Double-Digit Increase In Kellogg Applications

2013 SHAPING UP AS ANOTHER STRONG YEAR FOR MBA PLACEMENT

Blount said Kellogg’s yield—the percentage of accepted students who enroll—is also up and that job offers for the school’s MBA graduates this year is strong. “Placement is doing great under Michael Malone (who joined Kellogg in January of 2012 as head of its Career Management Center from Columbia Business School as director of career education and advising). Blount added that she expects the school to match last year’s placement rate when 96% of MBA graduation had job offers three months after graduation.

Students graduating this June continue to do well in traditional areas for MBA students like consulting, technology, consumer packaged goods, healthcare and manufacturing. The school also is hearing stories from students about opportunities in areas including energy (traditional and alternative), not for profit, media/tech and startups. Similarly, students are seeing opportunities in pharma and biotech, which is an area of potential interest and growth for MBAs.

“Recruiters love Kellogg,” said Blount. “Our students get offers from a much broader range of recruiters than any of our top-tier competitors. We have the most diverse offer base of any of the top five or ten and that has not changed. Michael has done a stunning job of continuing in Roxanne’s tradition,” she said, a reference to Roxanne Hori who led Kellogg’s Career Management Center for nearly 17 years.

Blount also said that a curriculum review, started shortly after she arrived as dean, has led to a “reaffirmed commitment to a foundational core but new incentives for innovation” among elective offerings. “We don’t think the foundations are going away,” she said. “What is going to change is what comes after it. So we wanted to build a culture of innovation that constantly adjusts on how we build on a core.”

NEW MAJOR THRUST IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP WITH THE POACHING OF A BOOTH PROFESSOR

To that end, Blount said Kellogg has committed to launching 10 to 15 new MBA courses a year. In the past 12 months, she said that ten new courses in entrepreneurship alone have been added to the course catalog. Among the new courses, for example, are “Global Governance of Private Companies,” “Entrepreneurial Selling: Business to Business,” “Intellectual Property for Entrepreneurs,” and “The Entrepreneurial Experience.”

A pair of “Innovation Lab” courses are being offered to students who have business concepts they would like to launch with the help of alumni and local mentors. The labs and several of the courses are being taught by Linda Darragh, who Blount poached from the University of Chicago’s Booth School last year. Darragh had been an adjunct and then an assistant professor at Kellogg from 1999 to 2005. After leaving for Chicago in 2005, she was instrumental in helping to build Booth’s reputation in entrepreneurship at the expense of Kellogg.

“When we went out in the market to get a bigger stake in entrepreneurship, the name that kept coming up over and over was Linda Darragh. My laser focus was how do we get her back?” Her return to Kellogg has been a major coup for the school, resulting in a recently published lengthy profile in The Chicago Tribune. It also didn’t hurt that two Northwestern teams, with several Kellogg students, captured eight of the nine major cash prizes in Rice University’s 2013 Business Plan Competition in April.

PILOTS AND EXPERIMENTATION WILL BE HOW KELLOGG CHANGES ITSELF

The innovation in the entrepreneurship area reflects a decision by Kellogg against a major overhaul of its MBA curriculum in favor of ongoing experimentation and innovation. “We don’t think you do massive systemwide change if you want to get the best ideas,” said Blount. “All the research on change is fostering an ongoing culture of orientation, You move forward in small groups and you see how it goes. It is all about experimentation in pods. The ones that don’t work you replace with another experiment.”

Similar changes are being rolled out elsewhere in the MBA curriculum. “We are redesigning basic statistics courses to prepare people for the era of big data,” said Blount. “There will be more integration across the core courses. We’re adding a series of 15-student seminars and will require students to do a number of them, along with new courses in collaboration and communication skills. We are going to completely redo how we do majors. Majors drive choice after the core and we want to have people completely rethink this.”

Blount says another outcome of the curriculum review was the decision not to require more courses, but to give students greater choice. “We don’t want students to have more requirements. We want them to have more choices. All a core does is create new political turf. Once you make something required, then people have to defend it. You want rewards for people who are constantly innovating beyond the foundational core.”

KELLOGG EXPECTS TO REACH HALF-WAY MARK ON A $350 MILLION CAPITAL CAMPAIGN THIS SUMMER

Blount is in the middle of a capital campaign meant to raise $350 million–$250 million for a new business school building and $100 million for programming, scholarships and globalization efforts. “Most of the capital campaign will not go into endowment,” explained Blount. “We have the third or fourth highest endowment of any business school at about $700 million. Some of that is earmarked for the building and that number moves around. Our core endowment is north of $600 million.”

The dean expects to reach the half way mark of the campaign this summer with $175 million in commitments. “We are in discussions for a lot of other gifts,” she said. “People love Kellogg. I’m not struggling at all. We have the go-ahead to break ground on our new building in late fall. The new waterfront structure is expected to open in the fall of 2016.

So far, however, no one has ponied up a naming gift for the new building. That could cost someone as much as $100 million, which is what Columbia Business School recently received from two different donors for naming gifts on its two-building campus under construction.

DONT MISS: KELLOGG’S NEW MBA GATEKEEPER or A HARVARD MBA GIVES KELLOGG THE MCKINSEY TREATMENT