Yale SOM’s Admissions Chief Gains GMAC Board Seat

The board of the Graduate Management Admission Council, the administrator of the GMAT exam, is typically made up of business school deans and corporate heavyweights. In a rare honor, the council has tapped the head of admissions of a top business school to join this select group of 16 board members.

Bruce DelMonico, the highly admired assistant dean for admissions at Yale School of Management, took his seat on the board on July 1, joining the deans of London Business School, Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, SDA Bocconi School of Management, Howard University’s Business School, the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business, and EBS Universitӓt für Wirtschaft und Recht in Germany. DelMonico is one of a half dozen new board members, including Mukesh Butani, founder and managing partner of BMR Legal Advocates; and Itziar de Ros, director of corporate marketing & communications for IESE Business School in Barcelona, Spain.

DelMonico is one of only three admission chiefs to join the GMAC board in recent year. He effectively replaces Peter Johnson, assistant dean of the full-time MBA program and admissions at UC-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business full-time MBA program and admissions of the Haas School of Business who had been on the board from 2018 to 2022. Soojin Kwon, the former managing director of full-time MBA admissions and program at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, also left the board. She recently departed Ross to work for McKinsey & Co.

JOINING THE GMAC BOARD FOR THE FIRST TIME ARE THE DEANS OF TEPPER, CAPE TOWN & HOWARD UNIVERSITY

Also joining the board is Isabelle Bajeux-Besnainou, dean of the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University; Catherine Duggan, Dean of the Graduate School of Business at the University of Cape Town; Anthony Wilbon, Dean of Howard University’s School of Business, as well as Butani and de Ros.

“We are thrilled and grateful for the six outstanding individuals from four continents joining the board of GMAC, bringing with them diverse and inspiring perspectives on graduate management education,” said Sangeet Chowfla, president and CEO of GMAC, in a statement. “As the industry continues to evolve and adapt in the face of the ever-changing landscape, their onboarding signals GMAC’s strong commitment to its global mission of connecting business schools and candidates in support of growing graduate business education.”

Isabelle Bajeux-Besnainou is the 10th dean of the Tepper School and the former dean of McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management in Montreal, Quebec.   Since her arrival at Tepper in 2020, Bajeux reorganized the leadership structure and started new degree programs that offer Tepper students new options and enhanced flexibility. As well, she launched the first comprehensive Tepper School DE&I Strategic Plan to support diversity, equity, and inclusion. Bajeux has refreshed the school’s brand positioning to be the school of “The Intelligent Future,” where students learn to combine the power of data with human judgement and imagination to make better decisions.

A former professor at Harvard Business School, Catherine Duggan is director (Dean) of the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business (UCT GSB). Her research examines the political economy of development in Africa, where she has done work in two dozen countries over more than twenty years.

Prior to joining the UCT GSB, she was Vice Dean at the African Leadership University School of Business – a new business school in Rwanda – and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School. She served on the HBSfaculty for nearly a decade and won several teaching awards, becoming the first woman in the school’s history to win the Faculty Award for Outstanding Teaching in the Required Curriculum two years in a row. She earned a Ph.D. from Stanford University and a B.A. with honors from Brown University, both in Political Science.

Anthony Wilbon is the dean of the Howard University School of Business. Dr. Wilbon’s areas of research include technology strategy, technology innovation and entrepreneurship, operations management, project management, systems development life cycle, and research methodology. Prior to joining Howard University, Wilbon was a faculty member at Morgan State University’s Earl Graves School of Business and Management.

He also previously served in engineering and management level positions and several organizations including the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Booz-Allen and Hamilton, Inc., American Management Systems, Inc, and Westinghouse Electric Corporation. Wilbon completed his BS in Electrical Engineering at Michigan State University, an MBA at Howard, and a Ph.D. at George Washington University in Management of Science, Technology and Innovation. He is also the recipient of a Fulbright International Education Administrators Award (France).

The current chair of the board is the retired President of Education and Career Services (ACT) Jon L. Erickson who first joined the board in 2016.  He succeeded as chair Martin Boehm, the former dean and professor of marketing at IE Business School whohas served on the GMAC board since 2017. Boehm is currently the rector of EBS Universitӓt für Wirtschaft und Recht in Germany.

DelMonico, one of the most well-liked admissions directors, has led Yale SOM’s admissions team since 2006. During his time at Yale, Bruce has helped innovate new technologies and novel methods of candidate evaluation, including early roles in the Slate CRM system, the use of asynchronous video questions, and the adoption of forced-choice non-cognitive assessments. He has sat on a number of industry-related boards and is a past Trustee of the Hopkins School in New Haven, Connecticut. Before joining Yale, he was an attorney focused on First Amendment, white collar, and commercial litigation, working primarily on cases with exposure ranging from $10 million to $10 billion. DelMonico holds a bachelor’s degree in Honors English from Brown University, a master’s degree in Literature from the University of Texas at Austin, and a law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law.