The Graduate School of Business Administration (GBA) launched three new master’s degree programs and expanded the number of collaborations involving the Master of Science in Global Finance and the Master of Science in Investor Relations.

A series of prominent events during the past academic year, anchored especially on the Fordham Wall Street Council, have contributed to the growing reputation of the school. Additional high-profile GBA events conducted in London, Istanbul, Jerusalem, and Beijing attracted business and government leaders, as well as growing numbers of Fordham alumni. Development activities are beginning to produce international donations and commitments to the school.

The three overarching goals of the GBA strategy remain as follows:

• Quality — revising, culling, and developing programs to assure quality enhancement, enrollment growth, and improved placement of GBA graduates

• Recognition — establishing a coherent global standing of GBA that is anchored on academic, industry, and alumni relationships

• Administrative Support — building an administrative infrastructure appropriate to support the academic enterprise of the school

GBA established three new master’s degree programs in fall 2012 and two new programs in fall 2013. An additional new program developed jointly with the Graduate School of Social Service (GSS) has been approved by both the joint council of business faculty and the faculty of GSS and is expected to begin in fall 2014.

Enrollments have exceeded targets for fiscal year 2013. A significant aspect of the enrollment growth is that the average credit-hour load per enrolled student has increased as GBA now has more full-time students than part-time students. The quality of enrolled students has improved significantly, as indicated by a rising average GMAT score for the MBA program and for the entire program portfolio of GBA. The use of digital technology to enhance the design and delivery of the curriculum offers new opportunities to advance academic excellence.

Negotiations conducted over the past year yielded collaborations with the Gordon Institute of Business Science at the University of Pretoria on the Master of Science in Global Finance and the 3 Continent Master’s of Global Management, to begin in summer 2014.

GBA developed a plan for fiscal year 2014 to integrate veterans of the United Kingdom with those of the United States, based on the model of the Fordham Accelerator for Business. Collaborators include retired Gen. Peter Pace and a select group of prominent individuals in London who are associated with the UK Veterans’ Aid, the Prince of Wales, the Church of England, and the Lady R Foundation.

In collaboration with Bilkent University, Petroturk, and the Turkish Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources, a certificate program on the business of energy has been designed for launch in Turkey.

Fiscal year 2013 delivered rising enrollments in the collaborative programs, increased number of international conferences and seminars with international academic partners, growing participation in the alumni and special interest groups sponsored by the school, and agreement with a partner to collaborate on a new executive program.

The Fordham Wall Street Council has reached 400 members, and the Alumni-Student Career Alliance (ASCA) now has more than 400 members. Both groups hold regular events matching students, alumni, and friends from industry to assist in building community with the school. In close coordination with the director of development for GBA, well-known speakers have been secured to elevate the stature and visibility of the Fordham Wall Street Council, ASCA, and a series on Business and the City. Additionally, a documentary film has been prepared based on the four events of the Future of Business series.

As a direct result of these activities, contributions and the number of contributors to the GBA Annual Fund have increased markedly.

Fordham ROTC at Commencement 2013.

Graduate School of Business Administration (GBA) Dean David Gautschi was on-site on Nov. 13 at McMahon Hall for the first info-session for the upcoming US/UK Veterans Entrepreneurship Program, in conjunction with the School of Professional and Continuing Studies.

Gripping a copy of the Financial Times with the headline “Fordham Lends US and UK Military Veterans an Entrepreneurial Hand,” Gautschi, himself a military veteran, said the concept for the certificate program was hatched this past June over dinner with several military veterans, several Fordham alumni, and a representative faction from Britain. He added that the program is already creating a bit of buzz in the UK, where it will no doubt rally support in the form of a wintertime fundraiser before the official launch in spring 2014.

With cohorts attending courses in New York and London, Gautschi explained that though the veterans will be indoctrinated into the contemporary context of business, they’ll also explore critical thinking through the reading of literature and plays.

“The whole program is very motivated by the Jesuit approach,” he said.

After four weeks of the basics, students begin a social immersion project where they work with a disadvantaged population through a non profit or NGO.

Gautschi said that while the social immersion aspect also exemplifies the Jesuit mission, it also holds practical implications for vets adjusting to civilian life, particularly for those who saw combat and witnessed human suffering.

“Coming back to the comfort of the UK or the U.S., vets have got to understand that the kinds of problems [they saw in battle]persist even here in our own society,” he said. “Vets can apply a lot of their experiences, perspectives and even they’re training to a disadvantaged population.”

