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Yale School of Management

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Yale School of Management 135 Prospect Street
New Haven, CT, 06520-8200
United States
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Demographic Information

Number of full-time MBA students (2011): 

216

Number of part-time MBA students (2011): 

0

Total duration of full-time MBA program: 

21 months

MBA faculty (Fall 2010): 

119

Females as percent of student body: 

34%
Who Are the Students? See what percentage of the 2010-2011 graduating class came to this MBA program from the private sector, the non-profit sector and government jobs
 
Private Sector (76%)
 
Non-profit (16%)
 
Government (8%)


Description of MBA Program: 

The mission of the Yale School of Management is to educate leaders for business and society. Throughout its history, Yale SOM has been known for its social and environmental commitments and its focus on ethical leadership.

 

Social, environmental, and ethical considerations are included in the overwhelming majority of courses in SOM’s innovative integrated MBA curriculum. In core classes, students have created proposals for redeveloping Governors Island near Manhattan, analyzed South Africa’s Black Economic Empowerment program, and studied General Electric’s Ecomagination initiative. Advanced electives, both at SOM and elsewhere at Yale, allow in-depth study of social and environmental topics. A student-managed elective on Global Social Enterprise pairs student consulting teams with nonprofit organizations in the developing world. The Global Social Entrepreneurship elective facilitates education and interaction between social entrepreneurs and SOM students both at Yale and in the entrepreneurs’ home countries.

 

Social and environmental scholarship is a hallmark of Yale SOM. Our faculty includes world-renowned experts in fields such as nonprofit management, development economics and microfinance, and environmental management. The school has also pioneered new multimedia “raw” cases, many of which include social and environmental considerations. SOM has created such cases for use by the Aspen Institute Center for Business Education’s Business Leadership Case Competition in 2008 and 2011. Yale SOM also partnered with the Aspen Institute in developing the “Giving Voice to Values” curriculum. Recent guest speakers at the school include Robin Chase, founder of ZipCar; Ezekiel Emanuel, former special health advisor to the director of the Office and Management and Budget; and Alex Counts, president and CEO of the Grameen Foundation.

 

The school’s Program on Social Enterprise supports scholars, students, alumni, and practitioners interested in exploring the ways in which business skills can be harnessed to achieve social objectives, facilitating work on nonprofit and public sector social entrepreneurship as well as initiatives in private sector social enterprise, including courses, research, publications and working with SOM students to sponsor conferences. The school’s Center for Business and the Environment at Yale, a partnership with the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, provides a focal point for research, education, and outreach to advance business solutions to global environmental problems. The Millstein Center for Corporate Governance and Performance aims to be the leading research, teaching, and policy center for effective corporate governance, focusing on issues of corporate and shareholder accountability.

 

Students also pursue social aims through extracurricular and professional activities. Through SOM Outreach, students consult pro bono for nonprofit, public, and private organizations in the New Haven community. Yale SOM’s NetImpact Chapter is consistently one of the most active in the country. Every year, students plan, organize, and run conferences that promote discussion and action around social, ethical, and environmental themes. Three of the largest annual conferences at the school, each drawing hundreds of participants, are the Healthcare, Philanthropy, and Education conferences.

 

SOM provides unsurpassed resources for students and graduates pursuing careers in socially beneficial fields. The SOM Internship Fund unites the community in financial support for students who take summer internships with nonprofit organizations. In 1986, the school pioneered its Loan Forgiveness Program for graduates pursuing public or nonprofit careers, a model subsequently adopted by many business schools across the country.



How does the MBA program 'walk the talk' of social and environmental impact?: 

In spring 2010, students led the Yale SOM Sustainability Project, an initiative to reduce the consumption of resources and the waste produced at the school. The project, which included sifting through the contents of dumpsters to survey how much waste is thrown out at SOM, was undertaken as a for-credit independent study class with support by a grant from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the Yale Office of Sustainability. The project helped launch a school-wide program to address improved practices in four areas - energy, transportation, procurement, and waste – and, in January 2011, SOM was awarded Yale University’s highest certification level for developing green practices in the workplace.



Since 1986, the school has underscored its mission of educating leaders for business and society by providing support to qualified alumni working in the public or nonprofit sectors through a generous educational loan forgiveness program. The first program of its kind, it has provided a model for similar programs at business schools around the country since its establishment. Beginning with the Class of 2009, the program expanded to include qualified graduates who work in L3C organizations and certified B Corporations.



The Center for Business and the Environment supports student and faculty efforts to start environmentally oriented for-profit businesses with cash prizes totaling $25,000 awarded through the Sabin Environmental Venture Prize. The Sabin prize has been awarded annually since 2009 to the best Yale student and/or faculty ideas for a product, service, project, or program that advances a more environmentally sustainable way of life.



