Best places in the world to invest in 2011

Source: belfasttelegraph.co.uk
Best places in the world to invest in 2011

Every investor knows that playing the stock market is a gambler's game. Strike lucky and the returns can be eye-watering, get it wrong and prepare to take a sharp intake of breath as money slides down the drain.
But for those with extra cash to spare – even as little as £500 – a plethora of opportunities look promising for the year ahead. And if choosing the right fund seems akin to finding a needle in a haystack, a glance over the world's major regions is a good starting point.

Investing on home soil

The stock market took a pasting in October following the Chancellor's announcement of £81bn in spending cuts over the next four years, but some sectors emerged looking surprisingly strong.
Manufacturing is the Cinderella sector. Once widely derided, it expanded so much last year that it made the UK the seventh-largest manufacturing centre in the world, with machinery and equipment firms seeing output rise by 16.8 per cent.
Retail investors can buy into this trend while it is still young by putting surplus cash into a range of UK funds that cover the sector, such as the AXA Framlington UK Select Opportunities Fund. Axa's fund has a 26 per cent exposure to industrials and delivered a return of 28.1 per cent last year, equivalent to a £280 gain, before fees, on an investment of £1,000 over 12 months.
Bhupinder Anand, the head of London-based independent investment adviser Anand Associates, predicts further growth this year: "Now is a good time to invest in UK manufacturing as interest rates are low, inventories and stock levels are down while new order balances are at record levels. A weak pound has led to increased overseas demand which will particularly help heavy exporters."

Europe

Investment mavericks have long cited the need to be courageous with investments when others are cautious. This year the threat of defaults has hovered over Greece and Ireland and
there are few places that induce such levels of pulse quickening than the landmass across the Channel.
But where there is fear there also lies hope and Cédric de Fonclare, a fund manager who covers Europe for investment house Jupiter, says investors stand to benefit from the region's abundance of undervalued firms. "Investors are paying a low valuation price because Europe isn't fashionable, but companies in Europe offer significant potential due to their low valuation reach and strong balance sheets," he says. "More than 10 per cent of total assets are in cash for the average company in Europe so they have got very strong balance sheets."
The JP Morgan Europe Dynamic Fund produced a return of 15 per cent in 2010, equivalent to a £150 gain on a £1,000 investment, making it one of several funds which may be attractive to investors with a minimum deposit of £1,000 to spare.
Currency woes for the euro, which saw it fall against the dollar last year, spell good news for investors who will get more stock for the same amount of sterling as a few months ago. According to financial advice website Fool.co.uk, listed European firms are trading at about 10 times earnings for 2011, well below the average of 14.5 per cent for the past 30 years, meaning that there may be strength in weakness.

United States

The land of opportunity had well-publicised economic woes last year – culminating in a pledge from the Federal Reserve to pump $600bn (£390bn) into the economy via quantitative easing before this June – making some investors think twice about investing in the region. But it's still one of the most competitive markets on earth, currently responsible for almost half of the global consumer goods market and offering investors a chance to benefit from near rock-bottom interest rates. The US stock market posted a 17.3 per cent return last year – well above the 9 per cent posted by the UK's FTSE 100. Analysts believe individual company balance sheets are in good shape, too.
A host of communications, retail and technology chains produced stellar returns last year, among them fast-food chain McDonald's, whose share price rose from a year low of $61 to an $81 high, and software firm Oracle, whose shares soared from a low of $21 to $32. The M&G American fund produced an annual return of 20.4 per cent.
Dan Morris, a global strategist at JP Morgan, predicts: "Depreciation of the dollar should help to reorient US domestic demand towards the national economy and away from imports, helping to reduce one of the larger global imbalances that initially precipitated the credit crisis."

