Columbia’s New Education Management Degree and Other MBA News Snippets

Education management degree draws from Columbia Business School

A dual MBA/MA degree in education management is to be offered through a new link-up between Columbia Business School and the US’s oldest graduate school of education, Teachers College, Columbia University.

Students can also opt to do the MBA segment of the new two-year qualification at INSEAD. The MA, meanwhile, is taken at Teachers College Columbia’s Klingenstein Center for Independent School Leadership.      

“Twenty-first century schools require leaders with knowledge of education and strong business acumen to successfully sustain and grow their schools,” said Pearl Rock Kane, Klingenstein’s director in a press release for Teachers College Columbia.

Getting into the new education management program entails filing separate applications with either Columbia Business School or INSEAD and with Teachers College Columbia – which requires an exemplary track record of achievement in teaching over a minimum of three years.  

Peter Thiel urges startup founders to build new ideas at HBS

A PayPal co-founder and early stage investor for Facebook, Peter Thiel, emphasized why startup founders need to remember the importance of innovation and building new ideas in their entrepreneurial ventures at a Harvard Business School (HBS) event yesterday.

Peter Thiel was at HBS’s Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship to talk about his new book on the subject, entitled Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.

Adding something radically different to a market in a startup is perhaps particularly expected of MBA graduates – as a Fortune article's disdain with a Stanford MBA alumna releasing ‘yet another dating app’ implies.

In conversation with HBS professor, William A. Sahlman, Peter Thiel also expressed his belief that more needs to be done to encourage greater diversity among startup founders - for the startup founders are the ones who set the template and culture for the ensuing enterprise, in Thiel’s opinion, and that means encouraging more people from differing backgrounds and more women to form their own companies. 

UNC Kenan-Flagler expands entrepreneurial curriculum

With tomorrow’s startup founders firmly in mind, UNC Kenan-Flagler announced a greater tilt towards entrepreneurship this week. 

The move involves a restructuring of the curriculum and an expansion in the number of hands-on opportunities available to the budding entrepreneurs among UNC Kenan-Flagler’s students.

“We want to support UNC entrepreneurs over their entire entrepreneurial and professional lifecycles,” said entrepreneurship professor, Ted Zoller, in a press release for UNC Kenan-Flagler.

University of Otago enters online MBA market

New Zealand’s University of Otago has announced its first foray into the world of the online MBA.

The idea of the online MBA offering is to increase Otago’s reach, while adhering as far as possible to the experience of those attending the campus program at Dunedin in the Otago region of the country’s South Island.

''It's important to note that this is the same degree as the one delivered to those who choose to live and study in Dunedin. It is the same curriculum, the same lecturers, and the same assessment. The difference is, we can offer this to students who live anywhere and choose to work full-time and study part-time,” the University of Otago’s executive programs director, Ian Lafferty, told the Otago Daily Times.

Lafferty added that, for this reason, the price of the online MBA would be the same as its campus counterpart when available next year and that class intake numbers would be restricted to around 20.

New Zealand zoo attracts second Stanford MBA for internship

Elsewhere in New Zealand, Wellington Zoo secured a Stanford MBA student for the second year running as part of the school’s internship scheme known as the Global Management Immersion Experience, designed to facilitate access to hands-on international management experience.

The Stanford MBA, Amanda Johnson, spent four weeks working on a partnership evaluation model for the zoo. Last year’s representative from the school, meanwhile, focused on a human resources project for a zoo that is home to over 100 species of animals, including the endangered Sumatran Tiger and cotton-top tamarin.

 “My goal was to bring clarity to the process, to help the zoo make informed choices. Part of the challenge is to not just deliver a template; you also have to make sure that it works within the existing context,” this year’s Stanford MBA student, Johnson, said in a press release for Wellington Zoo.