Business School

When Aarti Kothari decided she needed a top-quality business education to further her career, her choices at first weren't encouraging. In a country suffering a dramatic shortage of placements for college students, the nation's best business school, the Indian Institute of Management, had more than a hundred applicants for each seat. Lesser programs, strapped for resources, offered degrees of questionable value.

In 1988, when Barbara Hackman Franklin served on the George Bush campaign's Republican convention team, she would arrive every morning for staff meetings carrying a plastic bag filled with bran flakes and prunes. While her colleagues gorged on the daily spread of sweet rolls and coffee, she would pour skim milk into the bag and eat her cereal with a plastic spoon.

While the boom in graduate business education cools in the United States, American universities are finding eager new students of capitalism in places like Blagoveschensk, a bustling Russian river port on the Chinese border. There, for the last six months, Portland State University has been offering an executive master's degree in business administration program to 23 students who hope to export the region's timber, gold and soybeans.

The family of pioneering Oxnard developer Martin V. "Bud" Smith has pledged $3 million to establish a school of business and economics at Cal State Channel Islands, a move that will raise the profile of the emerging Ventura County university. Smith, who died in 2001 at age 85, was a longtime supporter of the campus near Camarillo. Six years ago, he created a $5-million endowment to boost the university's business programs.

Economist M. Frances Van Loo takes issue with the old Wall Street maxim that the business of business is business. Good works should matter too, she believes. The professor at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley has for years aimed to drive a little kindness into its hard-as-nails MBA education.

David Booth, chief executive of Santa Monica money manager Dimensional Fund Advisors, has given a $300-million gift to the University of Chicago's famed business school -- the largest ever donation to the university. The school now will be named for the 61-year-old Booth, a 1971 MBA graduate who has long kept a low profile in the money management business despite his success.

Loyola Marymount University's plan to expand its Westchester campus onto open bluffs overlooking Marina del Rey won approval from the Los Angeles City Council this week, ending nearly a decade of debate over the proposal. The council on Tuesday rejected protests from a group of die-hard opponents and unanimously agreed to let the private, Jesuit university build dormitories, a business school, a 1,000-seat theater and an athletic field on land zoned for single-family homes.

After riding a wave of change to the top of a leading Wall Street investment banking firm, William Mayer is aiming his philosophy of adaptability and foresight at a younger generation. In his first year as dean of the University of Maryland's graduate school of business, the former chairman and chief executive officer of First Boston Corp. already has commanded national attention. The school won a $5-million donation from a wealthy alumnus.

Taylor W. Meloan, 83, a former interim dean and professor of marketing at the USC Marshall School of Business, died Monday in Lake Forest, Calif., of respiratory complications from cancer. A full-time member of the USC faculty for 32 years, Meloan came to the university as professor and head of the department of marketing, and served as interim dean of the business school from 1969 to 1972. He later served as associate vice president for academic administration and research.

Like many business school graduates, Jake Neuberg and Ramit Varna had big plans. Theirs didn't involve corporate offices with city views or big signing bonuses but instead the standardized test that is the bane of many high school students' existence. When they graduated from UCLA's Anderson School of Management in 2002, the two wanted to create the largest SAT preparation company in the country, even larger than long-established companies Kaplan and Princeton Review.