Emerging markets

This sector has become synonymous with high returns on exotic investments – from beach huts to elephant sanctuaries. Powered by explosive growth rates and high commodity prices, the emerging-markets boom has seen a wave of investors put their money into the sector, with many enjoying attractive returns.
Last year the Aberdeen Emerging Markets Fund produced a return of 30.4 per cent and continues to have a low minimum investment of £500, making it accessible to most investors.
With many analysts refusing to buy into speculation of an emerging market bubble, and economies in Asia and Indonesia continuing to generate strong real GDP growth, the trend for positive returns looks set to remain. Nick Price, the manager of Fidelity's Emerging Market Equities Fund, predicts the growth trajectory will continue. "The secular drivers of emerging markets remain intact – attractive demographics, competitive advantages from low labour costs, an abundance of natural resources, increasing prosperity, productivity gains and sound fiscal management."

Seize the day

The unpredictable nature of stocks since the financial crisis may yet make this one of the best times for growth this century has seen. For those financially able to take a punt, wisely chosen investments could make a difference over the next 12 months – but decisions should not be taken lightly.
^Independent

Education - Beijing International MBA

Source: BusinessWeek
The prestigious BiMBA program at Peking University has a distinctly international bent and more Western faculty than other Chinese program

Beijing International MBA at Peking University

By Michele Scrimenti
Few Chinese schools put the "international" in International MBA as much as BiMBA. Originally founded in 1998 through a consortium of American Jesuit universities, BiMBA's degree-granting institution is now Belgium's Vlerick Leuven Gent School of Business, one of the top business schools in Europe. Vlerick and BiMBA's previous partner, Fordham, give the program a constant stream of highly educated foreign professors. More than 80 percent of BiMBA's faculty comes from Europe and the U.S., far outstripping other Chinese programs.
"I came to BiMBA because the international experience is more authentic than at other schools," says Liu Hongfei, a full-time MBA student from Beijing. "Management science is a purely Western discipline that has a very short history in China. It's best if it is taught in English by Western professors." But BiMBA (BiMBA Full-Time MBA Profile) makes a trade-off to get its foreign faculty ratio so high—most of the overseas professors are short-term visiting scholars, making it hard for students to establish close relationships with their teachers.

A Taste of Wall Street

BiMBA, however, doesn't just bring the international to Beijing; it also takes the students overseas on research trips and offers unique opportunities for study abroad. After finishing their coursework in China, many students opt for a dual-degree at Fordham University, spending an intensive five weeks studying finance in New York to come out with an MBA and a master's degree.
BiMBA's goals for its students extend beyond business knowledge and worldly success—nurturing people of character is just as important.
"We don't have a course on corporate social responsibility," says John Yang, U.S. Dean at BiMBA. "But we believe that CSR comes from within. And to that end, we work to make sure our students are of the highest moral character."
BiMBA is serious about its commitment. In a country where copying others' work often goes unnoticed and unpunished, BiMBA has been using anti-plagiarism technology for years on all student papers and presentations to ferret out any cheaters. BiMBA is also planning on bringing in Buddhist monks to teach Zen meditation as another way to develop what Yang calls "men and women of values and of love."

Some Military Discipline

The school takes character-building tips from West Point, another one of its overseas partners. Students have exchanges with cadets every year in which they have a crash course on leadership. "The best way to learn about yourself and build character is by seeing how you act in extreme situations," Yang says. "When they train with the West Point cadets—climbing mountains, fording rivers—the students are learning from people who are not only physically strong, but also morally strong. This is very important for business leaders, especially Chinese who do not necessarily have a solid moral education."
But with all these partnerships and exchanges, does BiMBA fail to teach its students about China?
"BiMBA is a great place to learn about China because of its host institution, the National School of Development," says Andrea Chen, a full-time MBA student from California who plans to work in China after graduation.

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Established in 1994 by Justin Lin, the current chief economist for the World Bank and a co-founder of BiMBA, the National School of Development is a think tank that houses some of the most influential government advisers in China. Surrounded by so many experts, students are immersed in an interdisciplinary environment, with the school's professors teaching BiMBA courses on economics, political science, and even decision-making through Sun Tzu's Art of War.
"Complexity is the rule of the game today," says BiMBA's Yang. "Only by giving students a well-rounded education—not just business, but also values, and politics, and social sciences—can they be successful in the workplace and in life."

