A Hunger Games' Reaping For MBAs

Columbia does a send-up of The Hunger Games

It’s Follies time again on many business school campuses and Columbia Business School has outdid itself this year by creating an highly amusing MBA version of The Hunger Games.

The reaping, featured CBS students dressed in rival business school gear, is artfully played out in Central Park. Amidst the grounds, MBAs from Stanford, Dartmouth, Kellogg, Wharton and Columbia ferociously compete with each other for the big prize: the chance to work at Berkshire Hathaway with Vice Chairman Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet’s ling-time partner.

In a wonderfully ominous voice, Brad Aspel of the Career Management Center welcomes the students to the reaping.

“Every year,” he intones, “two students from each top business school compete for the honor to be Charlie Munger’s right hand man at Berkshire Hathaway. They call it the Munger Games.”

One student, in an NYU Stern t-shirt, begs for a chance to live before being attacked by two Wharton MBAs with baseball bats.

‘WHARTON’S GREAT. I LOVE PITTSBURGH’

She pleads: “Please, please, don’t kill me. Wharton’s great. I love Pittsburgh.”

The video is a masterful send-up of business school stereotypes. To play off the fact that Princeton Review rates Wharton as the business school with the most competitive MBA students, the Follies skit has the two Wharton contestants later killing off each other.

The female “tribute” stabs her male classmate in the back. As he lay dying at Central Park’s Belvedere Castle, he lets her know that he poisoned her Red Bull.

In another scene, Munger asks the contestants to do a discounted cash flow analysis without Excel and brings out an abacus. The Kellogg tribute says he didn’t have to take corporate finance at his school and perishes on the spot.

‘HBS LIBRARY HIRES SERVANTS TO DO OUR DCFS FOR US’

The Harvard Business School contestant says in disgust: “I don’t know how this works. HBS library hires servants to do our DCFs for us. I never failed at anything in my life. Tell my stable of Arabian horses I love them,” she says, flinging herself out of a window to her death.

But when the winners of the competition, obviously two Columbia Business School MBAs, find out that they have to live in Omaha, Nebraska, to work with Munger, they balk.

“I’d rather die in New York than live in Omaha,” says one emphatically.

Instead, a USC Marshall School MBA recruited “from a dumber school” by a Stanford tribute for a pong contest, opts to go.

“Hell yeah,” he says, “I love Midwestern chicks!”

Check it out: