Why Harvard Business School Needs Another $1 Billion

The school says it needs to beef up fellowship funding to students to “inspire and enable the highest-potential leaders with the broadest possible range of backgrounds and experiences to attend HBS,” to “encourage students to broaden their career horizons by providing summer internship support,” and to “empower career choices driven not by debt but by the students’ interest and desire to make a difference.”

The size of the campaign did not surprise many rival deans. “HBS is a premiere business school with a large number of loyal alumni and students,” says Paul Danos, dean of Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business. “Given what it takes to be fully competitive for students and programs worldwide, to create leading-edge learning experiences and to build and retain a world-class faculty, I am not surprised that a school of HBS’s quality would launch a campaign with such a lofty goal.”

‘BUSINESS LEADERSHIP MATTERS MORE THAN EVER TODAY IN MORE SPHERES THAN EVER’

In yet another brief video, Youngme Moon, senior associate dean and chair of the MBA program, talks up the school’s training of leaders in a wide range of fields. “Business leadership matters more than ever today in more spheres than ever,” she says, “not just in business, in areas such as health care, education, government, social enterprise, non-profit organizations, the arts, the list goes on and on. And it all comes back to our being able to fill our classrooms with folks from different backgrounds.”

In making the case for the billion, the school is putting heavy emphasis on the students and alumni who work in what some might consider socially redeeming areas, such as health care or non-profits—not hedge funds, private equity firms, or money managers, fields that attract among the largest numbers of MBA grads. Obviously, few Harvard MBAs are immediately attracted to the lower-paid jobs in education and social enterprise. Last year, only 5% of its graduates went into the non-profit and government sectors. The vast majority of Harvard MBAs took jobs in financial services (27%), consulting (22%), and technology (18%).

Yet, the sea of statistics HBS is sharing with its potential funders are all in the do-gooder camp: the $10 million worth of pro bono services provided annually by alumni clubs, the more than 800 books and cases on social enterprise by HBS faculty since 1993, the 500-plus students in the social enterprise club, and the more than 1,300 social enterprise summer fellows since 1982. It’s almost as if making money and employing people is out to style.

KELLOGG HAS A $350 MILLION FUNDRAISING GOAL; LONDON BUSINESS SCHOOL IS AT $160 MILLION

Harvard, of course, is not the only business school seeking to raise money. After all, fundraising is a habitual requirement of a deanship these days. Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management is $200 million into a $350 million fundraising goal. Columbia Business School is in the midst of a campaign to raise $500 million to fund the construction of a new campus. London Business School is currently trying to raise $160 million.

But next to HBS’ $1 billion, those sums don’t look nearly as daunting. The kickoff for the capital campaign took place on Friday on the HBS campus with hundreds of alumni, students, faculty, staff, and friends participating in a day-long series of events that featured case discussions and faculty-led student and alumni panels on a wide range of business topics. In the evening, Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard Business School Dean Nitin Nohria, and Campaign Chair John Hess (MBA 1977), CEO of Hess Corporation, offered remarks.

“What truly distinguishes Harvard Business School is our capacity to continually innovate,” said Dean Nohria in a statement. “We see a challenge or an opportunity and we can respond quickly but thoughtfully to develop a novel solution. This is what led to the launch of the MBA degree, the first management case study in 1912, and the retraining programs that ultimately became Executive Education after World War II. Our faculty has developed breakthrough research ideas that have shaped management practice for decades. In short, we have been unafraid to anticipate and respond to changes in the world around us. Our vision is to continue to embrace these two capacities: to hold fast to the characteristics we most cherish, and to be bold— even relentless—in innovating for a better future.”

The campaign, he added, will emphasize the importance of flexible funding to support these and other innovations across the school for years to

The dean recalled his father growing up in a village without electricity, learning to read by natural light—and rising to lead a large power company, whose mission was not only to profit but to light the lives of many people in India, and to help them prosper. That experience, Nohria said, drew him into business. During the twentieth century, he observed, a billion people joined the ranks of those benefiting from “economic inclusion.” By the middle of this century, the world population will be nine billion, so there will be “many more people waiting to be brought into this circle of economic inclusion.” That aspiration “cannot happen without business. So let’s begin.”

DON’T MISS: HBS SEEKS TO RAISE $1 BILLION or DEAN NITIN NOHRIA: 2012 DEAN OF THE YEAR