Scrimenti is a freelance writer for Businessweek.com. A graduate of George Washington University with a BA in history, Scrimenti writes for the English-language edition of the Global Times in Beijing. He previously wrote for Fortune Times, a Chinese language publication. Fluent in Mandarin, Scrimenti also works as a translator for Pan Media Corp. and ChinaGeeks, a Chinese news and analysis web site.

Economy - Job market picks up for professionals in Michigan

Source: The Detroit News
Unemployment rate down to 12.4 percent after many leave area
Brian J. O'Connor / Detroit News Finance Editor

John King is in a very small, very exclusive and very encouraging Michigan club: People who landed a job in November.

King, 36, started as technical delivery manager at the Troy office of Ally Financial on Nov. 1, overseeing information technology projects. That was after 13 months in a lower-level, lower-paying job and three months with no paycheck at all, after losing a similar job in a mass layoff in June 2009.

"At the time I got laid off, five managers at my level were laid off at the same time," said the Lake Orion father of two.

Only 1,999 other Michiganians joined King in the new-job club in November, according to state data released Wednesday that contains both good news and bad news.

The good news is that the state jobless rate fell by four-tenths of a percentage point, down to 12.4 percent. That means 22,000 workers aren't pounding the pavement for a new job.

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The bad news is that 20,000 workers either retired, left the state, died or just quit looking for work.

Despite the huge job losses that have hit the state, John King and other professionals in accounting, technology and finance are seeing encouraging signs on the hiring line.

"In the last six to eight months, I was getting more phone calls from recruiters," King said. "Things were definitely opening up."

Matt Lewry, executive vice president for Accretive Solutions of Troy, a national recruiting firm that placed King, sees opportunities for experienced professionals opening up.

"The silver lining is that if you are a professional in Michigan, demand is picking up," Lewry said.

The reason is that some people have retired or left the state, shrinking the pool of job-hunters, he said.

As the automakers and others have recovered from the near-collapse of the industry, the demand for experienced professionals is beginning to change the balance of power between candidates who'd take anything a year ago and employers who suddenly are discovering that a good CPA is hard to find.

"All last year we would have 10 candidates for a position, and 90 percent of those were really good people who were displaced," Lewry said. "Today, that candidate pool might be down to five."

Part of the demand is being driven by technology upgrades at companies that have put off spending on infrastructure improvements since the downturn started, he added.

"There's a lot of investment in information technology now, which drives a lot of investment in people and processes and organization changes."

Laura Barron started her new job as chief financial officer of Financial One Inc. in Plymouth on Monday, after a year of finding nothing but consulting and contract work. Her last employer moved out of state in July 2008, and Barron decided to take some time off until the youngest of her three sons started kindergarten.

"I started looking in late summer of 2009, and that was when the job market just completely crashed," the 40-year-old Novi resident said. "I was using five recruiters, and there really wasn't anything until this fall."

When job offers did start picking up, Barron said, she noticed salaries were coming back to pre-recession levels, too.

"When I was looking in the fall of 2009, there weren't many positions available, but the ones I did get called on where a lot lower paying," she said. "If there was a job out there, it was scooped up by people who had a lot more experience than the position required, and it was at a lower salary.

Even professionals who managed to hang on to their jobs are being tempted to make a move, Lewry said.

"Throughout the last two years if people stayed in their jobs they either got zero increases or took a decrease in salary," he said. "Now we're seeing people move for increases."

While the improved job outlook for some experienced professionals is encouraging, entry level jobs aren't opening up, and some sectors, such as construction and government jobs, are still experiencing large losses. The shrinking unemployment rate has mostly come about because 46,000 fewer people are in the work force looking for jobs than there were in November 2009.

Despite an impressive drop in unemployment by two full percentage points — from 14.4 percent to 12.4 percent — in the past 12 months, the number of people in the state getting paychecks has fallen by 19,000 workers.

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And while the news from the financial services and information sectors is encouraging compared to November of last year, those categories still have a combined loss of 9,000 jobs.

