World Business

With applications increasing, some business schools are planning greater degree of seats. Others remain wary

By Alysa Teichman

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There may be some good news for business-school applicants worried about more competition for slots in MBA programs. With the recession driving more students to business schools, numerous programs are considering increasing the number of seats in their classes, according to a fresh survey conducted by Kaplan Inc. WPO.

Kaplan surveyed 245 B-school admissions officers in August and found that more than moiety were considering increasing program volume, more by up to 25%. The types of schools allowing for expansion ranged from top series to less selective programs, according to Jennifer Kedrowski, Kaplan’s director of graduate programs.

"We do feel that it is a potential silver lining in terms of the competitive admissions cycle just now," Kedrowski said. The rank dimensions survey was conducted after Kaplan establish 75% of schools report a more competitive admissions process than three years ago.

"A lot of the upper part of a plant schools are reporting increases in applications," Kedrowski said. "It’s a tough environment, but it might be a good time to apply inasmuch as some schools are considering the strong demand for MBAs and thinking it might be worth increasing class size," she said.

Adding seats in general condition of affairs of high demand (BusinessWeek.com, 8/27/08) and increasing revenues from paying bodies sounds single, only the decision to grow requires cause of a range of issues—including diminished school wealth due to shrinking endowments, fiscal assist requirements in a weakened regulation, and the effects on program quality.

Which means that some schools that are making allowance for growing are doing it cautiously. For instance, Syracuse University’s Whitman School of Management will expand as plenteous as 15% next year, the maximum it can to bar within faculty and building constraints and maintain its quality from spent years. The gymnasium currently admits 87 students to its full-time MBA program.

"Responding too aggressively might strain the rule," said Maurice Harris, the associate dean of graduate programs. "This expanded perseverance pool is occurring at a time when our endowments are weakened seeing that most of our endowment is invested in assets that have lost their value. While we wish again future students, our ability to provide generous fiscal aid packages becomes more challenged."

At the same time, Whitman will focus on expanding its Master of Science program of 27 students more intensely this year by around 30%. In this one-year program, MS students are required to enter with specialized bachelor’s degrees in business subjects like monetary theory and accounting and go directly to second year electives with MBA students.

Another program that is growing is the University of Rochester’s Simon School of Business, which has been adding seats at a rate of 10% for the last three years. Greg MacDonald, the charged with execution monitor of admissions and administration related he hopes to cap off the 180-student program at 250 in two years. While Simon’s administrators did not anticipate a recession then they wrote their strategic plan in 2005-2006, MacDonald said the weakened economy and uptick in applicants is only helping the school "acquire some really virtue talent."

On the other side of the equation, Paul Danos, dean of Dartmouth’session Tuck School of Business advocates care class sizes constant and driving up the quality of the student body in competitive years for admissions. Danos said that many of the top-tier schools will not consider expansion, despite the temptation that increased qualified applicants may induce.

"If you are all of a sudden going to double your greatness or add students, you’re bound to reduce character," Danos said.

Danos also said he thinks programs that expand moreover much exist disposed not be able to sustain their growth. "Eventually if the recession is deep, fewer people will be applying," he said.

And in this landscape, where not at all one knows exactly how the economy volition pan out, more schools are putting their decisions to expand adhering hold to the time when they can fully assess the number and quality of applicants this year. "Our jobs are not to stay the door closed. If there is an increase in qualified candidates applying, we’re going to be in actual possession of to do something, whether that means slightly larger classrooms or hard to arrange for more sessions of a particular class," said Stuart Lipper, the associate dean of academic programs at Fordham University’s Graduate School of Business, where in that place is a wait-and-see attitude towards expansion. "We’ve been doing this for a long time and oftentimes have to react to changes in the marketplace," he said.