Finally, students get to what Gautschi called the “enterprise builder” part of the program.

“That’s the guts of it,” he said. “For about five months they work with their ideas to see if they can commercialize them and build a business around it.”

Students will be coached by mentors through the GBA network, and GBA students will be drafted to take part. The vets will also get subject matter experts to help them “bone up areas they need help with.”

Finally they get to stage four, which he called the forum, where vets practice presenting their business ideas to a forum of critics who challenge them. There they learn how to articulate elevator pitches. The last component allows students to pitch to an audience of prospective investors seeking to invest in veteran-related startups.

“The whole concept of the university is that we want to learn from each other,” said Gautschi. “Those veterans who are coming into this exercise are going to teach us as much as we teach them.”

–Tom Stoelker

On Sept. 23, David Gautschi, Ph.D., dean of the Graduate School of Business Administration (GBA) took to the podium and introduced William Dudley, president and CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. A bank of TV cameras lined the back of the room as a dozen journalists tapped away on their laptops.

Although this was not a typical morning for Gautschi, neither was the Fed CEO’s visit an isolated incident: The star wattage of guest speakers at GBA has brightened considerably, including visits by Port Authority Executive Director Patrick Foye, FCRH ’78, LAW ’81, and Con Ed CEO Kevin Burke, LAW ’71, who sat on a panel last March.

On Oct. 15, former New York City Department of Education chief Joel Klein sat down for a discussion with Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, as part of the Business in the City symposium that Gautschi launched last spring. Former Reagan budget director David Stockman discussed his recent book, The Great Deformation, at the Wall Street Council lecture on Oct. 22.

The high-profile visitors are just one part of a larger paradigm shift that Gautschi was looking to create when he came to Fordham in 2010 from the Lally School of Management and Technology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, N.Y., where he served as dean and professor of marketing and business economics.

While GBA has been well served by a dean with an academic as well as practical understanding of marketing, marketing was not his first love—math was. In fact, Gautschi said he took a fortuitous, if somewhat unorthodox, route toward an understanding of marketing.

Born into an Air Force family, Gautschi said the place he most identified as home was the state of Maine, where he spent his high school years and met his wife. After serving in the U.S. Marine Corps, he pursued an M.B.A., though he still hedged his bets with math by focusing on quantitative methods, which eventually led to studying modeling and applied economics at the University of California at Berkeley, where he earned his doctorate. Throughout, Gautschi never took a course on marketing. Yet, his first job after Berkeley was teaching marketing at Cornell.

Gautschi seems well aware of the irony inherent in learning by teaching. But it illustrates his underlying rationale that adaptability is key to both teaching business courses and running a business. He described his eventual shift from academia to business, and back again, as analogous to the balance struck by business schools—maintaining one foot in the academy and another in the private sector.

Gautschi’s career took root in France, where he developed three successful businesses while teaching at INSEAD. For one business he used computer modeling to develop a decision-support system for clients—pre-Excel tools intended to help them with pricing, forecasting, and advertising. He offered clients a simulation intended to show them how the product performed in the real world, and the clients raved about the simulation, preferring it to the product Gautschi was actually trying to sell.

It was, he said, his first real lesson in business and marketing, and he responded accordingly: he made the simulation the product.

“The way the model worked was that it allowed people to see the whole picture of their business and to quasi-respond,” he said. “But models are inherently wrong because they’re abstractions of reality.”

Here Gautschi shifts from businessman to academic.

“The best leaders need to be good abstract thinkers because the business environment is constantly in flux,” he said.

It is for this reason that Gautschi says business school professors need to avoid being “too prescriptive.” He noted that many faculty in business schools haven’t been in business and can therefore provide students the objective perspective of someone who is not emotionally attached to the subject—a perspective they’ll need in the future.

“We have to remember that we’re preparing students to go out and participate in a future that we’re not participating in,” he said. “They’ll experience things we’ve never faced and they’ll have to figure it out.”

Gautschi believes there are two roles that a business school must play: the practical and the theoretical. He stressed that GBA is a graduate school, not simply a professional school.

“I don’t think that universities have ever come to grips with studying business as a part of the academy,” he said. “Yet you don’t go to an art historian to instruct someone how to paint.”

He said that running a business is different from studying the phenomenon of business. Preparing students “to go out there and do it puts business schools squarely in the realm of a professional school,” but a graduate school provides a broader education alongside practical application.

