An MBA program for rusty math skills?
CMU’s ‘quant-heavy’ program eager to get all sorts into class
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Benjamin Strickhouser isn’t your textbook definition of an MBA student — he graduated from the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy in Nassau County, N.Y., in 2011 and went on to work as a navigational watch officer.
There, he sailed on auxiliary ships and commanded navigational bridge watches: It was his job to ensure their safety.
At the academy, the most business-focused courses Mr. Strickhouser took covered logistics and intermodal transportation, he said, with a focus on containers, tankers and railways. He did take a combination finance and accounting course, but that was only a trimester long. Beyond a calculus class his freshman year, he’s been steering clear of math for a while.
So when Mr. Strickhouser, 29, was accepted to Carnegie Mellon University’s selective master of business administration program at the Tepper School of Business in Oakland, he was a bit uneasy. His math skills, after all, were a tad rusty.
“I was concerned coming back to school because it had been quite literally a decade since I had done anything with calculus,” he said.
Tepper’s MBA program is “quant-heavy,” according to Kate Barraclough, who heads the program. “Quant,” meaning quantitative, or math-driven.
But with additional math courses and tutoring for those who need it, she says, nontraditional students like Mr. Strickhouser — as well as humanities majors with an affinity for math — can certainly succeed.
“In actual fact, those are some
of the students we intentionally seek out,” she said. “That leads to richer classroom discussions [and] having a diversity of opinion or background leads to different business outcomes, different views coming to the table.”
Diversifying the range of students admitted is vital. MBA applications have been on the decline nationwide since 2014.
The Graduate Management Admission Council, a Reston, Va.-based nonprofit that provides services to business schools, found in a 2017 survey that 64 percent of two-year full-time MBA programs in the U.S. saw a decline in applications.
That may be due, in part, to the cost. Between 2008 and 2014, the average investment in a two-year MBA program increased by 44 percent to $104,000, right after the financial crisis, according to a 2018 analysis by the Financial Times, a business newspaper in London. During that period, grads’ average salary growth was just 4 percent.
That may be changing. Since 2014, salaries have since picked up 12 percent to an average of $142,000 in 2017.
More business schools have started accepting scores from the Graduate Record Examinations exam, typically used to test students for programs in the humanities or social sciences, to pick up the slack. That’s instead of the Graduate Management Admission Test, reserved for most math-heavy programs.
According to a November 2016 survey by Kaplan Test Prep, a Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based education firm, accepting the GRE has helped schools widen their pool of applicants beyond those with a banking or consulting background.
Sixty-one percent of schools surveyed said it has resulted in the enrollment of more students from nontraditional backgrounds.
In Pittsburgh, Tepper and the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz Graduate School of Business accept the GRE.
Both the GMAT and GRE are waived for “working adults” at Point Park University’s MBA program, according to its website. Chatham University also does not list an official GMAT or GRE test score as an application requirement for its MBA program.
Kelly Wilson, executive director of masters admissions at Tepper, said that since fall 2016, there has been a 37 percent increase in applications from humanities majors for the full-time MBA program.
Of the 220 students matriculating into Tepper’s MBA program in 2019, the majority hail from financial services, consulting or technology fields. By comparison, 24 percent of the class is characterized as “other,” per Tepper data, and that includes consumer products, entertainment and media, nonprofits and social impact jobs.
Those who majored in engineering or business comprise a combined 60 percent of the class, while humanities majors (such as history or philosophy) make up roughly 9 percent of the MBA class. That equates to about 20 students.
To pad out any missing or rusty math skills, Tepper offers a four-week online math course that mirrors a typical business calculus course.
On average over the past few years, about 30 percent of admitted students were required to take the online summer math course prior to their first semester, according to a university spokesperson. Tepper does not have a breakdown of how many of those students came from non-quant backgrounds.
For the first time, the course is now open to any incoming students who want to brush up on their math skills, so even more students may be completing it. There’s also a voluntary course on basic business concepts, with a particular focus on accounting and finance. The class includes modules on first and second differentials, partial differentiation, how to plot curves and understand local maxima and minima, limits and basic integrals.
Even if these concepts are confusing to some students before their first semester, Ms. Barraclough doesn’t believe any career paths are unattainable for MBA grads from a non-quant background.
There’s just one one caveat, though.
Students who apply for the technology leadership track — one of five options in the MBA program, which also offers entrepreneurship, business analytics, energy business and management of innovation and product development — typically need to come from a tech background.
In that case, it’s not the math keeping those students from heading in that direction, it’s their level of experience in the tech field.
More than 40 percent of Tepper’s MBA grads landed jobs with technology companies in 2017, although not all necessarily took the tech track. In fact, Ms. Barraclough noted, students aren’t required to select a track at all.
This summer, Mr. Strickhouser is being paid to intern at a “large consumer packaged goods company,” which he declined to name. There, he’s working on brand management.
Once he completes the Tepper MBA program — where he’s focused on marketing, business technologies and finance — he hopes to work at the company full time.
“I would hope that given my nontraditional background … I would have some nontraditional values to bring to the table,” he said.