“With some 13,000 graduate schools of business across the globe, the M.B.A. degree has clearly become a commodity. Even among elite schools, courses and case studies are pretty much water from the same well . So how do you choose? By using the rankings? Which ones? The Economist’s? Businessweek’s? The Financial Times’s? And if you do, how do you tell the difference between a school ranked No. 6 and a school ranked No. 7?” D. McDonald, New York Times
ESL Voices Lesson Plan for this post with Answer Key
Credit- Wesley Bedrosian for The New York Times
Excerpt: M.B.A. Programs That Get You Where You Want to Go, By Duff McDonald New York Times
“Don’t ask us. Don’t ask the schools, either. Their slick brochures try to be everything to everybody, and in the process they obscure rather than illuminate.
Conventional wisdom will tell you that Harvard is for Fortune 500 jobs, Wharton for Wall Street, Kellogg for marketing and Instead for multinational entities. There’s truth to some of it, but times change, and so do employers’ recruiting preferences. The smartest move might be to choose your business school by focusing on a very specific outcome and, assuming a good fit personally, going to the one with an impressive record of helping students achieve the same. Period.
To Work at Amazon
Go to Ross School of Business (University of Michigan)
Wesley Bedrosian for The New York Times
This might come as a surprise: Amazon regularly hires more M.B.A.s from top-10 business schools than big Wall Street firms. And its demand is surging: In 2014, Amazon hired 40 percent more M.B.A.s than it did in 2013, a large chunk of them from Ross. The e-commerce giant hired 27 M.B.A.s from Michigan last year, displacing Ross’s historical No. 1 recruiter, Deloitte Consulting, and 37 the previous two years.
To Work at Apple
Go to Fuqua School of Business (Duke)
Wesley Bedrosian for The New York Times
Silicon Valley hasn’t always welcomed M.B.A.s. After all, you don’t need a graduate degree to hatch a bold idea in your garage. Steve Jobs, Apple’s late chief, didn’t finish college and was known to have disdain for “suits,” whether investment bankers or management consultants. But the company, once the scrappy symbol of the tech counterculture, has undergone an evolution.
Two of Apple’s top 10 executives hail from Fuqua: the chief executive, Timothy D. Cook, and the senior vice president of operations, Jeff Williams. And they are, apparently, loyal. Apple has hired 32 Fuqua graduates over the past five years, while also providing 42 internships for Duke students.
To Work at Procter & Gamble
Go to Kelley School of Business (Indiana University)
Credit- Wesley Bedrosian
While M.B.A.s don’t dream of working at giant consumer products companies the way they did a few decades ago — today, it’s consulting, start-ups, tech giants or private equity — one of America’s legendary corporate success stories still draws them in hordes: the 177-year-old Procter & Gamble.
To Start Your Own Company
Go to Harvard Business School
Credit: Wesley Bedrosian
No, the world has not been turned upside down. The substantial resources Harvard has devoted to its entrepreneurial offerings in recent years are starting to show real results. By many accounts, Harvard has as strong a claim to being top start-up destination as Stanford does.
Anchored by its Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship, the school offers 33 graduate-level entrepreneurship courses, with the second-largest number of dedicated faculty after finance.”
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ESL Voices Lesson Plan for this post
I. Pre-Reading Activities
KWL Chart
Directions: Have students use the KWL chart to list the information they already know about the MBA programs at various business schools. Later in the Post- Reading segment of the lesson students can fill in what they’ve learned about the topic.
KWL Chart from Creately,com
Word Inference
Directions: Students are to infer the meanings of the words in bold taken from the article. They may use a dictionary, thesaurus, and Word Chart for assistance.
- Conventional wisdom will tell you that Harvard is for Fortune 500 jobs.
- But times change, and so do employers’ recruiting preferences.
- Choose your business school by focusing on a very specific outcome.
- The best schools have impressive records of helping students.
- Ross Graduates have traits common to most M.B.A.s.
- Desirable soft skills are humility, listening and a hearty work ethic.
- Presidio has placed sustainability directors at companies from Salesforce.com to Facebook.