“Do we exist to churn out people to make a lot of money and get wealthy? Or is there something broader that’s aligned with the purpose of the university? The purpose of the university is to contribute constructive and productive citizens to society,” he said.

In addition to providing perspective through a broad-based curriculum, Gautschi has pursued an overhaul of the student body and faculty that mimics the globalization of the business world. At the moment 720 of GBA’s approximately 1,765 students come from abroad, representing 43 different countries.

The cohort of international students, and indeed GBA’s international faculty, gives American students a basis on which to understand globalization.

“After graduation they’ll be interacting with each other whether they want to or not,” he said. “It would be irresponsible as a business school not to reflect what’s going on in the business world.”

Video:
Dean Gautschi discussing going global at GBA

At a conference exploring so-called “disruptive technologies,” Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, held a one-on-one conversation with former New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein about technology in the classroom.

The talk took place on Oct. 15 as part of the Graduate School of Business Administration (GBA) Business and the City discussion series, titled “Growing and Leveraging Tech Disruption” for its focus on tech infrastructure.

Klein, who is now chief executive officer at Amplify, a subsidiary of News Corp that provides digital instruction products for classrooms, called digital learning the “most important innovation since the printing press.”

As the economics of higher education become more challenging, he said, digital learning is a “way to change the game.” He twice cited an online master’s degree in computer science offered by Georgia Tech, in which fees are much lower than those for the classroom version of the degree.

“The difference can be in cost, but it can also be in human experience,” he said. “The big question is how the market will react. Who will IBM hire? A student with online education or the one with the classroom education?”

Klein advocated a cost-effective financial model for degrees that could incorporate a variety of tech innovations, including Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). He said that a blended approach in which technology is folded into existing classroom curricula, is gaining traction.

“I can only see good things coming from MOOCs, but they’re only part of the solution,” Klein said. “Tech integration has to be more nuanced than [a]be-all and end-all solution.”

Klein noted that America’s educational institution has a powerful legacy system that resists change, and that educators are understandably anxious that the new technology is asking them to take a leap of faith.

“Many are concerned that we may be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but they may be clinging too tenaciously to the baby,” he said.

In particular, Klein touted the tablet as a highly personalized tool that can benefit learning in grades K through 12, an area of education that Klein said “has been captured by pedagogy” and where the country’s learning problems are the most intense. Nevertheless, for the tablet to work, he said, the technology must be embraced by the teachers.  

He pointed out that New York City classrooms have a very heterogeneous environment in which some students are very ahead and others are very behind. He described several tablet programs designed by Amplify that help teachers differentiate student needs by finding out whether an individual student understands a lesson. The lesson can then be customized, with some of the students moving to the next phase of the lesson, while others who are struggling can receive additional instruction.  

Klein allowed that the tablet does have the potential to limit socialization. But, with proper training, teachers would be able to gauge when to use and when not to use the technology, as well as when to simply “shut it down.”

On a humid night in July, students crammed into a small fifth-floor classroom at Fordham College at Lincoln Center to hear a talk delivered by Herbert S. Chase, M.D., professor of clinical medicine in the Biomedical Informatics Department of Columbia University and resident scholar at Fordham’s Center for Digital Transformation.

Though the lecture was part of a Graduate School of Business Administration (GBA) course on big data, professors from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) joined students from the Graduate School of Social Service (GSS).

“That’s what struck me,” said Dr. Chase. “In that room there were these people with such diverse interests.”

Even as scholars debate the very definition of big data, most agree that big data will encompass almost every discipline and that coordination will be key to harnessing its power. For his part, Dr. Chase defines big data as “a humanly incomprehensible amount of information that only a machine with sophisticated algorithms can understand.”

Dr. Chase is not a computer scientist; he is a kidney specialist. His role is essentially that of translator between medical specialists and computer scientists. For big data to produce results, he said, the two disciplines must work in tandem.

“It’s the classic team effort: the computer scientists need to tell the researchers what’s possible, and the experts know the questions,” said Dr. Chase. “And that’s what is happening in every discipline. There’s the content expert and the computer expert.”

For many in computer science, big data is just a new term for an old concept.

“Big Data has been there for a long time, but the phrase has become popular because of the explosion in data collection,” said Frank Hsu, Ph.D., the Clavius Distinguished Professor of Science and professor of computer and information science. “It has been branded by the business sectors, just like the Internet. The Internet has been around since the 1970s, but in the 1990s when the WWW was introduced, everyone said, ‘Oh this is so useful! The Internet!’”