Yale SOM’s new 4.25 acre campus designed by Foster + Partners is currently under construction, slated to open in 2013. The new campus will incorporate the latest in “green construction” materials and practices. The school will pursue LEED certification for the new building.



The school prints all of it publications on at least 30% post-consumer waste recycled paper. The school’s magazine, Qn, is mailed in a corrugated cardboard mailer that is fully recyclable and made with 70% post-consumer waste recycled paper, and the greenhouse gas emission associated with its printing are offset through the purchase of renewable energy certificates.

Academic Department

Course Name: Global Social Entrepreneurship
Instructor: Sheldon, Tony

The Global Social Entrepreneurship course is designed to introduce students to practical issues faced by mission-driven social entrepreneurs, linking teams of Yale students with social enterprises (SEs) based in India. Student/SE teams work together to address specific management challenges faced by the SEs, culminating with the development of a set of recommendations (operational, financial or otherwise) to meet the identified challenges. The curriculum weaves together two main strands: one related to the practical, hands-on nature of the course (e.g., consulting, business planning, financial projections, making presentations) and the other related to the academic and thematic content (e.g., understanding social enterprise, the role of civil society in India, how the core disciplines of finance, data analysis, etc., relate to social enterprises). All students travel to India for their project. Some students travel in August to meet the SEs and scope the project; others travel in January to present findings and recommendations. The social enterprises each send two representatives to Yale in September/October for an intensive one-week program focused on both working with the student teams and on exploring conceptual frameworks and tools relevant to addressing their management challenges. During the semester, each student teams conduct research and interact regularly with their SE colleagues through email and conference calls, culminating in development of a plan and presentation addressing the management challenges they are jointly exploring.

Course Name: Greening Business Operations
Instructor: Chertow, Marian, Graedel, Thomas

Greening Business Operations provides prospective industrial environmental managers and those interested in industrial environmental policy with assessment approaches from engineering, environmental, and financial perspectives. Methods are drawn from operations management, industrial ecology, green chemistry and engineering, and accounting and finance to investigate industrial processes, the relationship of environmental and economic considerations in decision-making, and the potential to improve environmental and business implications of various sectors through sustainability approaches. This course intersperses lectures and industrial facility visits to provide an introduction to the environmental aspects of selected industrial sectors in the modern technological society. Specific topics addressed include industrial sectors and environmental behavior, industrial power generation, environmental life cycle analysis, sustainability metrics, greening supply chains, green chemistry, and remanufacturing and recycling.

Course Name: Healthcare Leadership Seminar
Instructor: Forman, Howie

This course, open to joint degree candidates of the School of Medicine or with written permission of the course director, exposes the students to current leaders in healthcare, with a particular emphasis on those leaders who are, or have been, active clinicians. The students come prepared to discuss the key elements in the speaker’s careers, including their research, when appropriate. Focus is on areas in which this leader has improved healthcare on a local, national or international level AND the lessons that can be learned about how effective leadership promoted better health and healthcare.

Course Name: Healthcare Operations
Instructor: Long, Elisa

With healthcare spending in the United States exceeding 17% of GDP and the demand for health services continuing to increase, improvements in the quality and efficiency of healthcare delivery are urgently needed. This course explores opportunities for improvement in the design and management of healthcare operations. Class topics include: evaluating the cost-effectiveness of health interventions (including discussion about the value of life), hospital capacity planning, physician and patient scheduling, pharmaceutical drug manufacturing, health insurance pricing, and improving pandemic responses.

Course Name: Hedge Fund Strategies
Instructor: Chen, Zhiwu

This course covers critical managerial aspects and characteristics of hedge funds and the hedge fund industry. It looks at the legal foundations and structures of hedge funds including the primary regulations in the U.S. and abroad that are most relevant for hedge funds.The course touches upon ethics in the industry. The format will mix lectures with presentations (depending on availability) from industry participants, hedge fund managers, those who in invest in hedge funds, those who advise them and provide services to them, and those who regulate them.

Course Name: High-Tech Marketing
Instructor: Mayzlin, Dina

The objective of this course is to examine the impact of Internet on markets (key players including consumers, sellers and intermediaries) and strategic marketing decisions (products, pricing, advertising, etc.) The course is designed to link the opportunities and challenges offered by the Internet with the theory and practice of marketing. Specifically, the course aims to understand how these principles will have to change in order to create and capture value online. The course will especially emphasize the impact of Internet on traditional businesses (e.g., what is the impact of Avon.com on Avon's sales force). The first part of the course deals with high-tech products (electronics, biotech, etc.) raising issues such as intellectual property rights, marketing input and high-tech strategy, pricing, etc. Addressed in great detail is how development, design and pricing affect the consumers. For example, one of the assignments involves students working with a professor in Mechanical Engineering Department at Yale to propose ways in which the new technologies developed in his lab can be commercialized. One or more case studies relate to non-profit/public sector organizations.

