School: Penn / Wharton » Clear Admit: MBA Admissions Consultants Blog

As we welcome in the year 2009, it is time to make a New Year’s resolution. What better resolution than to read the newspapers of your top MBA programs? Here is a list of the MBA programs which are regularly profiled in this section:

These campus newspapers are a great way to get a feel for student culture and on-campus events, so whether you’re adding the final polish to your Round 2 applications or preparing for a future interview, it’s worth taking the time to read the student news.

In particular, reading through current and back issues of MBA newspapers can be a great source of information on student-run conferences, ongoing controversies impacting student life, the way in which students interact with each other, and the classes, projects and trips that generate excitement on campus.

Applicants may also want to pay attention to whether a school has a regularly published student newspaper. If the school does not, how do students tend to get news about campus events? How do they express their opinions or concerns about campus issues? Candidates visiting a school without an active newspaper should consider talking with current students to learn how groups at the school publicize events, how students make their voices heard to the administration, and whether there are other outlets for sharing reviews and perspectives on campus life.

Finally, applicants with a talent for writing, photography, or design may want to mention their interest in working on the campus newspaper in their application essays, since schools are usually hoping to maintain (or build) a quality student news publication.

BusinessWeek Solicits Admissions Advice from Clear Admit’s Own Graham Richmond

Earlier this week, BusinessWeek ran the second of a five-part series called “Five Years to B-School,” featuring extensive input and admissions advice from Clear Admit co-founder Graham Richmond.

The series is designed to provide prospective business school applicants with a roadmap for what they should be doing in the five years leading up to business school in order to create the strongest resumé and skill set possible. Year two was the focus of this most recent article.

According to BW, prospective applicants should have spent the first year leading up to business school getting their feet wet and should now, in year two, be taking greater initiative and beginning to more clearly define their career paths.

This means taking on more responsibility at work, building and strengthening your network, getting more involved in activities outside of work and, if necessary, polishing your academic transcript by taking new courses and doing well in them, according to the BW article.

Richmond chimed in on several of these points, offering his perspective as both an experienced admissions counselor and an MBA graduate himself.

In this second year, begin to look for international opportunities, he told BW. “Even if it’s just meeting with a client in London or doing a project abroad, you should do it,” he said.

It’s also not a bad idea to study a foreign language, Richmond added. With more and more international applicants with extensive experience in different parts of the globe competing for business school spots, you need to look for opportunities to demonstrate that you have skills to offer in a global economy, he said.

Also, look for leadership roles or noteworthy activities outside of work. This is especially important, said Richmond, for those who are struggling to get noticed or promoted on the job. Organize a charity run or plan a recycling program, offers Richmond.

And while community service positions are great, even less selfless pursuits are valuable, according to the BW piece. “We don’t care if the activity is altruistic or totally selfish,” Judith Hodara, a senior associate admissions director at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told BW. “We’re looking for people with more to offer than the ability to run a spreadsheet.” Richmond, who played a musical instrument, was able to talk about this in his interviews for Wharton’s MBA program.

Wharton will host an interactive chat on Wednesday, December 17, for prospective applicants interested in learning more about the Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs (WEP). A regular weekly series, the chats cover different aspects of life and academia in an attempt to give applicants an opportunity to ask questions of faculty and staff about Wharton resources.

So, if you are an aspiring or active entrepreneur considering the Wharton School for your MBA, you won’t want to miss this chat. It will take place at 6 p.m. EST tomorrow, December 17. To participate, follow this link to the student2student discussion board. (If you haven’t participated in a Wharton chat before, you’ll want to get there a little bit early to order to register.)

Welcome to another edition of Trivia Tuesday, our weekly examination of the programs and policies that help to distinguish the leading business schools. This week we turn our attention to the first experience that matriculating students have on Wharton’s campus: the Wharton pre-term program.

Wharton offers a required 4-5 week pre-term program before the start of first-year classes. Students choose from among several levels of coursework in financial accounting, microeconomics and statistics, designed to bring all students up to the required level of understanding in these areas before fall classes begin. Placement in the pre-term courses is by self-registration; Wharton provides a CD-Rom with self-assessment tests in early summer so students may gauge the appropriate course levels for which to register. Wharton is very clear that it is the student’s responsibility to ensure an adequate level of mathematical understanding before starting classes; students who have less than a college level calculus background in mathematics are responsible for acquiring this background before arriving at Wharton. While the pre-term courses, including the week-long “math camp,” provide a review of quantitative subject areas, they, too, assume familiarity with college calculus.

