(Corrects date of Snyder's departure and clarifies that the school's 150% endowment growth under Snyder does not include a $300 million gift from alumnus David Booth.)
When Edward Snyder last December announced his intention to leave the dean's office at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business (Booth Full-Time MBA Profile) at the end of the 2010 school year, it marked the third time in six months that a top-three MBA program lost its leader.Last June the dean of Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management (Kellogg Full-Time MBA Profile), Dipak Jain, announced that he would be leaving the position.Then, in early December, Harvard Business School (Harvard Full-Time MBA Profile) Dean Jay O. Light followed suit. A week after Light, it was Snyder, marking the first time that the schools ranked one, two, and three in Bloomberg BusinessWeek's ranking of full-time MBA programs have had vacancy signs hanging outside of the dean's office at the same time.
They're three of the most sought-after positions in academia. But the searches come at a difficult time in management education. The global financial crisis has caused many to question the value of a graduate business degree, with some going so far as to place blame for the crisis squarely on the shoulders of business schools for training some individuals who were responsible for the meltdown.At the same time, the number of students with job offers by graduation is down an average of 15% at Kellogg, Chicago, and HBS; international students are struggling to obtain visas and student loans; and endowments have taken large hits, as well.
Stiff challenges all for the new deans, but Glen Urban, a Kellogg alum and dean emeritus at MIT's Sloan School of Management (Sloan Full-Time MBA Profile), says there's opportunity, too. "You're coming in at the bottom, and you can look forward to the future going up, as opposed to entering as things are falling," he says. "If we believe the economy is going to respond in the next couple of years, it's not going to be a bad time to be dean."
Searches are under way at each of the three programs in the hopes of having new deans in place by the start of the academic year in the fall. While the actual salaries deans receive at private institutions such as Chicago, Northwestern, and Harvard are a closely guarded secret, the median salary for business school deans at doctoral institutions like those three tops $260,000, according to a 2009-10 salary survey of 1,280 institutions by the College & University Professional Association for Human Resources.
Today we kick off a three-part series appraising the challenges the new deans at each school will face and some of the individuals being thought of as having the skills and qualifications for the positions. The first school we'll look at is Chicago Booth.
When Snyder vacates the dean's office at Chicago in June, he'll leave behind a business school that's in a much better place than it was when he took the position in 2001. In his decade as dean, Snyder has increased the school's endowment by 150%, and landed the biggest single gift to any b-school: a $300 million pledge from alumnus David Booth. He's also enhanced Chicago's global presence and impact, with a planned campus expansion in Singapore and a new campus in London. Snyder, who will be taking over as dean of the Yale School of Management (Yale Full-Time MBA Profile) next year, has also been able to attract and retain elite faculty, a big reason for Chicago's jump to the top of Bloomberg BusinessWeek's MBA rankings. "The job involves dealing with many different constituencies who tend to have different goals and preferences," says Milton Harris, a professor of finance and economics at Booth and chairman of the search committee that found Snyder. "Ted was very good at that."
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