Gary Weiss, Ph.D., an associate professor of computer and information science, traced the etymology of the term to “data mining,” which he said has been popular for the past 10 to 15 years. It was preceded by “machine learning.”

“The other term that is becoming very popular is ‘data science,’” said Weiss, who joins Hsu and other Arts and Sciences faculty to teach Fordham courses on data mining, bioinformatics, and information fusion.

But the question as to what constitutes “big” is nearly as subjective as the definition of big data. Does big data require billions of records? Weiss said that in theory a classic case would be a multinational corporation like Wal-Mart analyzing sales records that include billions of transactions for millions of people. But it could also be argued that big data includes relatively modest health study focusing on a couple hundred people.

For example, through Fordham’s Wireless Sensor Data Mining Lab, Weiss has developed a mobile healthcare application called Actitracker. The app collects large amounts of data about the users’ activity via an accelerometer embedded in their smartphone. Weiss said such “mobile health” applications (yet another fresh tech term to add to the digital lexicon) represent a huge growth area for big data.

“From a single subject we’re collecting data every 50 milliseconds, which is 20 times per second, so you can see how that can add up over 10 hours,” said Weiss—especially when multiplied over the apps’ 147 current users.

The Actitracker system reports 2,535 hours of data. That’s 182.5 million records, or data points, gathered from 147 people. Just one user using the app for 12 hours a day for 30 days generates 26 million records, or 104 million pieces of information.

“Sure there’s the health data, but people are applying these techniques to any kind of data,” he said. “It certainly relates to business. In astronomy a telescope is going to generate terabytes of data. Then there’s the digital humanities.”

Though his courses are situated squarely in GBA, “R.P.” Raghupathi, Ph.D., director of GBA’s Business Analytics program and Fordham’s Center for Digital Transformation, spent time discussing under-tapped areas of big data in the humanities, such as video, music, text, and audio.

In addition to the course in big data analytics, GBA has developed a host of programming to address market needs, including master’s programs in business analytics and marketing intelligence. All analytics courses are full this semester. A new program in applied statistics and decision-making is awaiting state approval.

Though Raghupathi is enthusiastic about preparing students for big data’s potential, he does have concerns.

“Big data was just lazy data that was just sitting there, but now that we have the technology to analyze the data, all sorts of issues are emerging, such as the privacy issues, security issues, as well as governance and the ownership,” he said. “Who owns this data?”
Raghupathi said that ethics and related issues, such as privacy concerns, are woven into every course at GBA.

Joel Reidenberg, Ph.D., the Stanley D. and Nikki Waxberg Chair of Law, is doing some revealing big data research on the question of ownership and privacy.

Reidenberg directs Fordham Law’s Center on Law and Information Policy (CLIP), which has zeroed in on the use of personal information gathered within big data.

“Big data is a catchphrase that is poorly understood by the general public, and most of it is taking place behind the scenes,” he said. “It involves the large-scale collection of personal information that can be used for predictive modeling of behavior, planning, detection, and surveillance.”

Reidenberg’s recent research through CLIP has centered on education and children’s privacy. As the federal government has encouraged or forced states to set up databases reporting children’s progress, detailed information—ranging from a child’s weight to a bad report for cursing—could become a permanent part of a child’s records.

CLIP is looking into how public schools are outsourcing storage of student information to the digital cloud, which could contain everything from a student’s seventh-grade PowerPoint presentation to his 12th-grade SAT scores.

Entire cities are contracting with data analytic companies that can, in turn, sell municipal information to yet another party, he said. The companies’ business models sometimes include little or no charge for services because they make up their costs by data mining and then reselling information.

Reidenberg said it is quite clear that school districts have difficulty understanding what they’re doing, let alone being able to protect a student’s privacy.

“Does the data get deleted or archived when the kid leaves the school, or does the kid’s seventh-grade blog post pop up when he or she applies for college or a job?” said Reidenberg. “That detailed personal data is part of what’s being crunched in big data and there are questions on the ethicacy of collecting that.”

Raghupathi noted that privacy concerns about identifying patterns in big data were further exacerbated after the National Security Administration mined phone records data. The NSA’s antiterrorism strategy certainly raised public awareness about data mining, but not in a good way, said Raghupathi. He expressed concern that the fallout from controversies could overshadow progress.

“The technology is there for us to use it for good purposes,” he said. “It is very important to resolve these legal and social policy issues before the public perception about big data gets distorted.”