For students who already have strong backgrounds in these fields, Wharton offers short refresher courses for the waiver exams the school offers in all but three core subjects. In addition to these refresher courses, Wharton offers special courses and seminars during pre-term on the history of business, career management, languages, communication skills and other topics. Few other business schools offer pre-term activities in such a wide range of fields. Wharton uses their online auction system, also used for elective course and job interview sign-ups, to manage enrollment in optional pre-term activities. Students use the pre-term auction as a kind of trial run of the bidding system and report that they appreciate learning bidding strategies before course and interview auctions begin.

For more information on Wharton’s pre-term or the pre-term structure at other MBA programs, be sure to speak with current students or to check out the Academics section of the Clear Admit School Guides!

Wiki Wednesdays: New Interview Reports from Chicago, CBS, Tuck, Duke, LBS, Kellogg, Michigan and Wharton!

Before highlighting some of the latest posts, we’d like to remind those going through the MBA admissions process that we’ll be awarding a $10 iTunes gift certificate to every fifth applicant who contributes content to the Wiki through December 19th. To be eligible for the prize, simply e-mail your content - whether an interview report, a school visit account or a school choices case - to wiki@clearadmit.com; we’ll post the content to the Wiki and notify the winners by e-mail. Now, without further ado, here are a few snippets from the numerous reports that have rolled in recently!

A trio of applicants to Wharton shared their interview questions from second-year student interviewers, including:

[Provide an] example of leading a team.
[Give me an] example of contributing to a team.
[Explain an] example of a challenging team/group situation.
Describe an ethical dilemma you have observed or experienced at work.

Across the pond, a London Business School Round 1 applicant interviewed with an alum:

[What are your] goals? How will LBS help you get there?
Have you applied to others schools? Which ones? Why?

The LBS applicant went on to describe the presentation portion of the interview,

“At some point he gave me a topic for my presentation and he asked that I don’t share the topic with anyone so I won’t, but it was a general topic that did not require any particular knowledge. I had 7 minutes to prepare and 5 minutes to present. It did require some serious thinking and was very concrete.”

These are just a few samples of the latest questions MBA applicants have added, but there are plenty of other reports to peruse in the Clear Admit Wiki! As always, we’d like to thank everyone who has shared their MBA admissions experiences this season! For those in the midst of interviews, don’t forget to check out the Clear Admit Interview Guides for a bit of extra guidance. Best of luck!

Last week, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, together with the School of Arts and Sciences (SAS), announced the launch of a new dual-degree program that will enable participants to earn a joint MBA/master of environmental studies (MES) degree in three years or less.

This new program is designed to prepare students to develop innovative approaches for solving sustainability issues facing the business world. Its graduates, program creators envision, will be primed for leadership positions in global environmental management, finance and other business specialties.

The new multi-disciplinary degree will advance educational goals in both the business and environmental studies disciplines, according to Eric Orts, a professor of legal studies and business ethics and director of the Initiative for Global Environmental Leadership at Penn/Wharton. “It is a good example of the Penn Compact’s promise to integrate knowledge across disciplines,” he said in a release announcing the new program.

Participating students will spend three semesters taking business classes full time at Wharton and one year taking environmental-studies classes at SAS’s College of Liberal and Professional Studies (LPS). Students who choose to may take LPS classes during the evening and summer, select a research focus in a concentrated field of study and develop a thesis simultaneously, enabling some to complete the program in two and a half years.

Classes offered as part of the MES portion of the program will focus on environmental issues, environmental evaluation techniques and practical field experience, while classes in Wharton’s environmental and risk management track will develop complementary practical business skills and knowledge.

“This degree will close the gap between business and the environmental sciences,” Yvette Bordeaux, director of the M.E.S. and other programs at LPS, said in a statement.

To participate in the new program, prospective applicants must apply and be admitted to each school independently, at which point they may select the joint-degree program.

Today we’ll take a closer look at how the various top programs fared in BusinessWeek’s most recent business school rankings, released last week.