- The school’s emphasis on persona is historic.
- Private equity has the most lucrative jobs for M.B.A.s, but also the fewest.
- East Coast schools seem an obvious choice given their proximity to Wall Street.
ELLteaching 2.0 vocabualry chart
Reading Comprehension
Fill-ins
Directions: Place students in groups and after they have read the entire article, have them complete the following paragraph from the article. They can use the words and terms from the list below, or provide their own terms. Students can find the meanings of any new vocabulary.
For an M.B.A.,___a job at McKinsey is a bit like ___to get into a ___business school all over again. Except the field is much ___ made up of only those who managed to pass the first___. But graduates of___perform quite well the second time around. The school’s M.B.A.s are in___ at ___consulting firms, which hired 35 percent of its ___last year, a higher ___than at Harvard (23 percent) and Stanford (16 percent). The top four___at Kellogg in 2014 were McKinsey, Deloitte, Bain and the Boston Consulting Group. McKinsey alone has hired 215 Kellogg ___over the last five years.
Word List:
recruiters, competitive, demand, graduates, trying, hurdle, percentage, graduates,
landing, stronger, Kellogg, elite
Grammar Focus: Structure and Usage
Directions: The following groups of sentences are from the article. One of the sentences in each group contains a grammatical error. Students are to identify the sentence (1, 2, or 3 ) from each group that contains the grammatical error.
I
- This might come as a surprise: Amazon regularly hire more M.B.A.s.
- The e-commerce giant hired 27 M.B.A.s from Michigan last year.
- The most senior Ross graduate at Amazon is Peter Faricy.
II
- Last year, Amazon was home to three teams.
- A few desirable soft skills is humility and listening.
- Silicon Valley hasn’t always welcomed M.B.A.s.
III
- Two of Apple’s top 10 executives hail from Fuqua.
- Kelley is looking on talented hard workers with the ability to grow.
- Harvard grads consistently start more companies.
III. Post Reading Tasks
KWL Chart
Directions: Have students fill in the last column of the KWL chart if they used one in the pre-reading segment of this lesson.
Discussion/Writing Exercise
Directions: Place students in groups and have them answer the following questions. Afterwards, have the groups share their thoughts as a class. To reinforce the ideas, students can write an essay on one of the following discussion topics.
The following three statements were taken from the article. Rephrase each statement in your own words, then discuss the meaning with the members of your group.
1. “Silicon Valley hasn’t always welcomed M.B.A.s. After all, you don’t need a graduate degree to hatch a bold idea in your garage. Steve Jobs, Apple’s late chief, didn’t finish college and was known to have disdain for “suits,” whether investment bankers or management consultants. But the company, once the scrappy symbol of the tech counterculture, has undergone an evolution.”
2. “This might come as a surprise: Amazon regularly hires more M.B.A.s from top-10 business schools than big Wall Street firms. And its demand is surging: In 2014, Amazon hired 40 percent more M.B.A.s than it did in 2013, a large chunk of them from Ross. The e-commerce giant hired 27 M.B.A.s from Michigan last year, displacing Ross’s historical No. 1 recruiter, Deloitte Consulting, and 37 the previous two years.”
3. “Edward A. Snyder is reinventing Yale’s business school. Soon after his arrival as dean in 2011, the school created the Global Network for Advanced Management. The network has since assembled an impressive membership of 27 schools from five continents, including well-known names (Insead, London School of Economics). Since its establishment in 1976, the Yale School of Management has insisted that business, government and nonprofit leaders need to better understand one another, giving the school a distinct public/private flavor. Dr. Snyder makes clear: We’re not abandoning the school’s longstanding mission. Environmental sustainability, for example, is not going to get solved by the government, the market or the nonprofit sector alone. We’re continuing within the frame, but with a more modern — and more global — view.”
3-2-1-Writing
Directions: Allow students 5 minutes to write down three new ideas they’ve learned about MBA programs from the reading, two things they did not understand in the reading, and one thing they would like to know that the article did not mention. Review the responses as a class.
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