Course Name: Innovator
Instructor: Nalebuff, Barry, Canales, Rodrigo

This class studies issues of idea generation, idea evaluation and development, creative projects, and fostering and sustaining innovation in organizations. Students analyze innovation in a set of companies across sectors. For example, the course typically includes sessions with guests from the Red Cross and Mercy Corps to talk about innovation in non- profit organizations. The 2009-2010 course included a guest lecture by an alum who works in disaster relief to discuss the need for continued innovation in that field. The course also addresses policy experiments to promote energy savings, poverty relief, etc. In addition, it seeks to bring in issues of discrimination, ethics in innovation, diversity in the workforce, etc. throughout the sessions.

Course Name: Integrated Leadership Perspective
Instructor: Goetzmann, Will, Garstka, Stan

This course merges various managerial perspectives in a series of interdisciplinary cases structured to describe challenges faced by leaders of organizations of differing size, scope, and sector. Students examine how ideas are generated from existing holes in the market; how leaders think about positioning and developing their organizations to fill those holes; and how organizations handle the challenges of raising new capital, finding new partners, expanding geographically, and growing through acquisition. The course concludes with high-level, modern management challenges bridging the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. Specific cases dealing with social, ethical, and environmental issues include: “Brandeis” about the social impact of the art experience, “Toys in China” about the ethical decisions in management, “Blackstone” about the ethical responsibilities of a CEO, “Bio Solutions” dealing with the ethical dilemmas concerning anthrax vaccine production, “Kingdom of Norway” focusing in ethical investing for social welfare, and “Climate Change” which discusses how financial markets can address the issue.

Course Name: International Economics
Instructor: Schott, Peter

Exploring topics in international economics relevant for managers, this course presents a discussion of the creation and distribution of benefits through trade among countries in the framework of the intensifying globalization process. Topics addressed include trade liberalization, monetary and customs union, tax harmonization, foreign exchange rate risk, currency hedging, international alliances, and international entrepreneurship. Other relevant topics include different paths of macroeconomic development, inequality generated from international trade, labor effects of outsourcing, and corruption.

Course Name: International Experience
Instructor: Chen, Zhiwu, Rutz, Oliver

As part of the Yale Integrated MBA curriculum, each first-year student travels to one of several destinations around the world to study the local business and socio-economic environment. For example, the Ghana and Morrocco trip will focus on economic development. In Morocco, the course will concentrate on financial services and tourism activity; in Ghana, the course will emphasize issues related to socio-economic development and the primary products sector (i.e., mining and agriculture).

The trip to Estonia and Hungary will focus on the economic challenges of transitioning from planned to market-based economies and on the business opportunities emerging in Eastern Europe. In each location, the class meets with government officials as well as business leaders both in established companies and in entrepreneurial ventures. Students contrast the different approaches each country has taken to stimulate economic activity. Estonia has been following what one might consider a "modern" development path, while Hungary has been following a more traditional path, with substantial economic activity in agriculture, extraction and heavy manufacturing. One of the themes of the trip will be comparing the pros and cons of these development paths and whether and why their appropriateness might vary across countries. Another (closely-related) theme will involve thinking about what kinds of business opportunities exist in each of these places. Students are able to witness the social impact of such economic development decisions, one factor in evaluating the success of the decisions.

The course taught in Costa Rica explored how the country focuses on long-term investments in natural resources and the environment as an innovative national strategy. Guest lecturers included the nation’s Minister of Tourism, who discussed his focus on ecotourism; leaders from the Rainforest Alliance, who discussed sustainable tourism efforts; representatives from the Organization for Tropical Studies, who discussed climate change impacts and environmental measurement approaches; and the CEO of the Costa Rican Stock Exchange, who discussed the role of savings in development. Other course activities included tours of certified coffee, banana, and pineapple plantations, as well as rainforest excursions.

Led by a development and environmental economist, the course taught in Malaysia and Bangladesh contrasts the two countries’ levels of development in Asia, despite having shared colonial history and being heavily influenced by the predominant Muslim religion. Students analyze social impacts from Malaysia’s transition to the next phase of development as a ‘middle income’ country, as compared to Bangladesh’s continued state of extreme poverty that is dependent on the agricultural sector and thus prone to floods during the annual monsoons. In visiting both countries, students meet with prominent finance and development experts from Malaysia’s national bank, HIV/AIDS awareness groups, export processing zones, government agencies, and microfinance institutions.

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