Even the recruiter Lewry doesn't overstate the good news.

"The balance for some employment seekers is starting to come back to something like normal," he said. "But that's not hard to do when you had almost nothing the year before."

Economy - Foreclosures drop as banks clean up robo-signing scandal

Source: CNNMoney
The number of foreclosure notices filed in November plunged 21%, the biggest month-over-month drop ever recorded by RealtyTrac, the online foreclosure marketer. Filings fell 14% compared with November 2009.

The number of Americans who actually lost their homes to bank repossessions plummeted even more steeply -- to 67,428. That was off a whopping 28% from 93,236 in October. Repossessions are down a third since September.

The drop in total filings, which include notices of default, scheduled auctions and repossessions, followed a 4% decline a month earlier. RealtyTrac CEO James Saccacio attributed the downtrend to fallout from the recent robo-signing controversy.

"[That] forced lenders and servicers to hit the pause button on many foreclosures while they scrambled to revamp their internal procedures and revise or resubmit questionable paperwork," he said.

Robo-signing exposed sloppy industry practices that critics charged violated state laws and regulations. Some lenders froze the foreclosure process for all their loans until they could check whether their procedures were flawed and make any needed corrections.

The robo-signing moratoriums were responsible for the lion's share of the decrease in November filings, said Rick Sharga, spokesman for RealtyTrac.

"I wish the report was actually good news," he said. "But it's just an artificial drop. For most borrowers in foreclosure, it will be a temporary reprieve."

As evidence, Sharga pointed out that in judicial foreclosure states, ones where courts are involved and where banks are most vulnerable to scrutiny over their foreclosure practices, filings dropped substantially more than in states where courts do not usually participate in foreclosure actions.

There were 34% fewer auctions scheduled in judicial states, month-over-month, compared with a 7% decline in non-judicial states. Even that small drop was probably driven by an excess of caution among the banks, Sharga said.

Already, the banks have begun to restart the foreclosure process. Bank of America announced last week that it was phasing out its moratorium.

Sharga discounted economic factors as a major contributor to the foreclosure notice drop. Unemployment remains stubbornly high, home prices have taken another dip and significant improvement in consumer confidence has been elusive.

The temporary freezes likely won't benefit many homeowners, he added: Most will still lose their homes.

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"There will probably be a few people who will use the extra time to negotiate loan modifications or do a short sale but not in any meaningful way," said Sharga.

He predicted December will bring another decline followed by an acceleration of foreclosure activity in the first quarter of 2011. Conditions will return to what people now refer to as a "normal market" during the second quarter.

Hardest-hit places

The industry has dubbed the four leading foreclosure states of the past few years, California, Florida, Arizona and Nevada, as the "sand states" because they all have extensive areas of beaches or desert.

Now, a fifth sand state has joined their ranks. Utah recorded one filing for every 222 housing units during the month, second only to Nevada (one for every 99).

California (one for every 233), Arizona (one for every 262) and Florida (one for every 267) round out the top five.

Among the nation's metro areas, Las Vegas leads the pack. Seven interior California cities are in the top 10, plus Reno, Nev., is at no. 8 and Port St. Lucie, Fla., is at 10.

Education - Columbia University adds three-year J.D./MBA program

Source: Law.com
Karen Sloan

December 15, 2010
Accelerated J.D./MBA joint degree programs are catching on.

Columbia University Law School is the latest to announce the addition of such a program, which allows students to obtain both a J.D. and MBA within three years, joining schools including Yale Law School and Northwestern University School of Law.

The benefit of the program, according to the law schools, is that "highly motivated" students may complete their dual degrees and enter the job market more quickly.

Columbia already has a four-year joint J.D./MBA program will remain. Under the three-year program, students will spend their first and third years at the law school and their second year at the Columbia Business School.

Students will also benefit from access to networking opportunities in both the law and business schools, according to administrators.

The program is more intense than the typical law school course load, which is 13 credits. Students in the three-year dual degree program need to take at least 15 credits per semester. They may opt to take an intensive 2 1/2-week course in the summer between their second and third years, but the program leaves summers open so that students may work or intern.

