“The Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business is the centerpiece of CBS’s efforts to extend its global orientation. The Chazen Institute oversees the school’s MBA Exchange Program as well as the Chazen Language Program, which offers eight-week beginning, intermediate and advanced courses in nine languages.

“On-campus offerings from the Chazen Institute include a regular series of conferences and speaker forums, often in conjunction with other centers at CBS. Off-campus, Chazen also provides organizational support for several International Study Tours each winter and spring, working with individual student organizers or student clubs to select destinations and coordinate logistics. These week-long trips are popular among students as an alternative to spending a full semester abroad. Destinations for the Spring 2011 term included Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico and South Korea.

“For students with an interest in pursuing coursework in international business, the school’s International Business area of focus offers a framework for understanding and solving problems in the global market. Though the concentration is not run by the Chazen Institute, its courses on topics such as entrepreneurship in Africa and international banking complement Chazen’s experiential offerings.”

To read more about Columbia’s international offerings, as well as to obtain in-depth information about the school’s program and curriculum, be sure to check out the Clear Admit School Guide to Columbia. All Clear Admit School Guides are available for immediate purchase and download on the Clear Admit shop.

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HBS came in at number two, followed by Wharton at number three. London Business School, meanwhile, fell from joint first to fourth, mirroring a general trend in which U.S. schools fared marginally better than their European counterparts. Falling salaries among alumni from European schools – an impact of the recent economic turmoil in Europe – account in part for this trend, the FT reports.

The FT ranking is calculated using data gathered from participating schools and alumni from the class that graduates three years before the survey. Stanford 2008 graduates had the highest sector-weighted average salary in this year’s rankings – $192,179 per year – a designation the California school has snagged eight times in the ranking’s 14-year history. Stanford also shot up this year in the ranking’s measurement of alumni career progress and “aims achieved,” helping it take the number one spot for the first time.

The top ten schools in this year’s ranking are as follow:

Stanford GSB (1) Harvard Business School (2) Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (3) London Business School(4) Columbia Business School (5) INSEAD (6) MIT Sloan School of Management (7) IE Business School (8) IESE Business School (9) Hong Kong UST Business School (10)

For the full FT 2012 Global MBA rankings, click here.

The world’s largest MBA fair, the QS World MBA Tour will feature more than $1.2 million worth of available scholarships, panel discussions addressing hot MBA topics and trends, free GMAT information seminars and presentations from local and international school representatives. B-school alumni, entrepreneurial groups and career development organizations will also be in attendance, giving prospective applicants valuable networking opportunities. The fair also features a dedicated section for Executive MBAs as well as a special “Women in Leadership” forum.

Participating schools include Columbia Business School, the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, IE, NYU’s Stern School of Business, Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business, the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, Cornell’s Johnson School and many more.

For more details on specific tour dates in the cities below, use the following links:

• Washington, DC, Tuesday, February 7th • Boston, Thursday, February 9th • Toronto, Saturday, February 11th • New York, Sunday, February 12th • Los Angeles, Wednesday, February 15th • San Francisco, Thursday, February 16th

Jack Mitchell, chairman and CEO of Mitchells/Richards/Marshs and Wilkes Bashford, was appointed CBS’s most recent Executive in Residence on January 4th. Men’s and women’s specialty stores in Connecticut, New York and California, Mitchells/Richards/Marshs and Wilkes Bashford are renowned for providing personal service and establishing strong relationships between employees and clientele.

“We are pleased to welcome Jack Mitchell to the Executives in Residence program,” Donald (Don) C. Waite III ’66, director of the Executives in Residence program since 2002, said in a statement. The program is one of the largest held by any business school, and his expertise in the management of family business and retailing will greatly enrich the program’s resources.”

Mitchell joined his family business, Ed Mitchell, Inc., after completing a BA at Wesleyan University and an MA at the University of California at Berkeley. Under his leadership, the company acquired Richards of Greenwich, CT, Marshs of Huntington, Long Island, and Wilkes Bashford of northern California. The stores became well known for employee engagement and retention as well as exceptional customer service and high quality merchandise. Beyond his management of the business, Mitchell since 2003 has also launched a career as a speaker and author, keynoting events for top corporations on employee engagement and customer service.

For more on CBS’s Executives in Residence Program, including a listing of other current Executives, click here.

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Thank you to everyone who has submitted interview accounts!

To see more MBA admissions interview reports, check out the Clear Admit Wiki – a free resource with hundreds of real, documented interview experiences from b-school applicants. Also, if you’d like to help your fellow applicants by adding your experiences, please send us your interview field report and we’ll post it to the wiki. Finally, if you’d like even more helpful hints and detailed analysis on how to ace your interview, check out our line of Interview Guides, which demystify the most common questions asked by the leading programs and offer step-by-step guidance for a successful interview.