Beginning fall of 2014, the Master of Science in Nonprofit Leadership program will integrate the schools’ respective emphases on management excellence and social justice to prepare future leaders for the unique financial and social demands of nonprofit organizations.

Applications to the program will open this fall.

“In this program, you’ll learn how to plan strategically for your business and also learn how to orient those strategic plans toward social change,” said Allan Luks, director of the Fordham Center for Nonprofit Leaders, which will oversee the program.

Although Fordham is not the first to offer coursework in managing nonprofits, this degree program takes the novel approach of giving two graduate schools equal weight in administering the degree.

“What’s unique about this program is that it is run jointly by the business and social work schools, with courses taught by both GSS and GBA faculty,” said Elaine Congress, D.S.W., professor and associate dean for continuing education and extramural programs at GSS. “Many other schools have courses in nonprofit management, but they don’t have the social justice orientation that you get from a social work school.”

The one-year program will require 30 credits taken over three trimesters. Students will take one intensive at the beginning of each trimester that runs Thursday through Sunday evenings. The remaining 21 credits will be offered as weekly evening courses.

The schedule, Congress said, aims to accommodate full-time workers, making it an ideal program for mid-level managers who want to advance their careers, professionals who want to switch from the corporate to the nonprofit field, clinicians who want to move into administrative positions, and others interested in leadership positions.

The program stems from an earlier endeavor by GBA and GSS, the executive education certificate in nonprofit leadership. The 18-credit certificate is earned over three consecutive all-day sessions that cover such topics as organization management, program development, and fundraising. Since its launch in April 2010, the certificate program has trained more than 600 students.

The new master’s degree allows students to delve even deeper into the world of nonprofits, exposing them to topics such as social entrepreneurship, volunteerism, the history of nonprofits, and public policy/advocacy. Students will also have the opportunity to work with mentors in the field in order to get firsthand experience with running nonprofits.

Together with its offer of a graduate-level degree, the comprehensive look at the worlds of both business and social work will make program graduates highly marketable, Luks said.

“Nonprofits have the key to making social justice a reality instead of just a dream,” he said. “It’s our job to teach leaders that they don’t just run their organizations for the numbers, but that they run them to change society.”

To learn more visit www.fordham.edu/nonprofits.

Master of Science in Business Enterprise: Reynolds Fernandez; Master of Science in Media Entrepreneurship: Andrew Hevia; Master of Science in Business Analytics: Neeraj Tiwari

Five second place winners will receive 50% tuition scholarships. More than 1600 students worldwide completed challenge entries.

It is the second year GBA has sponsored the innovative scholarship competition, in partnership with Student Competitions.

After beating out 18 other university teams to get to the “final four,” students from the Graduate School of Business Administration (GBA) won the New York Regional Final of the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Institute Research Challenge. Ken Boswell, Paul Kearney, Jonathan LaSala, and Elaine Lou headed to London this month for the Global Final to compete against teams from the Asia-Pacific region, Europe, and North America.

The New York Society of Security Analysts hosted the regional competition at Bloomberg Headquarters on March 4. Competing against Montclair State, Pace, and Seton Hall universities, the GBA team boiled down complex data on Microsoft Corp. into a 10-page research brief and a buy/sell/hold recommendation.
Students put their GBA skills to the test in a forum where industry experts could evaluate their report and 10-minute slide presentation, and ask follow-up questions.

“It was a daunting process for our dedicated students; their social life has been pretty much nil,” said Robert J. Fuest, GBA ‘08, adjunct professor of finance in the Schools of Business and the team’s faculty adviser.

Team mentor Mike Kiernan, GBA ’93, joined Fuest in coaching the students, as did several other faculty and business professionals. The training began in earnest last August and the constant drilling was not unlike preparing for an athletic competition.

Students also read dozens of reports on Microsoft, banked 40 hours of interviews, and received more than 200 survey responses.
“A lot their understanding came from the surveys,” said Fuest. “I think their findings were valid.” 

With the support of the Graduate School of Business Administration’s (GBA) Global Healthcare Innovation Management Center, and its director Falguni Sen, Ph.D., the Westchester-based Collaborative for Palliative Care will run an intensive two-weekend certificate program this summer and next fall.

“One of the big issues is communication,” said Mary Beth Morrissey, Ph.D., FCRH ’79, LAW ’82, GSS ’11. “Patients and families don’t understand and are often not informed about their palliative care options that are being embedded in the health care structure.”