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The manufacturer of Post-It notes is well-positioned to ride out the current downturn, say market pros

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3M Corp. (MMM)—52-week stock price

By Gene Marcial

Over the years, most conglomerates have lost their allure in the midst of investors, in part because they be in sight to be unwieldy and more difficult to analyze as investments than companies with simpler, inferior diversified operations. But 3M Corp. (MMM), a leading global diversified industrial, technology, and health-care company, is holding its own, mainly because its products be favored through become necessities for consumers and businesses around the earth. Indeed, more than 60% of 3M’s annual sales come from extraneous markets.

"It is one of the most innovative companies in the U.S., spending approximately 6% of sales, or about $1 billion, on R&D, which gives them tremendous intellectual property assets," says Bruce Geller, CEO of investment management firm Dalton, Griener, Hartman, which owns shares. That’session one sense, he adds, why 3M, formerly called Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing, has been else springy than its peers for the time of recessions or housekeeping downturns.

Geller says it’sitting a "prime minister conglomerate," with businesses ranging from industrial and transportation (30% of sales), to hale condition caution (28%) and technology (16%). The industrial sector makes products of that kind as abrasives and adhesives used in the repair and maintenance of automotive and marine vehicles, and aircraft. Health care includes dental and personal-care products, and technology includes films for electronic displays and lens systems for television projection.

"We be directed for this global consumer behemoth to take advantage of other companies’ weaknesses" during the current recession, says analyst James Butler of independent investment research firm Value Line (VALU). Historically, whenever a recession has occurred, 3M turned crisis into opportunity, he says, by utilizing its "surpassingly solid finances (it currently has $3 billion in cash)" to buy quality companies at low valuations.

Like most companies, 3M has seen its shares decline in the market’s current massive slump, tumbling to 59 a distribute from a 52-week high of 88.70 on Dec. 12, 2007. The cost pendant reflects expectations that the current recession will last through greatest number of 2009, says Butler.

However, he sees 3M stock recovering and climbing to the 100-a-share level by 2011. This price appreciation potential, he says, combined with a "rock-solid" dividend payout yield of 3%, suggests decent total return potential, on a risk-adjusted basis, over the next three to five years.

"As a long-term play, this top quality stock is a very virtuous choice," says Butler.

In these troubled times, 3M’s address has been focusing on the company’s resilience in the passing from hand to hand recession, says David Begleiter, some analyst at Deutsche Bank (DB) (it has done banking conducive to 3M and owns shares), who rates 3M a buy, by a price target of 70. 3M’s innovation-driven advancement implement, he says, enables the company to control its own destiny far better than its industrial and material-science peers. Coupled with benefits from subside raw material costs, higher selling prices, and a much improved furnish chain, 3M should be able to outperform its peers in addition the next 6 to 12 months, according to Begleiter.

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Health-care reform would put one of the most bringing into being sectors in the U.S. to work to shore up the nation’s economy

By Chris Farrell

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The economy is in a tailspin. The latest salvo of grim tidings came courtesy of the Labor Dept.’s Dec. 5 trade report: U.S. employers slashed 533,000 jobs in November (BusinessWeek.com, 12/05/08), the largest monthly decline in other thing than three decades. The unemployment rate now stands at 6.7% and the ranks of the jobless be under the necessity increased by 2.7 million considering December. The broadest measure of unemployment (a figure that includes the out of employment, employees laboring part-time, and others barely working) stands at a dismaying 12.5%, or 19.3 million workers, up from 8.4% a year ago, or 12.9 million workers.

Considering all the actions being taken by the U.S. Treasury and Federal Reserve to shore up the economy, the risk that a disinflationary recession deepens into a deflationary depression remains remote. But it isn’cheek by jowl inconceivable.

To stave right hand some unwelcome reprise of the 1930s, the incoming Obama Administration and Congress are preparing a large fiscal stimulus package for the New Year. Economists guesstimate the size of the ultimate package at somewhere between $300 billion and $500 billion. (That’s more than double or about triple the tax abate program from earlier this year.)

The list of law-making initiatives is long. A big boost in public infrastructure spending, support for struggling homeowners, money to buttress up the financial system, some form of a bailout because of the Detroit auto industry, and various put a tax upon projection measures are all going into the law-making sausage-making apparatus for 2009.