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Prospective students must apply separately to the law school and the business school and meet admissions criteria for both. Applications for the first cycle of the program, which will launch fall 2011, are due by Feb. 15.

The cost of the three-year program is comparable to the cost of the four-year joint J.D./MBA program. Student will pay the standard law school tuition during their first year and 150% of the business school tuition in the second year. They will pay 150% of the law school tuition in the third year.

Economy - Unemployment according to the experts

Source: Guardian
Unemployment: what the experts say

Unemployment is on the rise. Photograph: Danny Lawson/PA

With the number of people out of work in the UK rising over the 2.5 million mark today, analysts fear that the jobless crisis will escalate in 2011

Andrew Goodwin at the Ernst & Young Item Club

These figures confirm that the improvement in the labour market, seen in the middle of the year, has ground to a halt. After the strongest quarter for job creation on record in the summer, the ILO [International Labour Organisation] measure of employment has now moved into reverse. Indeed, all of the ILO indicators show worrying trends, with unemployment and inactivity rising. Further evidence of a fragile labour market come from another steep decline in the number of full-time workers, allied to rises in the number of people being forced to accept part-time or temporary work because they can't find a full-time job.
We are already beginning to see the impact of fiscal retrenchment on the labour market, with public-sector jobs being cut in Q3 and the private-sector struggling to make up the difference. With recent business surveys suggesting that firms remain wary of hiring, this is likely to be an increasingly important theme over the coming year as the pace of public-sector job cuts steps up. Private-sector hiring is being held back by residual concerns about the durability of the recovery and the fact that many firms chose to hoard labour during the recession. So it looks likely that we will see a further increase in unemployment over the first half of next year.

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There is little in the way of good news in this release. The only positives come from a small rise in vacancies – which suggests that there is some life in the private sector – and earnings growth, which has continued to slowly strengthen. But even this is tempered by the fact that earnings remain subdued by historical standards and continue to lag someway behind inflation, thus eating into consumers' spending power. Earnings growth of just 2.2% certainly suggests that we shouldn't be too concerned with inflation taking off over the medium term.

Ian Brinkley, associate director of The Work Foundation

The labour market recovery has stalled, but it is premature to talk about a "double-dip" recession. The fall in employment, hitting women more than men, and rise in unemployment shown by the Labour Force Survey are small, comparing the three months to October with the previous three months.
The bigger concern is that we have still seen no turn-round in full-time jobs.
Full-time jobs are still falling and there has been a significant increase in the number of people in part-time work because no full-time jobs were available. Until full-time jobs start to increase again the labour market will not be able to absorb large-scale job losses in the public sector. Unemployment in 2011 must then inevitably rise.

Nigel Meager, director of the Institute for Employment Studies

The figures again serve to highlight the fragility of the labour market recovery. Overall employment fell slightly, by 33,000, as a result of the decline in public-sector employment, which is now starting to show up clearly in the official figures. Redundancies in the public sector are now running at twice the rate of a year ago, whereas redundancies in all other sectors have fallen over the period.
Unemployment stands at 2.5 million, having risen by 35,000, and it is clear that conditions remain very tough for jobseekers, with 5.5 unemployed people for every vacancy. More than one-third of the unemployed have been out of work for 12 months or more, and the number of long-term unemployed is at its highest since 1997.
The rise in unemployment was more marked among women, and while in the past 12 months the general trend in male unemployment has been downwards, for women it has been clearly upwards, growing by some 89,000. With women more heavily represented in the public sector this trend may be set to continue.
The figures also highlight the amount of spare capacity in the labour market, and the number of people working part-time because they could not find full-time work is now at the highest level since records began, standing at 1.16 million. The growth in those working in temporary contracts because they couldn't find permanent work also continued, growing by 23,000 over the quarter to reach 592,000.

