“I see as much potential here as I did there.” Peter Tufano is describing his plans for his first-ever deanship. And here happens to be Oxford University’s 15-year-old Saïd Business School, where 248 students work toward an MBA in a year, under the guise of about 60 faculty. There is Harvard Business School, Tufano’s training ground of [...]

When Dan Thibeault scanned the Sunday papers on his iPhone on May 22, he found a satirical cartoon that made him smile. A dean was handing a graduate her diploma, saying, “Best of luck realizing your dreams…” The girl had a ball and chain attached to her ankle, with “Student Debt” written across the ball. “It’s [...]

In April 2011, a woman received one of the most important letters of her life, announcing her acceptance to one of the world’s top five MBA programs. She popped open a bottle of champagne and celebrated with her family and boyfriend. Then, she looked at the price tag. To attend, she’d need to shell out [...]

In 2008, Brian Jenkins moved to Malibu, Calif., to start his MBA at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management. He had big ambitions for B-school, expecting the degree to help him land a job in human resources at a top company. He hoped to make close to a six-figure salary, too. Pepperdine seemed poised [...]

David Wilson is President and Chief Executive Officer of Graduate Management Admission Council, the 58-year-old organization responsible for creating and managing the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT). In 2010, prospective business school students sat for the three and a half hour exam 263,979 times, demonstrating a healthy appetite for…[Read more]

Nancy Unsworth isn’t your cookie cutter MBA. While 32% of her 240 classmates at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business hail from consulting and another 18% from banking and financial services, she turned up on campus fresh from the creative world of Sesame Workshop (Sesame Street), where she was most recently vice-president of business planning. During [...]

Flowers led Ohad Goldberg to an MBA. Raised in Ra’anana, Israel, a city nine miles north of Tel Aviv, Israel, Ohad spent five years in the Israeli Army after high school, rising to the level of Officer. After a six-month trip around New Zealand, he went to university to study agricultural engineering. Then he joined a leadership [...]

Ruth Owades is an original MBA poet. On day one of orientation at Harvard Business School in 1973, she was summoned to the Dean of Admission’s office for a quiet word. She recalls, “For the first time” the Dean said, “we’re admitting 3% of the class with a purely liberal arts education. We’re calling you ‘the Poets.’ [...]