Chicago Booth held firmly to the number one spot it secured in the 2006 rankings, boasting high scores in both the corporate recruiter and graduate surveys. Harvard Business School (HBS) and Wharton traded places this year, with HBS climbing to number two and Wharton slipping to number four. BW’s Louis Lavelle attributed Wharton’s slide to a poorer showing in the intellectual capital category this year than in 2006.

Columbia, meanwhile, advanced from the number 10 spot to number seven, but MIT Sloan and Berkeley’s Haas School of Business each slipped slightly. Also noteworthy was the fact that Southern Methodist University (18) and Brigham Young University (22) each cracked the top 25 this year for the first time ever. SMU, for its part, has been among the participating schools for years, but lacked sufficient response rates in the recruiter and student portions of the ranking to secure a top spot before now, according to BW’s Geoff Gloeckler.

There were also two newcomers to the Global MBA rankings, IE Business School (2) and Oxford’s Saïd Business School (10). Like SMU, IE has long been a participant but until this year had insufficient recruiter and student response rates, Gloeckler said.

Yale School of Management, meanwhile, seems to have fallen back slightly. It came in at 24 this year, down from 19 in 2006. Lavelle attributed its fall to low student survey scores.

In an article accompanying the rankings, BW takes a look at the current business school landscape, which it says is marked by surging application rates amid “wretched” recruiting prospects.

As has historically been the case in times of economic downturn, application rates to business schools are rising steadily. According to the BW report, schools are reporting double-digit increases in application volume. Chicago Booth, for example, has seen a 20 percent surge in attendance at information sessions around the globe.

But even as more students clamor to get in, job prospects upon graduation are uncertain, with some schools bracing for the toughest MBA job market since the dotcom bust. “I think next fall is going to be very, very difficult,” George Daly, dean of Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, told BW.

The article went on to cite a survey by umbrella group MBA Career Services Council, in which 70 percent of 77 participating schools reported a downturn in full-time recruiting opportunities in financial services in October.

As a result, some students are shifting their focus from investment banking to consulting and other fields. Attendance at recruiting presentations by consulting firms is standing room only, New York University’s Stern School of Business Dean Gary Fraser told BW.

A shift is also taking place in the classroom, as professors are introducing new case studies and re-writing syllabi as part of an effort to make sense of the financial crisis and market upheaval.

Risk management, meanwhile, is expected to play a much more important role in business school curriculums over the next three to five years, according to the BW report, a trend that Robert Meyer, co-director of Wharton’s Risk Management & Decision Processes Center, calls “potentially transformational.”

It’s Tuesday once again and it’s time to check in on the important details and differences of the leading MBA programs. This week’s focus is teamwork, now a hot topic in business education. For the last decade or so, business schools have moved towards greater use of teams in coursework. This trend has been prompted by the reality that much of modern business depends on the work of functional, productive teams. In response, many business schools have integrated mandatory teamwork into the MBA curriculum, especially into the first year. Today we’ll look at a few of the models used by the leading MBA programs.

Wharton was among the first of the leading business schools to incorporate small learning teams into the first year. Wharton’s teams are assigned in August, at the end of Pre-Term, and students work with their assigned team members throughout the first year. The teams go on a 2-3 day Learning Team Retreat before classes start, during which they get to know one another and start laying the foundation for their work together during the school year. In addition to working together on class projects and studying together for core courses, Wharton’s learning teams also serve as the focus for the half-credit core course Foundations of Leadership and Teamwork. The course, which meets for the first and last six weeks of the first year, focuses on self-awareness, working in teams, and leading others, key concepts for any effective manager or teammate.

Harvard Business School divides its student body into 10 smaller groups called sections, who take all of their first-year classes together. While learning team members at most schools belong to the same larger cohort or cluster, Harvard’s learning teams - only recently introduced to the program - are cross-sectional. This is necessary because of the importance of contributing original ideas to case method classes with one’s sectionmates, and beneficial because it gives students the opportunity to meet and work with classmates outside of their section.

Kellogg, a school known for its focus on teamwork, is one of the only leading MBA programs not to assign first-year study groups. Like other b-schools, Kellogg does split its entering class into smaller sections, usually consisting of approximately 65 students each, and students in each section take all of their core courses together. (Fun fact: Kellogg’s section names are among the most unusual of any b-school’s, with the eight sections called Big Dogs, Bucketheads, Bull Frogs, Cash Cows, Highlanders, Jive Turkeys, Moose and Poets.)