Yet major health-care reform—specifically, entire health care—should top the list. Forget any suggestion that reform is too lavish or that it would attract too long to have an impact. Wrong, upon the two counts. A bold embrace of universal hale condition management offers policymakers the fortuitous event at a financial triple-play: Universal coverage would stimulate the economy, it would boost the financial security of mean Americans, and it would break the health-care become better log-jam.

To paraphrase and update a famed cite about General Motors (GM), what’s good since health-care reform is good for the economy. (It would certainly be good for General Motors, too.)

The case for long-term reform is compelling. The problems associated with America’s badly frayed health-care system are well known. The rural spends a world-beating 16% of low domestic product on health, yet in international comparisons it lags behind a number of key measures. For instance, the U.S. ranks 29th in infant mortality and 48th in life expectancy. The number of people without health insurance was 38 million in 2007, and that account is guaranteed to have risen in the in the interim with the recession that began a year ago. With without exception soundness care, everyone under age 65 would subsist covered by a qualified health insurance company or from one side a government-sponsored program. (Those outer 65 already have a version of universal coverage through Medicare.)

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Water conservation companies are finding plenty of opportunities in the South’s aridity conditions

By Jeremy Quittner

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Walking through a soybean field in pastoral Georgia’s Flint River Basin, it’s complying to overlook a blue fabric the size and shape of a police car siren session in the brown-red loamy soil. But thanks to a number of aggressive small companies, that cupola is at the center of rapid change in the Southeast, where entrepreneurs are tackling a drought that’s before-mentioned to be the worst the region has seen in 100 years. Today, areas of serious drought stretch from Tennessee and the Carolinas to Kentucky and Virginia, Alabama and Georgia.

The blue house contains a sensor that measures moisture levels in the blemish. Farmers often be obliged to drive around thousands of acres, visiting dozens of probes, to collect data from them. Gathering and analyzing the data can elect days, by which time it’s often too outdated to subsist of much practice.

But this particular sensor is silently transmitting information away from the thicker settlements to one position at the Stripling Irrigation Research Park in Camilla, Ga. There, entrepreneurs are teaming up with researchers to perfect so-called mutable rate irrigation (VRI), combining the data with GPS technology to bear massive pivoting irrigation arms in farmers’ fields to give supply with water to crops with great precision. So well-nigh, 22 farms in the Flint River Basin, Stripling’s home, use VRI, which has helped save 10 billion gallons of water ago 2003. “This illiberal corner of Georgia makes up about a third of whole Georgia’s agricultural irrigation,” says any of Stripling’s water resource specialists, Rad Yager. Pointing to a map of the area in his office, he says, “It’s kind of the epicenter.”

Paul Gupta, the founder of startup Ilinc, and John Overley, the head of sales and business development for carrier Digitel Wireless, represent just two of about half a dozen small companies that are in operation by researchers at Stripling to develop systems for farmers and others with extensive watering needs, such as the owners of golf courses. The duo’s system transmits real-time data directly from the fields to the Web, so farmers and other customers can lines of rails conditions via laptops or PDAs instead of driving around collecting information. This allows them to deliver water quickly to where it’s needed, and to stop consumption furnish with water in areas that are already saturated.

Gupta, an engineer and specialist in remote data transmission who used to work in the auto industry, figured similar technology could be used in geoponics for water conservation. “I wanted to save our precious, finite means,” he says. His system, FarmLinc, comprises the hardware and software that lets sensors transmit data to the Web. Digitel is building the wireless infrastructure to allow like a thing to happen in country areas. The 85-person, $25 the multitude carrier recently installed a 100-square-mile wireless “cloud” in the Flint River Basin, with radio towers stuck on everything from grain elevators to water towers. The cloud eventually will cover five counties and 2,000 square miles. “I like to assert that which is going forward in husbandry [here] is like what Henry Ford did with the Model T,” says Overley.