Through combined admissions, schools can look for applicants whose profiles may not be strong enough to secure a spot in the full-time MBA program but who might be well suited for the part-time or executive MBA programs. For example, students with low GMAT scores but valuable work experience could be admitted to the EMBA cohort at certain programs instead of the full-time MBA program, admissions officials told the FT.

Schools that embrace combined admissions are able to merge the admissions functions of different programs within the school, realizing cost savings and better meeting their recruiting targets by being able to market the traditional full-time MBA as well as the part-time and executive programs to applicants to ensure that each student finds a fit with one program.

At CBS, for example, Vice Dean Amir Ziv helped centralize admissions two years ago. Before then “the full-time MBA and EMBA were separate divisions and instead of co-operating they were almost competing [for students],” Ziv told the FT.

At IE, meanwhile, the new system helps direct highly qualified students who may not gain admission to the full-time MBA program to consider alternate programs instead. Strong candidates who are turned down for IE’s flagship international MBA program now undergo a more formal counseling process about which other programs could be a fit, Lisa Bevil, director of full-time admissions, told the FT. Ten percent of students who applied to one program now study in another as a result of the new system, she said.

The University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business combined admissions two years ago, and since then 130 students have applied to the part-time program instead of the EMBA after receiving advice from admissions counselors about better fit, Ross Director of Admissions Soojin Koh told the FT. “They would have all applied to the EMBA and probably would have not been admitted, because they had mis-evaluated their experience,” Koh said. 

Combined admissions is also helping schools cut costs. “We didn’t have shared accountability for the enrolment results . . . there was no formal process for cross selling and there was no co-ordinated marketing plan,” Liz Riley Hargrove, associate dean for admission at Duke, told the FT about the school’s previous system. Now, “we save a significant amount of money just by co-ordinating the [recruiting] schedule,” she added. 

To learn more about some schools’ move toward combined admissions, click here.

Prospective applicants to Chicago Booth, Columbia, Harvard, INSEAD, Kellogg, Stanford and Wharton need to look no further for a comprehensive, at your fingertips resource that is helpful at all stages of the MBA admissions process.  Whether you are just beginning to research target schools, crafting application essays, preparing for an admissions interview or making a final decision about where you attend, the Clear Admit MBA Guide Apps are a valuable and time-saving resource.

Each of the seven MBA Guide Apps includes 30+ pages of objective information covering student demographics, academics, special programs, student life, career services, admission and financial aid among other things.  The convenient “Notes” feature allows you to record your thoughts as you peruse each page of the guide.

If you’re an MBA applicant who wants the benefits of the Clear Admit School Guides with the convince of being able to read them anywhere, the School Guide Apps are for you!

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Michael Melmed, a first-year student, created the video as part of his Social Media Marketing class at CBS. Inspired by a new question on the CBS application that asks applicants to share, in 200 characters or less, their post-MBA professional goal, Melmed gathered tweets from current CBS students about why they love the Columbia MBA program. He compiled the responses into a 4-minute video – sort of a love letter to the school – that offers prospective applicants viewpoints from a range of current students on what makes the CBS MBA unique.

“I want to help potential applicants in any way possible, so I have a group of students actively monitoring the Comments section on YouTube to answer any questions of prospective students,” Melmed writes.

In the weeks since the video first aired, comments and chatter between prospective applicants and current students have sprung up around topics ranging from entrepreneurship opportunities at the school to the limitations of the current business school facilities at Uris Hall to the advantages and disadvantages of CBS’s class and cluster sizes. Current students also provide answers to questions pertaining to changing careers, access to financial aid, best times to submit your application, advice for reapplicants and more.

To view Melmed’s video and the resulting comment forum, click here.

This month marks the successful conclusion of the first year of the new CBS Program for Financial Studies. The program, developed by Laurie Hodrick, the A. Barton Hepburn Professor of Economics, is governed by a 16-member Executive Advisory Board and a seven-member Academic Advisory Board.

During its inaugural year, the program included outreach initiatives designed to promote interdisciplinary financial studies and inspire students to apply their learning to real-life business scenarios and career development. One such initiative was Career Tracks, allowing students to customize their curriculum development to better reach their individual career goals.

Another initiative launched by the Program for Financial Studies earlier this summer was the No Free Lunch Seminar Series, intended to encourage greater discussion of faculty members’ research. As part of the open, informal series, CBS professors are invited to introduce their in-progress research to MBA and PhD students in lunchtime seminars. Seminars are filmed as they take place and archived online, where they are available for all to see. To access them, click here.

As the Program for Financial Studies gears up to enter its second year, it will host its inaugural conference. The conference, scheduled to take place on November 4th in Columbia University’s Faculty House, will explore the theme “Finance in a World of Uncertainties.” Among the conference’s highlights will be panel discussions on asset management and corporate finance and a keynote address by Erskine Bowles ’69, co-chair of the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.

To learn more about CBS’s Program for Financial Studies, click here.