Despite not breaking down the sections into smaller study groups, Kellogg students do work in teams throughout the curriculum. Students report that most of their class assignments require small group work, with the group assignments usually made by individual professors. Because Kellogg students may be in different study or project groups for each course, they miss out on the experience of sustained interaction with a single group of peers, but instead gain experience in working with a broad range of personalities. This system also hones students’ time management skills, since scheduling a group meeting for 5-6 people who are in 4-5 other small groups (while also working around classes, clubs, and recruiting activities) requires a sophisticated ability to juggle schedules!

Overall, most Kellogg students praise the school’s choice to use a dynamic team structure, feeling that this organization mimics teamwork situations in the professional world. However, since students at Wharton, Tuck, Columbia, and other schools often believe that their long-term group assignments best prepare them for teamwork in the business world, applicants should think carefully about the type of teamwork experience they are looking for, as well as the kind of group work they expect to encounter after graduating from business school.

In the end, regardless of how the learning teams or study groups are organized, they all share a common goal: providing students with hands-on practice in working effectively with a group of diverse people with divergent strengths, personalities and work styles. To find out more about the team-based learning at the leading MBA programs, be sure to check out the schools’ websites or the Clear Admit School Guides!

A piece in the Economix column of the New York Times earlier this week called attention to troubling news regarding the impact of the current credit crisis on the availablility of student loans to MBA students, particularly private loans administered through the CitiAssist program for international students.

The piece, entitled “Credit Crisis Is Bad News for M.B.A. Students” excerpted an email message sent to students Monday at MIT Sloan School of Management. According to that message, Citibank has exercised its 30-day option to cancel the CitiAssist custom student loan program with MIT Sloan, effective November 2, 2008.

The Economix column went on to explain that students who have already had their loans processed and approved by Citibank appear to be safe, but that those who still need to secure financing face greater problems. “The school is now helping students scramble to find alternate financing,” the Times reported.

The problem is not limited to MIT Sloan. The CitiAssist program is also ending at the Ross School at the University of Michigan, according to the school’s own website.

Information listed on the Ross site about the CitiAssist program indicates that of the 3,500 University of Michigan students who took out private loans in 2007, 68 percent did so through the CitiAssist program. But a bulleted point highlighted in red in the program description reads, “This loan program will end on 11/02/08. Priority date for applications is 10/15/08. Applications received after this date may not be processed.”

In a phone interview this morning, Randall Sawyer, dean of admissions for the Johnson School of Business at Cornell University, said that as he understands it, Citibank has removed its CitiAssist program from all of its schools for international students without a domestic cosigner. Harvard Business School and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania have also historically been part of the CitiAssist program.

“It’s affecting us, though not on a huge scale,” Sawyer said, indicating that schools with greater numbers of international students could be facing a larger-scale problem. “It’s certainly something that we are talking about though,” he continued.

According to Sawyer, even students who have secured funding for this year may still be unsure about whether they will find funding for next year. “At this point we don’t have any official release about the situation,” he said, but he indicated that Johnson would do its best to help students find alternate sources of funding.

Clear Admit plans to stay on top of this unfolding situation as it impacts prospective MBA applicants. Watch this space for more details as they become available.

Trivia Tuesday: International Study Trips at Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, NYU Stern and Wharton

Welcome back to Trivia Tuesday, our weekly exploration of the details, distinctions and developments of the leading MBA programs.

Over the last decade, most business schools have sought ways to provide relevant, hands-on international business exposure within the confines of a two-year degree. The solution that many schools have arrived at is “study trips,” which allow students to spend 1-2 weeks exploring the business environment of another country over the summer or during a mid-semester break. Depending on the school, these trips may be organized through an elective course, by an administrative office, or through a campus student group.

For instance, the Chazen Institute at Columbia works with individual students and clubs to organize study trips to countries or regions of interest, while Chicago’s International Programs Office coordinates short-term summer exchanges to Austria, Brazil, France and Germany. Several other business schools offer students academic credit for their travel abroad. At HBS students are able to earn 1.5 credits for their work abroad over the summer between the first and second year, provided they keep a weekly journal and submit a final paper. At Wharton, however, study trips are often closely integrated into full-semester elective courses, with students participating in hands-on consulting projects with firms from outside the U.S.

