Q&A

‘Our Best Measure Is the Success of Our Graduates’

Mark Zupan, dean of the Simon School, looks ahead to the next 20 years.

Considering Simon’s 50-year history, where do you see the school going in the next few decades?

The Simon Graduate School of Business has long been regarded among the world’s best business schools. Most recently, the Financial Times of London rated Simon third in the world for finance, fourth in the world for both managerial economics and accounting, and eighth in the world for statistics. For the second straight year, Simon is ranked 22nd among business schools in the United States.

We intend to become one of the nation’s 20 leading schools of business within the next five years. Our strategic plan, approved by the Board of Trustees, outlines the steps needed to achieve that goal. By 2026, our aspiration is to play at the top 10 level. In the next five years, the school will increase both student quality and enrollments, strengthen the faculty’s size and impact, enhance the curriculum and the sense of community within the school, and launch a major fundraising campaign.

We will do this by continuing to build on our core strengths, namely our highly personalized environment for learning and scholarship, our analytic economics-based approach, the excellent reputation of our faculty and curriculum, and the diversity of our student body.

BUSINESS LEADER: Under the leadership of Mark Zupan, dean since 2004, the Simon School has led a national trend among business schools by attracting talented young people to enroll in its programs.

What are the challenges for graduate business education? And where do you see opportunities? Both at Rochester and in the United States?

The challenges facing Simon are the same as those facing all business schools—increased global competition for students, faculty, and staff. At Simon, we have turned those challenges into an opportunity. Our Early Leaders initiative will increase our competitiveness and has been a key reason why we have grown our enrollments over the past two years by 40 percent (significantly above the average of other top 30 business schools).

Our enrollment growth hasn’t been accomplished at the expense of quality. Simon is arguably the most improved business school on admissions quality metrics. In addition, our diversity has been further strengthened through the initiative: half of our Early Leader students are female compared to an average of 30 percent female at leading full-time MBA programs nationally. To keep pace with enrollment growth, we intend to grow our faculty ranks by 10 members over the next five years. We are very proud of the four new faculty members we added this year, including Russian sisters Anzhela and Diana Knyazeva, who joined us as assistant professors of finance, and the international media coverage they’ve received.

How is Simon prepared to address the challenges?

In 2006, Simon set a national business school trend when we established the Early Leaders initiative, aimed at attracting premier MBA students with zero to three years of work experience. Simon has long been open to all sources of talent, regardless of age or other demographic distinctions. Many of our most prominent alumni came to Simon directly out of undergraduate studies or shortly thereafter.

By launching Early Leaders, we are effectively increasing the diversity of our student body, by becoming a more viable option especially for leading female students. In addition to opening up the opportunity for students who might not otherwise have been able to pursue an MBA later in their careers due to family and work demands, our research shows that pursuing an MBA soon after college versus four to six years later offers a net present value increase of over $160,000 by the age of 30. Since the introduction of the Early Leaders initiative, Harvard, Wharton, Stanford, MIT, and other top business schools have established similar programs for recent college graduates. We are in excellent company.

What has Simon become known for over the past five decades? Do you see the school’s focus changing over time?

Simon is consistently ranked among the world’s top business schools. We have long been recognized for our analytical, economics-based curriculum that gives students the tools to solve complex business problems. Historically, our world-renowned faculty have produced research, including pioneering work in agency theory led by Michael Jensen in the 1970s, as well as positive accounting theory and organizational architecture, that changed the way business is conducted in the boardrooms of major corporations as well as in the classrooms of other business schools.

Our strengths lie in other areas as well, including marketing, health sciences management, general management, entrepreneurship, systems-based consulting, and pricing.

We have built—or are in the process of launching—four new centers and institutes: the Center for Pricing, in partnership with the Professional Pricing Society; the Center for Information Intensive Services; the Institute for Health Care Management; and the Center for Leadership Development. Simon will continue to build on its core strengths while adapting to meet the needs of the marketplace in the years to come.

The business program began life as part of the arts and sciences undergraduate program but has not had an undergraduate degree for many years. Is there a place for an undergraduate degree program? Are there other options to give undergraduates opportunities?

Thirty-eight of the top 50 business schools offer undergraduate majors at their universities. It provides a good feeder to the graduate programs and the undergrad program enrollments have historically been counter-cyclical to the grad programs in terms of volume of students. We are actively reviewing our options for undergraduate minors as well as majors.

In addition, through the generosity of trustee Ed Hajim ’58, chairman and CEO of MLH Capital, we established the Summer Business Institute @ Simon for college juniors and seniors or recent college graduates. The Summer Business Institute is a three-week intensive immersion in three key subject areas: general management, accounting and finance, and marketing. Participants also have the opportunity to network with regional CEOs at evening receptions and shadow them on visits to their companies during the day. Simon also has established Direct Admission Partnerships with more than 25 liberal arts colleges and universities to provide Early Leader candidates to our programs.

The stories about the value of an MBA continue to ebb and flow with the news cycles. What is your answer to the question of why a business leader should get an MBA?

Our best measure of the value of an MBA is the success of our graduates. They are presidents and CEOs of major corporations, respected business owners, and successful entrepreneurs, and professors and deans at prestigious academic institutions.

The statistics are impressive, especially considering that our programs are only 50 years old: 358 Simon graduates are presidents of leading companies, 141 are CEOs of major corporations, 106 are CFOs, and 62 are COOs. Since awarding our very first MBA degree in 1962, more than 11,000 Simon alumni have made their mark on the business world with their extraordinary talents and achievements. Today, Simon alumni form an influential network that extends across the country and around the world.

The diversity of where an MBA takes an individual is worth noting. (For example, Simon alumni include a news anchor at CNN, the cofounder of MySpace, the entrepreneur who founded Kronos Inc., as well as CEOs of Fortune 500 firms, like Goodyear, and the CFO of the New York Times, to name a few.) I hear from alumni every day who tell me that their Simon MBA has made a huge impact on their careers. The value of an MBA in terms of starting salary is significant. A Simon Class of 2007 graduate can expect to earn a mean base salary of $84,137 and a mean signing bonus of $18,520.

BusinessWeek recently ranked Simon 7th for return on investment and 13th in total compensation earned 10 years post graduation. While the practical value of an MBA is significant, its intrinsic value is priceless. It transforms the thinking process and provides tools to successfully solve the most complex business problems.