Charles Davis at the Centre for Economics and Business Research

Overall, today's figures are a reminder that there is still a long way to go in the labour market recovery despite the ground gained earlier this year. In many cases, businesses are still too cautious about future prospects to aggressively expand headcount, especially ahead of a year in which the VAT rise and the effect of soaring commodity prices will squeeze households. Although private-sector employment should grow to some extent in 2011, the public sector will have started to retrench; the Office for Budget Responsibility is expecting 40,000 job losses in 2011-12. Hence, we expect the unemployment rate to rise above 8% in 2011.

David Birne, an insolvency practitioner at HW Fisher

The latest unemployment figures are a taster of what is to come in 2011. This time next year we expect unemployment to be considerably higher than it is at present, as many more of Britain's companies go to the wall.
We deal with companies of every size and from every sector day in, day out and for a large chunk of them things are looking very bleak indeed.
And with the VAT rise, rising inflation and potentially higher interest rates cutting further into people's spending power next year, things are only going to get tougher.
For the UK's businesses and their employees, 2011 is shaping up to be harsher than any of the past three years.
Anyone who thinks the private sector can take up the slack from the public sector is out of touch with what's happening on the ground.

Howard Archer at IHS Global Insight

The labour market data are pretty disappointing overall and will do little to ease concern that unemployment is likely to rise in 2011 in the face of slower growth and increasing job losses in the public-sector.
Meanwhile, underlying wage growth only edged up in October and remained muted so it still seems highly unlikely that wage pressures will pose a serious inflationary threat anytime soon, which supports the case for the Bank of England to keep interest rates down at 0.50% for some time to come.

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Even if inflation expectations rise further, this is unlikely to translate into markedly increased pay awards as workers appear to have little bargaining power given high unemployment and an uncertain labour market outlook. Indeed, with real wage growth negative and the major fiscal squeeze increasingly kicking in from the start of 2011, it is hard to see consumer spending being anything else than limited for an extended period.
Labour market data may well be mixed in the near term, but we expect a modest deteriorating trend to emerge as 2011 progresses. We suspect that unemployment is headed up in 2011 as a consequence of slower, below-trend growth, rising business caution and public-sector jobs being increasingly pared. Specifically, we forecast unemployment on the ILO measure to rise to 2.65 million by end-2011 and to peak around 2.75 million around mid-2012. This would see the unemployment rate rise to 8.4% by end-2011 and to a peak of 8.6% in mid-2012.

Education - America's best MBA programs: On the mend

Source: Fortune

December 15, 2010 9:01 am

Business schools and their graduates have weathered one of the toughest economic storms to ever hit the business world. But it looks like things are slowly getting back to normal, with Harvard and London Business School earning top spots in Poets&Quants' first MBA rankings.
By John A. Byrne, contributor
(poetsandquants.com) -- Things are slowly getting back to normal at the world's top business schools. Job offers are up nearly everywhere, and corporate recruiters -- especially from the once hard-hit financial sector -- are back in hiring mode. So it is with little surprise, perhaps, that the Harvard Business School, the most famous MBA-granting institution in the world, is on top again.In a new ranking by Poets&Quants, Harvard won first-place honors among 100 of the best business schools in the U.S. Right behind Harvard was its West Coast rival Stanford, the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, Wharton, Columbia Business School, and Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business (the full list of all 100 schools).
London Business School, meantime, came in first among 50 of the best B-schools outside the U.S. France's INSEAD was second, followed by IESE and IE Business School in Spain, and HEC in Paris (the full list of all 50 ranked schools).

