Harvard Business School MBA

Harvard Business School, officially named the Harvard Business School: George F. Baker Foundation, and also known as HBS, is one of the graduate schools of Harvard University.

The school was founded in 1908 with an initial class of 59 students in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In the 1920s, the class size reached 500 students. In 1927, the School moved across the Charles River to its present location in Allston (part of Boston) - hence the custom of faculty and students of referring to the rest of Harvard University as "across the river." Women were first admitted to its regular two-year Master of Business Administration program with the Class of 1965. The dean of HBS is Jay O. Light, who was appointed by then University President Lawrence Summers on April 24, 2006.

The school offers a full-time MBA program, a doctoral program and many executive education programs, but does not offer an 'Executive MBA'. The School owns Harvard Business School Publishing , which publishes business books, online management tools, teaching cases and the monthly Harvard Business Review.

Organizational relationships
Harvard Business School has a number of relationships with other leading business schools. It offers its students cross-registration at the MIT Sloan School of Management, one of the few leading pairs of business schools to offer such an arrangement. It also offers a number of Executive Education programs jointly with the Wharton School of Business and Stanford Graduate School of Business. Harvard Business School has a partnership with the Asian Institute of Management in Manila, Philippines, and collaborated with the Indian Institute of Management and IESE in setting up their post-graduate programs in management. Faculty and research associates author a large portion of the case studies used at many other business schools around the world.


Rankings
Harvard is consistently ranked among the top business schools in the world. It is currently ranked #4 by BusinessWeek magazine [2], #3 by the Financial Times, #7 by Forbes Magazine, #8 by Princeton Review [3], #1 by U.S. News and World Report, and #14 by the Wall Street Journal. Different publications use highly varying MBA ranking methodologies.The school does not provide assistance, other than publicly available data, to publications that rank MBA programs.

MBA Program

Admission to the MBA program is one of the most selective graduate programs in the world, with an admission rate of 15% for the class of 2008. The student body is highly international and diverse and come from a variety of different backgrounds. Women comprise 35% of the class of 2008.

The Required Curriculum consists of two semesters. The first semester focuses primarily on the internal aspects of the company and includes the courses Technology and Operations Management, Marketing, Financial Reporting and Control, Leadership and Organizational Behaviour, and Finance I. The second semester focuses on the external aspects and includes the courses Business, Government, and the International Economy, Strategy, The Entrepreneurial Manager, Negotiations, Finance II, and Leadership and Corporate Accountability.

The Elective Curriculum can be chosen from more than 50 courses. The students assign each course a priority and the courses are filled through a lottery system based on student priority and class availability. Elective curriculum students can also complete a field study in lieu of a class.

Current MBA classes have a size of approximately 900 students, divided into ten sections (A-J) of 90 students. Each section takes classes together the first year, with the intention of forming deep social bonds. Graduation rates are approximately 98%. Teaching is almost exclusively (95%) done through case teaching (also referred to as the Socratic method), where the students prepare teaching cases and discuss them in class, with a professor as moderator and facilitator.

MBA students at Harvard are graded on a relative curve. The top 15-20% of the class receive "1's" (instead of A's), the middle 70-75% receive "2's", and the bottom 10% receive "3's". If a student receives more than a certain number of "3's" in the first semester of the Required Curriculum, they receive an academic warning. The student is offered help, in the form of academic counseling and tutors to improve their academic performance. If they fail to do so and end up receiving more "3's" in the second semester and go over the limit, they may 'hit the screen'. If a student 'hits the screen', they may be held back from moving on to the second year (Elective Curriculum). The 'hit the screen' mechanism creates a sense of insecurity that not everyone will make it to the second year, which makes students at the Harvard Business School study harder than most MBA programs. The fact that most MBA students at Harvard have been at the top of their classes in undergraduate schools and high schools makes it more competitive. However, it is said that the relationships between students are not as cutthroat as rumored and that it is quite a friendly and collaborative learning environment.

Academic honors
The top academic honor at Harvard Business School is the Baker Scholar designation (High Distinction), given to the top 5% of the graduating MBA class. In a typical year a Baker Scholar will have achieved "1s" in approximately 70 - 75% of their course credits. Students receiving honors (top 20%) in both their first and second years are awarded the MBA degree with Distinction.

The student who receives the highest grades in the first year of the program is awarded the Henry Ford II scholarship and is known as the Ford Scholar. For a typical class to attain this honor entails achieving the highest available grade in each of the ten MBA classes in the first year of the program. Other acadamic distinctions include the Thomas M. and Edna E. Wolfe Award, given to recognise scholastic excellence (generally to the student with the highest grade in the class) and the Loeb prize given for the most outstanding performance in finance.

Until 2005, Harvard Business School also awarded the Siebel Scholarship to each of the top five students in the first year of the program (see www.siebelscholars.com). However for reasons that were not publicised this was recently withdrawn.