At NYU Stern, the school’s two-week long Doing Business In… (DBI) programs offer an appealing short-term alternative to spending an entire semester abroad. The program is usually offered in three selected locations each year and takes place outside of the normal academic calendar, usually between semester breaks or during Spring Break, making it easy for students to fit the program in at some point during their MBA. Each DBI includes one pre-trip class session and 8-10 full days of scheduled activities in the host country. Admission is by lottery, and classes are taught by the faculty of the host university; these faculty members also award the final pass/fail project or paper grades for the course.

In addition to the two-week DBI programs, Stern also offers students the unusual opportunity to study abroad for 1-6 weeks with one of four partner universities in Argentina, Denmark, Germany, or South Korea. These courses usually take place in early- to mid-May, making it possible to arrange a summer internship start date around completion of the course. The one-, three- and six-week programs may earn students 1.5 to 6 credits toward graduation. Although many MBA programs allow students to study abroad for a full semester or to travel abroad as part of a course, few provide summer exchanges through which students can earn credit toward graduation.

As knowledge of other cultures and business practices becomes more important to the daily life of business, it will become ever more important for students to gain exposure to international business during the MBA program. Since study trips range from informal and self-directed to formal consulting engagements for academic credit, applicants may want to consider the type of study trip that would best complement their prior international experience and keep this in mind as they apply to MBA programs. For more information on the details of schools’ study trip offerings, be sure to check out the schools’ websites or consult the Clear Admit School Guides!

Partnering with the Management Research Group of Portland, Maine, and tapping the expertise of Journal editor Jennifer Merritt, who formerly headed up BusinessWeek’s business school rankings, the Journal has officially entered the EMBA ranking game.

The result of extensive surveys with current students, recent grads, and human-resources and executive-development managers at companies across 23 industries, the ranking reveals the top 25 schools around the globe that provide “the rigor needed to build tomorrow’s corporate leaders and C-suite executives,” according to the Journal.

Rounding out the top five programs were the Thunderbird School of Global Management at number three, the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business at number four; and the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School at number five.

To reach its conclusions, the Journal took into account survey scores from students and corporations of 73 EMBA programs at 53 business schools across nine countries. In addition to the student and corporate scores, the rankings also measured what employers wanted out of programs and how well students felt their programs developed those skills.

To compile the final rankings, student and corporate ratings were weighted 40 percent each, and the skills ratings were weighted 20 percent.

Kellogg and Wharton have among the largest EMBA programs, with 843 candidates currently enrolled in the seven Kellogg programs and with 406 students currently enrolled in Wharton’s two programs. Both schools’ programs got high marks from companies – nearly double their closest competitors – which put them squarely in the lead despite lower scores from students.

That’s because corporate scores varied the most – the two leaders far outpaced those in the middle of the pack. In contrast, student scores were closer in range. So even though Wharton came in at number 15 in terms of student ratings, it was still within striking distance of the leading schools’ scores.

That said, for the number one school in the student ranking, the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, a particularly strong student score is what guaranteed it a place in the top five.

In addition to determining how the various schools measured up to one another, the Journal rankings also revealed interesting information about what students are looking for in EMBA programs overall. Among the key findings:

• School reputation is the top consideration for students choosing which program to attend, as noted by 51 percent of student respondents.
• Quality faculty is a key factor, with 78 percent of students reporting that they considered their school because of its distinguished faculty.
• Students are drawn to EMBA programs because they offer a way to develop leadership skills without losing more than a few days a month in the office and because what they learn in school can be immediately applied on the job. “Learn on Friday and Saturday, apply on Monday,” is how one respondent put it.
• Cost was relatively unimportant whether or not companies helped pay the bill. Program tuition ranged from $65,000 to $160,000; nearly 34 percent of students said they paid their own way, 30 percent said their employers paid the entire bill, and 13 percent said their companies paid at least half. (Average out-of-pocket expense among respondents was $45,000.)
• Distance is not a deterrent for the right program. While the majority of students (64 percent) traveled less than 50 miles one way, 7 percent commuted up to 200 miles and nearly 9 percent schlepped a whopping 1,000 miles or more one way.
• With an EMBA comes a bonus or promotion or both. Of those surveyed, 24 percent report having been given both a raise and promotion since they started classes and another 30 percent expect both in the next year.

