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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: Marketing Strategy
Instructor: Dhar, Ravi

This course offers students the opportunity to develop skills and acquire experience in dealing with strategic marketing problems. The course presents an integrative, dynamic view of competitive brand strategy. It focuses on understanding, developing, and evaluating brand marketing strategies over the product life cycle. The sessions of the strategy through the life cycle discuss the cases of Marlboro Friday, and Prozac & Paxil, which are related to the issue of marketing ethics.”

Course Name: Maximizing Company Performance
Instructor: Kontes, Peter

This course offers an integrated framework for managing corporate performance, with a focus on how financial, strategic and organizational decisions can be aligned around the common objective of maximizing the company’s intrinsic value. MGT 863 takes the view that a corporation's primary obligation to society is to maximize the wealth it creates over time, subject always to strict adherence to the laws, regulations, and ethical and moral traditions of the society in which it operates. By investing human and financial capital in their highest and best economic uses over time, corporations create the wealth - and often the technology - that societies need to help deal with social and environmental issues.

Course Name: Microfinance and Economic Development
Instructor: Sheldon, Tony

This course explores the successes and limitations of microfinance as an economic development strategy. The focus is on the role of microfinance in international poverty alleviation efforts. The course explores the history and evolution of the field from both a theoretical and practical perspective. While the roles played by various constituencies (e.g., clients, policy makers, donors, investors, etc.) are examined, emphasis is on the practitioners’ perspective and the challenges of managing a “double bottom line” institution.

Course Name: Navigating Organizations
Instructor: Massey, Cade

This course explores how students can improve their personal leverage in organizations. The intent is to push beyond formal motivational systems and organizational design to the informal side of organizations. The objective is to leave you with a well grounded understanding of the threats and opportunities presented there, and well equipped to navigate them. Topics include power & authority, organizational structure, social networks, traits, persuasion, coalitions and status. A theme in this course is when/whether/how/why the end ever justifies the means. Students read biographies of Lyndon Johnson, Robert Moses and Sergio de Mello to bring these questions to life. Students are asked to wrestle with these questions in the context of their own lives. Some specific topics that include explicit ethical considerations are informal networks, persuasion and coalitions.

Course Name: Negotiations: Beyond Win-Win
Instructor: Cain, Daylian

In this class, you will learn how to buy for less, sell for more, and how to create value all around you. The purpose of this half-semester course is to learn how to be more effective at the bargaining table and what you should be doing while away from it. You will learn how to avoid mental traps that will cost you money and how to be more aggressive (without being offensive). In addition to lectures and readings, students will develop their techniques through weekly in-class negotiation exercises, negotiating against each other and discussing the results as a group. There are no prerequisites, however, because of the experiential nature of this course, class attendance is crucial. Weekly planning documents and a final paper about a real-world negotiation (one that you perform during the course) are required.

In addition to standard negotiation topics, ethics topics discussed include business bluffing, power, integrity, coercion, cooperation, social dilemmas, promise-keeping, and putting a decision-value on prosocial concerns. Borrowing from MGT 532 (Business Ethics Meets Behavioral Economics), we also discuss how negotiators can fail by their own normative standards.

Course Name: Nonprofit Organizations Clinic
Instructor: Simon, John

This clinical workshop will serve the needs of nonprofit organizations, nascent and established, that require help in the process of organization and incorporation, in obtaining tax exemption, and solving ongoing legal problems — organizations that cannot afford to retain private counsel.

Course Name: Operating a Hedge Fund
Instructor: Metzger, Leon

This course is meant to serve as a multi-functional primer for starting and operating a hedge fund by simulating the experience of launching one as a team, from naming the fund to developing valuation and risk-management policies. Throughout the course, the professor focuses on the importance of maintaining a code of ethics, of the various potential conflicts that might arise in the process of operating a hedge fund, and how to deal with those conflicts. Examples of conflicts covered include insider trading, potential conflicts of interest among investor classes, and whistleblowing.

Course Name: Operations Engine
Instructor: Swersey, Art, Kim, Sang

Broadening the traditional operations management course, this course includes and emphases linkages to organizational behavior and workforce management, strategy, accounting, finance, and marketing. At its heart, this course is about using quantitative models to provide managerial insights; it is built on how work is organized and how processes are improved, but also considers the relationship among work centers, suppliers, and customers, as well as the design and improvement of the supply chain. Using examples like, contaminated Heparin from China and salmonella-tainted peanut butter, the course is also devoted to examining various failures in Operations and the effects of those failures. In addition, a class on bottlenecks examines the role of migrant labor on farms, and whether it is ethical to cut hours in order to maximize efficiency.

Course Name: Philanthropic Foundations
Instructor: Meyers, Jack

This course will examine the history and practice of philanthropic foundations in the United States from the establishment of the Peabody Education Fund in 1867, through the rise of large general-purpose foundations in the first decades of the twentieth century, to the major reshaping of foundations that occurred in the wake of the 1969 Tax Reform Act. The course will examine the practices of independent, family, corporate and community foundations and will explore, in detail, foundation governance structures, program design, grant decision-making processes, and evaluation procedures. Particular attention will be paid to the interrelations between foundations and government and to foundations’ evolving philanthropic missions and strategies. The course will also analyze important debates in the field about issues such as program versus project support, the value of “venture” philanthropy, and the extent to which foundations must be accountable and transparent. Discussion of foundations in context of their impact on society.

Course Name: Policy Modeling
Instructor: Kaplan, Edward

Policy Modeling provides an operational framework for exploring the costs and benefits of public policy decisions. The techniques employed include "back of the envelope" probabilistic models, Markov processes, queuing theory, and linear/integer programming. With an eye towards making better decisions, these techniques are applied to a number of important policy problems. In addition to lectures, assigned articles and text readings, and short problem sets, students will be responsible for completing a take-home midterm exam and a number of cases. In some instances, it will be possible to take a real problem from formulation to solution, and compare your own analysis to what actually happened. How can one evaluate the effectiveness of HIV prevention programs? How many drug treatment slots are required to provide treatment on demand? Does capital punishment deter homicide? And what do the above questions have in common? The answer to the last query is simple: these problems and more are considered in Policy Modeling -- building on earlier coursework in quantitative analysis and statistics.

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