slide show of the Michigan and Ross campus
• Cracking the books: a table listing the (self-reported) number of hours per week that business students say they study. Ross students reported that they work, on average, 21 hours per week, most in the survey. The average for all schools is around 14 hours per week.

Let me know if you have any questions related to this survey.