Companies, meanwhile, have their own set of expectations. Quick return on investment topped the list, with 26 percent of companies saying they expect to see management and leadership skills put to use immediately, and an equal percentage expect them to be put to use within a year of graduation. Human-resource-development managers – 64 percent of them – view EMBA programs as a means of holding onto talent. And 55 percent of company respondents called the EMBA a critical business investment.

Despite the high marks for many programs, the rankings suggest that there’s still room for improvement. Companies sometimes complain that students return from EMBA programs seeking to solve business problems like academic exercises – without practical sense. Students complained about programs that rely too heavily on distance technology that doesn’t always work well or enhance the learning process.

Finally, more flexibility was called for by many students, for whom program scheduling can prove too difficult work into an existing work routine or for whom the 15 hours or more of study per week is too much to carry.

To view the complete rankings, click here. To read more about the methodology the Journal employed to compile its rankings, click here.

“Brace yourselves - because we are!” read an email to Wharton School alumni sent last week. “We expect this to be one of our highest years in terms of applications received.”

Business school application volume has historically run counter to the economy, spiking in times of financial downturn. Accounting for the increase in volume are both those seeking simply to ride out the storm in school and those viewing a slowdown as an opportune time to obtain an advanced degree to differentiate themselves in an increasingly competitive job market.

The past couple of years have been no exception. GMAT test registration volume, which can be a good indicator of how many people are considering applying to business school, has been rising steadily.

According to the most recent figures, year-to-date worldwide registration through the end of August was 194,946, representing a 10.98 percent increase over the number of registrations recorded during the same period in 2007. This figure represents the highest registration volume recorded for any years studied by the Graduate Management Admissions Council, which administers the GMAT exam.

While it’s too early to measure the impact of the past few weeks’ market gyrations on admissions numbers, business school admissions offices are bracing for record application volume in the cycles ahead.

The following snapshot of Wharton’s incoming class this fall gives a sense of where the school’s application cycle closed last year. With the admissions office expecting this year’s volume to be even greater, admission criteria may prove even more competitive than usual.

Wharton received 7,328 applications for the 2010 class, up from 6,649 the year before. Meanwhile, the actual enrollment size – 800 – remained constant.

Admitted students, on average, had six years of work experience (up from 5.8 the year before), a 3.5 grade point average and a GMAT score of 715 (up just a few points from last year’s 712). The average age of applicants was 28.

With the nation squarely focused on the state of the economy and Congressional negotiations toward a bailout plan waging on, business schools, too, have kept the financial crisis at the forefront of their communications.

Harvard Business School’s Admission Director Dee Leopold yesterday posted an entry on her blog directed toward prospective applicants wondering how the current economic situation will impact upcoming admissions volumes and cycles.

According to Leopold, the Admissions Office at HBS has been receiving a new array of questions given the climate of uncertainty in the financial markets. Questions have ranged from whether or not HBS intends to increase the size of next year’s class and/or the number of admits from financial services in light of higher application volume to whether prospective candidates who are unemployed will be at a disadvantage.

The class size next year will not increase, remaining at roughly 900 students, Leopold says. As to increasing the number of admits from financial services, Leopold’s answer was less precise. “Not necessarily,” she said. “Our goal is to compose a class which represents many different kinds of diversity, of which professional experience is only one element.” But there are not strict quotas that govern industry or geographical targets, so the overall class profile could shift some in the coming year.

Applicants who find themselves unemployed will not be at a disadvantage, Leeopold assures. “We realize that these are unusual times and that many strong contributors may find themselves in this situation,” she says.

Schools Offer Support to Alumni
MIT Sloan and Wharton, meanwhile, have each reached out to their alumni bases via email to remind them that school career services, networks and support are available to those within the alumni community who may need them.

“Whether you are employed by a fledging new venture, a not-for-profit service or one of the firms in the headlines, these services are there for you,” wrote MIT Sloan Dean David Schmittlein in an email address to alumni earlier this week. Schmittlein also encouraged alumni who are in a position to provide support to other alums in need to get in touch with the school.

