Competition between Business Colleges

In an article written by Kim Jack Riley “The New School: learn how a poor job market is affecting how business schools compete for students”, says that there are 1.2 million college graduates that are competing with nine million unemployed individuals for only 3 million jobs. This caused a lot of college students to postpone the search for a job and stay in school to get a second degree. This have made the approach to the M.B. A program more frequent but for the wrong reasons, were most of the students attain it just to have it as an resume enhancer. Tony Lee, editor-in-chief of the College Journal (www.collegejournal.com), made his concerns about the employers today, where even if they have an M.B.A, does that mean that he/she have the aptitude to do well in the job or was it a last minute decision made by the graduate college out of desperation to get a job. This what made the business graduate schools adjust and enhance their programs to better preapre graduates for the competitive environment they will be facin. With regard to what we have studied in class about Barneys framework VRIO, each of the colleges that are mentioned in the article staring with University's Fuqua School of Business in Durham, where their career management center initiated a campaign called “Hire up”,it’s a three-month program that contacts over 12,000 targeted alumni and company recruiters. Another college was Babson College's F. W. Online Graduate School of Business in Babson Park,They developed a distnace based program called Fast Track, that allows participants who cant attend a traditional evening M.B.A program. The program provides an accelerated 27-month curriculum compared to the average part-time M.B.A program, which can be accomplished in three years. While in Wake Forest University’Babcock Graduate School of Management they have joined a graduate business school with an undergraduate business school, where they provide an intensive month long program that exposes students to the fundamnetals of business, they all have made valuable chnages to their programs that meets the changes and needs of their approaching students. But from my point of view, their changes and development that each college have done where valuable to the college itself but compared to other institutions they were not rare and can be easily imitated. The strategy that can really differentiate between each college is the way they interface with their students, the services and supplies that they can provide the students with, by implying the third component of the business concept by Hamel, Customer Interface, where one of its elements is information and insights where refers to all of the knowledge that is collected from and utilized on behalf of their students, if they can attend an evening program, or work online whenever they can on the program. The number of years that will be able to achieve the degree in. Another strategy will be strategic resources and its element Core competencies where the college knows its skills and unique capabilities that they can offer to the students, like what Arthur Kraft in the article offers, he says that he thinks that the M.B.A program should be innovative and teach proficiencies such as written and oral communication skills. His college offers these skills while other colleges like Wake Forest offers intense including accounting, marketing, operations, strategy, finance, and the management of information systems. Another strategy would be the Core strategy, where its element Basis for differentiation is also aplied by these colleges, as each one competes in a different way than the other.