Big Data Gets Master Treatment at B-Schools
One-Year Analytics Programs Cater to Shift in Students' Ambitions
ENLARGE Ayushi Agrawal left her job as a senior business analyst to enroll in the analytics program at Arizona State's business school. Mark Peterman for The Wall Street Journal
By
Lindsay Gellman
B-school students can't get enough of big data. Neither can recruiters.
Interest in specialized, one-year master's programs in business analytics, the discipline of using data to explore and solve business problems, has increased lately, prompting at least five business schools to roll out stand-alone programs in the past two years.
The growing interest in analytics comes amid a broader shift in students' ambitions. No longer content with jobs at big financial and consulting firms, the most plum jobs for B-school grads are now in technology or in roles that combine business skills with data acumen, say school administrators.
But some faculty and school administrators remain unconvinced that the programs properly prepare students to work with analytics.
The University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business began its Master of Business Analytics program this fall with 30 students. About 50 to 60 students are expected to enroll in the $47,000 program next year, the school said.
The program was the brainchild of Marshall's corporate advisory board-executives at blue-chip firms like General Electric Co. , Boeing Co. and Walt Disney Co. who say they need more hires with analytics talent, said James Ellis, the school's dean. The board also recommended that undergraduate students at Marshall be required to take a course in the subject.
"We find it invaluable to have people who can synthesize data" and suggest changes based on those insights, said Melissa Lora, president of Yum Brands Inc. 's Taco Bell International, who serves on the school's corporate-advisory board.
Business-analytics professionals, for instance, are needed at Taco Bell to sort data on restaurants' service speed and product quality, as well as social-media metrics, Ms. Lora said.
Amy Hillman, dean at Arizona State University's W.P. Carey School of Business, said interest in a year-old master's program in business analytics has spread "like wildfire." More than 300 people applied for 87 spots in this year's class, according to the school.
Ayushi Agrawal, a current Carey student, said she left her job as a senior business analyst at a Bangalore, India, branch of a Chicago-based analytics firm to enroll in the program. As data become central to more business decisions, "I want to be at the forefront" of the emerging field, the 24-year-old student said.
'We find it invaluable to have people who can synthesize data.'—Melissa Lora, president of Taco Bell International
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology also has a new program in the works. Professors and administrators at its Sloan School of Management are developing a tentatively titled Masters in Analytics program to be offered jointly with the university's Operations Research Center beginning in 2016, said Dimitris Bertsimas, co-director of the center. The program will enroll about 50 students, he said.
At General Motors Co. , business-analytics professionals "make sense of big data, mine vast quantities of information, and look for trends in customer and dealer behavior," said Nate Bruin-Slot, a customer-experience manager at GM who has recruited students from analytics programs.
Starting salaries for 2013 grads of the M.S. Business Analytics program at Michigan State University's Eli Broad College of Business averaged $75,000, according to the school, while salaries for graduates of the two-year M.B.A. program averaged $90,000. Generally, the analytics students tend to have a strong background in computer programming and statistics, school officials say.
Yet others say it is smarter to deliver analytics training to all students, rather than a select few.
Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management offers several courses in analytics, some of which are required for M.B.A.s. The school has no plans to offer a stand-alone business-analytics degree, said Florian Zettelmeyer, director of Kellogg's Program on Data Analytics.
"These one-year masters programs are creating a type of person who is neither fish nor fowl," Dr. Zettelmeyer said. "We fear they're neither as competent with data as real data scientists, nor have the leadership skills that you really need to drive change in analytics," he said.
Michael Rappa, founding director of the Institute for Advanced Analytics at North Carolina State University, said analytics is best studied in an interdisciplinary context, rather than only through a university's business school.
"Analytics programs in a business school will always be in the shadow of the M.B.A. program," said Dr. Rappa, architect of the Institute's popular Master of Science in Analytics program, launched in 2007. "That's how the school is ranked."
Write to Lindsay Gellman at lindsay.gellman@wsj.com
SEARCH RESULTS - WSJ.com
On B-School Test, Americans Fail to Measure Up
High GMAT Scores From China, India Spur Separate Rankings for U.S. Students
ENLARGE Viktor Koen
By
Lindsay Gellman
New waves of Indians and Chinese are taking America's business-school entrance exam, and that's causing a big problem for America's prospective M.B.A.s.
Why? The foreign students are much better at the test.
Asia-Pacific students have shown a mastery of the quantitative portion of the four-part Graduate Management Admission Test. That has skewed mean test scores upward, and vexed U.S. students, whose results are looking increasingly poor in comparison. In response, admissions officers at U.S. schools are seeking new ways of measurement, to make U.S. students look better.