The Poets&Quants ranking is a composite of the five major MBA rankings published by Bloomberg BusinessWeek, The Economist, The Financial Times, Forbes, and U.S. News & World Report. The ranking takes into account a wealth of quantitative and qualitative data captured in the five major lists, from surveys of corporate recruiters, MBA graduates, deans and faculty publication records, to median GPA and GMAT scores of entering students, as well as salary and employment statistics for the latest graduating class.
To some long-time watchers of MBA education, there may be little surprise seeing Harvard and Stanford at the top of the rankings. But BusinessWeek's biennial rankings have never included Harvard or Stanford in the top spot. Over the past 24 years, the publication has awarded that accolade to Northwestern's Kellogg School five times, to the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School four times, and to the University of Chicago's Booth School on three occasions.
The last time The Financial Times ranked Harvard first on its global MBA rankings was back in 2005. Since then, Harvard has lost out to Wharton (four times in a row) and to London Business School (in the 2010 FT ranking). The highest rank Stanford has ever achieved in The Financial Times ranking was third, in 2007.
Business schools and their graduates have weathered one of the toughest economic storms to ever hit the business world. As the school synonymous with the MBA degree, Harvard especially took it on the chin. Critics quickly pointed fingers at the school for the greed and excess that led to the global crash. The Masters of the Universe quickly became, in the words of one of Harvard's own graduates, the "Masters of Disaster" with their fingerprints on many a financial fiasco.
2006 Harvard MBA Philip Delves Broughton noted that the last two heads of Merrill Lynch -- Stan O'Neal and John Thain -- were both Harvard MBAs, along with then Securities & Exchange Commission head Chris Cox and U.S. Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, who watched as Lehman Brothers went under.
Today, however, the school's MBAs are doing quite well. Some 95% of the class of 2010 landed jobs three months after graduation. The median starting salary for a Harvard MBA this year was $110,000, down slightly from $114,000 a year earlier. And two out of three graduates were handed signing bonuses of $20,000, while one of every four grads picked up additional "guaranteed compensation" of $23,000, not including stock or stock options or performance bonuses. The percentage of Harvard MBAs headed into investment banking is back into the double-digits, 10% this year from a six-year low of 6% in 2009.
There is no shortage of highly qualified applicants to the top schools. For the class of 2012, Harvard had its pick from the second largest pool of applicants in its history -- 9,524 for 910 seats in the first-year class -- an increase of 5% over 2009. This year's entering class had the highest GMAT score (722) in Harvard's history.
Harvard's advantages, of course, are the envy of the business school world. The school's resources are so expansive, its financials so rich, that it could easily be a university itself. Some 33 separate buildings, from a massive fitness center to a small, quiet chapel, adorn its 40-acre campus alongside the Charles River.
Just two months ago, the school received a $50 million gift from Indian entrepreneur Ratan Tata for a 34th building -- a new academic and residential center for executive education. The school's $2.8 billion endowment casts a shadow over all rivals. In comparison, the endowment at Stanford is $825 million; at Wharton, $800 million; and at Columbia, $410 million.
A new Harvard dean, Nitin Nohira, is promising to pursue "bold, brave things" that will set the course for the entire field of management education over the next 100 years. Just five months into his tenure, Nohira has yet to clearly articulate a vision for the school. In stump speeches before alumni, he has talked about what Harvard is now calling the "five I's": innovation, intellectual ambition, internationalization, inclusion, and integration with the rest of the university.
For all the politically correct talk that comes out of Harvard these days, the school remains a business boot camp. In the first-year, MBA candidates must read, absorb and debate some 270 case studies in 10 courses, often fighting for "air time" with equally clever students just as eager as they are to score points with professors.

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Yet the school has worked hard to become more nurturing. "When I first arrived and was welcomed to the school, the dean told us to 'look to your left and look to your right. These people will be sitting next to you on the graduation platform,'" says Justine Leichuk, co-president of the MBA Student Association. "It was such a welcoming statement, so different from what you might hear about Harvard."
Students say Harvard doesn't live up to its reputation as a place that only attracts people with sharp elbows and cutting comments.
"It's not cutthroat," says Brett Gibson, the other co-president of the MBA Student Association. "So many classmates helped each other get jobs this past recruiting season. No one hoards his or her contacts."
Whether Harvard or London, Chicago or INSEAD, it looks like the good times are coming back.
"When you talk to recruiters, they argue that MBAs offer incredible value," says David Wilson, CEO of the Graduate Management Admission Council. "Our surveys show that 99% reported satisfaction with the MBAs they've hired. That is the highest level of satisfaction we've recorded and that was in May of this year. Nine out of ten MBAs in 2010 (versus 84% in 2009) have a job."