Eastbrook MBA Program
The MBA program at Eastbrook University has undergone several dramatic changes over the past five years. During that time, the goal of the business school was to recruit as many students as possible into the MBA program to build up their student base and credit hour production. A massive campaign was launched five years ago in order to attract more applicants to the program.
Special brochures containing information about the program were printed and mailed to prospective students as well as to other colleges and universities that were likely to have undergraduate students who might be interested in coming to Eastbrook. Mailings were also sent to students who indicated an interest in Eastbrook on their GMAT exam
. (The GMAT exam is a national standardized test used by most business schools in making admissions decisions for applicants to their graduate programs.) Representatives from the Eastbrook School of Business began attending regional MBA fairs and conventions where MBA programs can meet with prospective MBA students and share Information.
In the beginning, the number of students applying to the Eastbrook MBA program was small, but eventually, the advertising campaign began to work and the number of qualified applicants each year increased to the target value of 300 initially set by the dean of the business school and the director of the MBA program. The yield, i.e., the number of admitted applicants who actually enroll and attend Eastbrook, is typically around 80%. Admitted students who do not enroll either attend other MBA programs or accept job offers. The table below shows the admissions and enrollment figures for the five years of the MBA student base-building plan at Eastbrook.
Albert Razzick, the director of the program, is currently putting the second phase of the plan into action. He knows that in order for the MBA program at Eastbrook to attain national recognition they must become more selective in the admissions process. The number of applicants is now large enough to do this without falling below a critical mass of 60 enrolled students each year.
The major issue facing Albert and the MBA program is how to go about selecting students for the program. Albert recently met with Dr. Kathleen Thompson, who is a finance professor to discuss how they can improve their admissions process.
Albert shared his intentions of making the program better. He wants to make sure he can get the best 100 students to the program next year.
Their current standards of minimum GMAT and minimum UG GPA had to be abandoned.
He suggested a formula approach where a score is calculated by multiplying the UGGPA by a constant and adding the GMAT score i.e.: SCORE = GMAT + 200 * UGGPA.
Kathleen suggests that the formula approach should be extended to include other relevant variables such as their UG major, the schools they are coming from, whether they are local or international students and even more relevant variables if data can be found.
After a long conversation, Kathleen and Albert agreed that they should develop their own formula with as many variables as they can get to improve their methodology’s prediction power. Further discussion led them to decide to use the end of first-year GPA in their MBA program to judge whether the student is successful or not. They decided to consider the student “successful” if she/he has an MBA_GPA greater than 3.2 at the end of the first year. They are also aware of the fact that not all students will achieve that GPA and that is fine with them.
Albert promised Kathleen that he would get a set of data for the last two years of students who are already in the program and that they can work on building the model.
Assignment
Albert Razzick’s assistant gathered the data for the past two years of experience with the Eastbrook MBA program and stored the information in the file EASTBROOK.XLSX on Blackboard. The Data Description section provides a partial listing of the data along with variable definitions.
Using this data set and other information given in the case, help Albert Razzick develop admissions guidelines for the Eastbrook MBA program.
Keep in mind that you want to set the guidelines in such a way that the best students are selected and the minimum enrollment of 100 students per year is reached.
For each proposal, you consider, check for any potential mistakes in the guidelines, i.e., check to see if there were any unsuccessful students in the past two years who meet the proposed guidelines or any successful students in the past two years who would not meet the proposed guidelines.
Develop a model that best predicts the potentially successful student. Make sure you have access to your model during the exam. Drop your report in Bb>Assignment>Final Exam Case Report.
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