Monday, August 29, 2005

SSRN-Core Finance Trends in the Top MBA Programs in 2005 by Kent Womack, Ying Zhang

SSRN-Core Finance Trends in the Top MBA Programs in 2005 by Kent Womack, Ying Zhang:

Following Friday's mention of the DeAngelo, DeAngelo, and Zimmerman paper that looks at what is wrong with MBA programs at some universities, I was sent the following paper by Womack and Zhang. They survey MBA programs to see what trends exist.

The good news? More finance!
"Five of the nineteen schools responding have increased hours spent in the finance core substantially, compared to results of our earlier survey in 2001."
The bad news (at least for students): fewer electives:
"The recent survey results, however, suggest in general that most other schools seem to be migrating in the other direction, towards more required course hours."
The paper is full of many really cool things. Fot instance focusing on finance:
  1. "Principles of Corporate Finance by Brealey, Meyers, and Allen (BMA) and
    Corporate Finance by Ross, Westerfield, Jaffe (RWJ), were used by 8 and 6 schools this
    year respectively, and remain the prevailing main textbook choices by most schools."
  2. “Average outside class hours expected per session”. The mean for all schools
    responding is 4.2 hours, with a wide range of 2 to 8 hours."
  3. "...programs continue to spend significant amount of time (on average, 9% of in-class time) on Present Value and other primary background topics. Diverse professional backgrounds and entry mathematic proficiency levels demandfinance professors “level the playing field” before teaching other challenging topics."
VERY Interesting for anyone in an MBA program!

The is available from SSRN as well as from Womack's web site.

Cite:
Womack, Kent L. and Zhang, Ying N., "Core Finance Trends in the Top MBA Programs in 2005" . http://ssrn.com/abstract=760604

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