As a fellow of the center, Morrissey has been leading roundtable discussions about health care reform. With her background in law, policy, and social science research, Morrissey spearheaded the cross-disciplinary program, which brings together nurses, social workers, psychologists, doctors, business owners, and managers in the same classroom.

The program will introduce students to the various aspects of palliative care, including: a public health approach to health care management, the legal and ethical consensus in end-of-life decision making, meanings of patient suffering from a human science perspective, new systems of care, policies and protocols in palliative medicine, clinical management of pain, advance care planning, models of financing, and the role of ethics committees in conflict negotiation.

Morrissey said that after the latest health care debate there’s a consensus that “we need to change the way we do business.” Early palliative care intervention would help drive down costs by allowing patients and their families to understand their illness trajectories and help them access care that will improve quality of life, instead of relying on marginally beneficial tests and procedures that may prolong suffering and be unlikely to improve patient outcomes.
Because palliative care has not yet become mainstream, it is often shunted to the sidelines as doctors and patients soldier on when they should be talking about best management of the advanced illness.

“People are living longer with chronic illness,” said Morrissey. “We see multiple co-morbidities, like chronic cancer, diabetes, and advanced dementia in the same patient.”

American culture in general has a problem accepting any limits on care, she said. The language of Western individualism, patient rights, and autonomy, has made little space for engaging in conversations about future health care needs, values, and care preferences.

But it’s not just the culture at large that has a problem with human finitude, said Morrissey. Doctors trained to prolong life, such as oncologists, rarely make referrals to palliative care.

Morrissey has led five annual conferences that have provided a platform for mobilizing resources, especially at the local level. She continues to encourage interdisciplinary training and education that bring together law, policy, and social science research to strengthen the health care workforce. The certificate program will build on these initiatives.

“Participants in the certificate program will understand that palliative care is an effective medical and business model, and holds great promise as a social model,” she said.

— Tom Stoelker

The U.S. News and World Report‘s 2014 Best Graduate School Rankings are out and Fordham’s Graduate School of Business Administration (GBA) maintained its top 25 ranking in Finance and Marketing and continues to improve overall.

U.S. News 2014 GBA Rankings are:

Finance: #15
• Consistently in top 20-25 over last 4 years

Marketing: # 21
• Consistently in top 25 in last 4 years

Overall: #79 in 2014
• top quartile of 448 AACSB-accredited programs surveyed
• up 18 places from 2 years ago
, from #97 in 2012 to #79 in 2014.

The latest survey appears in the March 12, 2013 issue. Rankings for professional schools are based on two types of data: expert opinions about program excellence and statistical indicators that measure the quality of a school’s faculty, research, and students.

The year’s positive rankings, plus a first-ever entry into the Businessweek rankings, bode well for the school, which has also seen a 40 percent increase in applications from last year.

David Gautschi, Ph.D., dean of GBA, said that the improved rankings and increased applications are the result of an ongoing strategic redirection of the MBA program which continues to shift its student population from part-timers, toward a more fulltime student body.

“We actually had to make the MBA program smaller to make it more selective, plus we rolled out several new MS programs that provide career pathways for students,” said Gautschi.

“The MBA continues to go through a curriculum review, so that we can make it very exclusive and very good,” he said.

To view the full rankings click here.

There will be little cavorting for the fifth cohort of Fordham Westchester’s Executive MBA (WEMBA) program. The Class of 2014 began the intensive program just after New Year and will spend the next 22 months hunkering down.

“Part of my job is to keep them sane through the process,” said Francis Petit, Ed.D., associate dean for executive programs at the Graduate School of Business Administration (GBA).

Petit said that the rigorous program is a good fit for the 22 new students, most of whom are already working in business and are seeking to further their careers with a Fordham MBA.

Executive MBA (EMBA) students tend to be a bit older, with this group’s average age coming in at 36. A more senior cohort means a more senior salary, with the average salary for this year’s group coming in at $125,000.

Petit was charged with putting together like-minded execs who will spend one weekend a month together on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday from 9 to 5.

“The classmates make up a big part of the experience, so we recruit a higher level,” said Petit.  “They survive the process together.”

Petit said that corporate sponsorship, once a given for working executives, has waned in recent years. But, in general, companies still want general managers to have an MBA.

“It is a changing market and one of the things that happens is that since students are paying more out of pocket, their level of commitment is that much stronger,” he said.

As Dean David Gautshi, Ph.D., pointed out in his webinar last month, GBA has been well known for its part-time MBA program for over 40 years.