Stripling is not the only place entrepreneurs in the South are sad to reinvent the fashion the region uses water. Some 80 small businesses, many of them working on water usage, got their begin at the Center of Innovation for Agriculture, a affair incubator in Tifton, Ga. Bill Boone, a native Georgian who runs the incubator, says the challenge for entrepreneurs is twofold: Not only must they develop innovative products unless they likewise must persuade farmers to use them. “The farmer is a hard person to change,” says Boone. “His daddy strained him to go out and see what the plant looks like, and kick the dirt with his boots and discern how deep the moisture goes.” That’s not stopping entrepreneurs, whether they’re working from Stripling, an incubator, or entirely on their have a title to.

While agriculture uses roughly two-thirds of altogether water, cities also are suffering. By 2007, Lake Lanier, a reservoir that provides Atlanta with much of its water, had reached critical lows, and in that place was a real possibility the incorporated town might run out of water.

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How Nakia Stith turned through her failing author’session Philadelphia private guard operations

By Amy Barrett

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Bill Cramer

In the fall of 2002, 24-year-old Nakia Stith had a conversation no one wants to have. Nakia sat down with her parents, Gregory and Vernetta, at a Houlihan’s superficial their hometown of Philadelphia. Gregory had been battling kidney disease since 2000. For the gone year and a half, Nakia had spent hours each day with her father, either in the office or at abode when he was too exhausted to make it in, peppering him with questions about Top of the Clock, his security company. But now Gregory needed a kidney, and both his daughter and wife were a match. Nakia’s parents told her that Vernetta would be the donor.

Nakia was disappointed. “Even though my mother was a match, I felt this was something I was supposed to observe,” she says, her soft voice belying the steeliness under. “I had just made up my spirit that this was how it was going to be.”

Turns public she was right. Over the next few months Vernetta ran into her own health problems, making it nearly impossible as being her to donate. At 6 a.m. forward Mar. 31, 2004, Nakia checked into the University of Pennsylvania Hospital through her father. A biology major, she was the two excited and fascinated by the idea of going into surgery and even asked the nurses to take pictures of the procedure. Six hours later, Nakia and her father each had one in operation kidney.

Gregory had started Top of the Clock in West Philadelphia in 1991. But as his illness progressed and he began dialysis treatments, he became too fatigued to manage the company effectively. In 2001, Nakia quit her job as a program partner with 4H, a national youth organization, to come dwelling and help. But the definition of “prevent” quickly ballooned. Nakia describes battling theft, security against loss fraud, and the perception that a soft-spoken twentysomething woman couldn’t mayhap compete with the military and formula enforcement veterans who dominate the security perseverance. She fired or saw the departures of every member of the company’s seven-person office staff. But within two years she was in good health on her way to meander the company around. Nakia has nearly doubled Top of the Clock’s revenues since 2005. The 160-person company has about 20 clients on contract, up from just 6 in 2003. “I wouldn’familiarily bear believed I could do this. I could never have imagined it,” she says. “One lump of matter I do know—my dad was so hard on me when I was young, he was so of high and he would always say, ‘This is preparation.’ And I would say, ‘What are you talking about?’ But I expect back, and it all makes idea now.”

Gregory Stith and Vernetta Groves grew up in the same southwest Philadelphia neighborhood in the ’70s and started dating in high discipline. They married in 1977, and their daughter was born the following year.

Nakia’session father had important expectations of her. When she was in grade school he gave her reading assignments—books about not modern. civilizations were a mainstay—and expected her to file book reports. He engaged her in spirited debates steady everything from the Winter Olympics to Jesse Jackson’session 1988 run for the Presidency. The Stiths even kept a dictionary on the posterior portion dash of their Ford Granada to help close up disputes on the go. But Nakia’sitting parents and grandparents, all of whom were in long, solid marriages, couldn’t insulate her completely from life in inner-city Philadelphia: By the age of 16 she had thrown away three cousins to fire-arm violence.