Dean Tom Robertson of the Wharton School at the University of Pennyslvania issued a similar statement to that school’s alumni on Monday, listing a range of resources available to alumni in need of support and encouraging others who might be in a hiring position to post job opportunities at no cost on the Wharton Job Board.

Roberston also noted that Wharton faculty led a teach-in on campus on September 16th about the unfolding financial situation attended by more than 1,000 students. Videos of that day’s panelists are available for viewing at this link.

The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business also reached out to its alumni, including convening a dinner in New York in the immediate aftermath of the Lehman bankruptcy announcement for members of the 2008 class who had accepted offers with the firm.

“As soon as we heard the news, we reached out to the ‘08s who had just graduated in June,” explained Julie Morton, associate dean of career services at Chicago GSB. According to Morton, 26 members of the 2008 Chicago class had accepted offers with Lehman, some in Chicago and New York and others in London and Asia.

Morton and Stacey Kole, dean of Chicago’s full-time MBA program, flew to New York to have dinner with the Lehman students there on September 19th. “At that point the whole Barclays deal had been announced and they were waiting to see,” Morton explained, most having just completed training a week earlier and not yet started their rotational programs.

“They were in a state of limbo, and we were really just reminding them that we were here from them,” Morton said.

“At this point quite honestly I’m not sure they are going to need a lot of new job support,” Morton said in a phone interview earlier this week. “I think for the most part they will land on their feet with the acquisition,” she said, “but I think it meant a lot to them to know that we are there.”

Partnering with the Wall Street Journal and CNBC, Yale School of Management (SOM) held a roundtable discussion Tuesday in New York on the current financial crisis, drawing together business leaders and scholars from Yale, Wharton, NYU, Columbia and Harvard to examine the state of the economy and the proposed Treasury Department bail-out plan.

“We were inspired by the outpouring of interest and the quick response to this event,” said its organizer, Yale SOM Senior Associate Dean Jeffrey Sonnenfeld. Planning began on Sunday night, and by Tuesday afternoon a staggering roster of economic thought leaders had assembled around the table to share their insights.

Among those in attendance were a former chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the former executive chairman of the Bank of New York Mellon Corporation, the president and CEO of Marsh & McLennan Companies, the president and CEO of Credit Suisse Investment Banking and managing directors and partners at several prominent boutique investment and private equity firms. A full list of roundtable participants is available here.

“That we could get everyone together so quickly is a signal of both their leadership and their concern in this growing crisis,” said Sonnenfeld. “Peer-driven learning is what is required, as there is no clear map to follow for navigating this worst financial crisis in 80 years,” he continued.

Yale SOM will post video of the full roundtable discussion as soon as it is available. In the meantime, you can view video from various roundtable participants:

Check back tomorrow when our continuing coverage of top business school’s responses to the current economic crisis will include outreach efforts by the Wharton School, MIT Sloan and Chicago GSB to recent alums, as well as Harvard Business School’s advice to prospect applicants on how the situation could impact future application cycles.

As many of you may know, former Wharton Admissions Director Thomas Caleel stepped down in June, and a search for his replacement is currently underway. Of course, the important work of the admissions office cannot be put on hold. Anjani Jain, vice dean and director of Wharton’s Graduate Division, has stepped in as interim director until Caleel’s successor is named. He is supported by a veteran staff of senior and associate admissions directors led by Judith Hodara, who joined the Wharton Admissions Committee in 2000.

Amid a busy season of travel to admissions events around the globe, we managed to catch up with Judith last week on the road. She shared enthusiastically about the new accelerated three-year JD/MBA program that the Wharton School will offer in collaboration with the Law School of Pennsylvania beginning next year.

In her answers below, she also helps demystify the application process for prospective applicants and offers some advice on how applicants can let their true voices come through in their essays. So read on!

Clear Admit: What’s the single most exciting development, change, or event happening at Wharton this coming year?

Judith Hodara: As we recently announced, the Wharton School and the Law School at the University of Pennsylvania are launching an accelerated three-year program leading to both the JD and MBA degrees. We’re really excited about this new opportunity to add to our joint and dual degree programs.

Students in the new program will spend the first year in Law School and the following summer in four Law and Wharton courses designed specifically for the three-year JD/MBA. The second and third years will include a combination of Law and Wharton courses, including capstone courses in the third year and work experience in law, business, finance, or the public sector in the summer between the second and third years.