booth stays number one

Today BusinessWeek released its rankings for the top business schools in the United States. These results usually come out earlier, but were postponed because of the election.

Once again the University of Chicago, now the Booth School of Business, holds the top slot. The remaining top ten (in order) are Harvard, Kellogg, Wharton, Ross, Stanford, Columbia, Duke, Sloan and Haas. The full report can be found here.

With the economy in its current state, schools expect that MBA applications will be higher than normal. Already there is an increase in the number of people taking the GMAT. Business School is not a bad place to ride out a dismal economy. When the economy is booming, there is usually a slump in MBA applications. Go figure.

If you are applying to the University of Chicago, here's a tip - don't call the school the BSB. Call it University of Chicago, Booth School of Business or even just Booth.

on the night stand :: Listening is an Act of Love

i did something cool today

B forwarded me an email he received from the University of Chicago, Graduate School of Business (GSB) about a historic announcement. They were streaming it live, so at 3pm PT I joined the party. It was almost like being back in the Winter Garden.

Beforehand we tried to guess what the big announcement could be. We figured with all the news about appointments to Barack Obama's team, perhaps several of the GSB faculty had new jobs. We were wrong, and that has been done before, so not exactly "historic".

It turned out that David (class of '71) and Suzanne Booth, had given the business school an endowment of $300 million. This is the largest single gift any business school has received. The school announced the $100M Booth Matching Fund - also the largest matching fund in business school history. It was further decided that the business school would now be called The University of Chicago, Booth School of Business.

Since I had Twitter open, I told the world (all 200 something of my followers) what had just been announced. Apparently I scooped The Wall Street Journal, among others. It isn't like I told the world, or was the first to know (reportedly there were 3000 people logged in to view the announcement). And clearly this has been known for a bit as at the end the current students were invited to take Booth swag after the event.

Of course I immediately went to the GSB bookstore, as B wears his GSB tshirts often. Hate for him to be out of style. There wasn't anything there, but I did email. Hopefully I will hear back soon. B said he also needs a new decal for the car - the one that has almost 200,000 miles on it. It looks like the site is under construction, so maybe that is good news.



on the night stand :: Not A Box