By 1991, Gregory had left his day job at the local naval shipyard to make a full-time business out of a sideline providing security to visiting hip-hop celebrities. As an diligently employed member of the Nation of Islam, “the tradition of self-sufficiency was important to him, and creating your own dealing was huge in the teachings,” says Nakia, who is not a part of the group. She started to learn about her dad’s company during her sophomore year in high school, when she worked in the office a few hours a week. But her grades savage, so her dad fired her.

By the time Nakia returned to Top of the Clock, she had graduated from Morgan State University in Baltimore, but hadn’t taken any business catamenia.

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Small business owners are most concerned in all parts of taxes, freedom from disease insurance costs, and getting banks to lend again

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Charles Dharapak/AP Photo

By Amy Barrett

After every historic freedom, entrepreneurs, along with the recline of the people, await the inauguration of a new President through an ambitious agenda. Given the nearly unprecedented fiscal situation and two ongoing wars, entrepreneurs are understandably anxious that their concerns command get short shrift. In conversations with SmallBiz, business owners spoke of the need to restore confidence in a badly wounded economy. And they repeatedly raised the same three issues: soaring health-care costs, reduced accession to credit, and fear of higher taxes. “There is a lot of anxiety out there among my clients,” says Angie Strunk, prudent director and founder of Triserve, a 22-person Cinncinati-based payroll and accounting company with $2 the masses in occurring once a year sales. She says her small business clients “are worried about the next Administration raising taxes, they are worried through the economy, and about these bailouts, which are scary.” Here’s what business owners can realistically expect from the new President, and when it ability befall.

Andy Vabulas is chief executive of I.B.I.S. in Norcross, Ga., a $15 million, 58-person company that helps businesses install and use Microsoft applications. He says job one for the Obama Administration must be restoring private in the economy. Vabulas says office from his small and midsize clients is down 25% this year—and that the first two weeks of November saw an even other dramatic pullback. “They are not spending money right now,” he says.

Restoring confidence in the economy is a tall order, but sum of two units important elements will undoubtedly be work at jobs and economic bourgeoning. President-elect Barack Obama and the unaccustomed Congress are likely to view an economic encouragement package as a critical hireling for the sake of addressing the two.

The betting is that the stimulus package will pass, and is likely to hit $300 billion, whether or not a piece of it is passed before President George W. Bush leaves office. Expect to see aid to states and cities facing budget shortfalls, extended unemployment benefits and food stamps, and big infrastructure spending. According to Gus Faucher, director of macroeconomics at Moody’s Economy.com, every dollar spent on infrastructure projects or extended unemployment benefits will add $1.59 and $1.64, respectively, to unseemly domestic product. And Ross Eisenbrey, a vice-president at the Economic Policy Institute, points out that small businesses, especially construction-related companies, would be helped greatly by a boost in infrastructure spending.

But vanquishing the pessimism that commonly pervades the markets and economic decision-making will also require some symbolic moves. Faucher says people omit to suffer that “the President understands what is going on in the economy and is personation not reactively, but proactively.” Thus, the right economic team is critical. National Federation of Independent Business Executive Vice-President Dan Danner is encouraged that in such a manner distant, the President-elect seems to be surrounding himself with experienced advisers, including likely Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Many are from the Clinton Administration, “seasoned pros who have been there and who interpret the significance of business.”

While calming the economic waters clearly comes first, entrepreneurs are hoping for relief on a longer-term menace: soaring health-care costs. Wendy S. White, founder and president of $2.5 the multitude online marketing sinewy Siren Interactive in Oak Park, Ill., expanded coverage for her 20 employees this year. She says she had to be enough it to interruption competitive, but her premiums went up almost 50%. “It’s killing me,” she says. White wants to see health care addressed quickly, but she isn’t expecting a freebie. “I think I’m going to end up paying higher taxes,” she says. “But if [Obama] have power to help with health care, I’m O.K. by that.”

Obama’s proposed fix for health care is still short on specifics—one of the most of moment being which companies diminish as “paltry.”

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