Domestic candidates are "banging their heads against the wall," said Jeremy Shinewald, founder and president of mbaMission, a New York-based M.B.A. admissions-consulting company. While U.S. scores have remained consistent over the past several years, the falling percentiles are "causing a ton of student anxiety," he said.
Since people with near-perfect scores on the test's math section now make up a significant percentage of all GMAT takers, "the higher you go, the harder it is to get to the next percentile or score," said 22-year-old Natalie Miller, who eventually plans to apply to the University of Indianapolis School of Business.
ENLARGE The GMAT, administered by the Graduate Management Admission Council, is typically required to apply to M.B.A. programs, along with undergraduate transcripts, essay responses and letters of recommendation. Students at top programs like Harvard Business School and Stanford Graduate School of Business have mean GMAT rankings around the 96th percentile.
Of the test's four sections—writing, integrated reasoning, quantitative and verbal—admissions officers view results from the quantitative section as a key predictor of business school success.
Percentile rankings are calculated using a raw score—for the quantitative section, typically between 0 and 51. In 2004, a raw score of 48 in the quantitative section yielded a ranking in the 86th percentile, according to GMAC; today, that same score would land the test-taker in the 74th percentile.
U.S. students' raw scores on the quantitative section have remained roughly flat over the last decade at around 33, but their percentile ranking has fallen as more of their higher-scoring international counterparts take the exam.
Hires with Western training are in demand overseas, and students from Asia are flocking to U.S. business schools. Asia-Pacific students comprise 44% of current GMAT test-takers, up from a decade ago, when they represented 22%, according to GMAC. U.S. students, once the majority of test-takers, now comprise 36% of the whole.
Related
On average, Asia citizens fare better on the quantitative section of the exam than Americans do, according to GMAC data. This year, the mean raw score for students in the Asian-Pacific region on that section was 45, above the global mean of 38 and the U.S. mean of 33. Asian students' raw score has risen to 45 from 42 over the last decade.
The shifting data give an impression that U.S. student aptitude is declining, said Sangeet Chowfla, GMAC's chief executive officer. He said schools have complained to him that the test's global rankings were becoming more difficult to interpret and asked for new ways to assess both U.S. and foreign test-takers separately.
To address those concerns, GMAC in September introduced a benchmarking tool that allows admissions officers to compare applicants against their own cohort, filtering scores and percentile rankings by world region, country, gender and college grade-point average.
Sara Neher, assistant dean of M.B.A. admissions at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, said she was among those who contacted GMAC for help.
"I need to be able to show my scholarship committee, which includes faculty, that this person is in the top 5% of test takers in his region," even though that individual might not rank highly against test takers world-wide, she said.
Rather than effectively creating a different standard for U.S. students, one admissions officer at a top-ranked business school said American students need better math instruction, starting in elementary school. Students in South and East Asia tend to have a strong grounding in math fundamentals during school, and spend longer hours studying for the test. According to GMAC, Asia students spend an average of 151 hours in test preparation; U.S. students average 64 hours.
American business schools have put great effort into recruiting in South and East Asia as they try to grow enrollment and make their programs more global. But schools also don't want to become factories for high-scoring test-takers from abroad.
At Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, admissions officers strive to assemble a class with impressive credentials and geographic as well as ethnic and racial diversity. Increasingly, that means passing over some top-scorers in favor of lower-scoring candidates who bring other strengths to the class, said Liz Riley Hargrove, associate dean for admissions at Fuqua. About half of Fuqua's total applications come from international candidates; among those, the pool is "heavily lopsided" toward China, India and Korea, she said.
Students worried about their GMAT percentile have an alternative exam: the Graduate Record Examinations, or GRE. Typically taken for entrance to graduate programs in a variety of academic subjects including the humanities and engineering, GRE scores are now accepted for admission at 85% of business schools, according to Kaplan Test Prep, a division of Kaplan Inc.
The University of Rochester's Simon Business School began accepting the GRE as well as GMAT for its M.B.A. applicants three years ago. Rebekah Lewin, assistant dean for admissions, said her office has no preference for one test over the other.
For now, though, the GMAT still looms large.
Ms. Miller, who took the test last month, said she spent the bulk of her test-preparation time reviewing the quantitative section. She said the extra math training helped her think more quickly on the quantitative section, but she didn't score as high as she'd hoped.
Write to Lindsay Gellman at lindsay.gellman@wsj.com
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