UConn Today – The UConn Online MBA program debuted at No. 33 among the best online programs in the nation, considered an honor for a program that recently entered the academic arena.
Poets & Quants, a news and ranking organization focused on graduate business education, announced the results this week. The UConn program also ranked No. 27 for career outcomes and No. 26 for academic experience.
At the School of Business, our main mission is to prepare our college students to begin or grow their careers and differentiate themselves in the workforce. But it isn’t our exclusive goal.
We also work with Connecticut high schools to ensure that our state’s aspiring youth have the foundation that they need to meet their business and financial goals, as well.
One of the programs I’m most excited about is the School of Business’ Financial Literacy Innovation Program, known as FLIP. The program began in 2019, serving just 20 students. This semester, it drew 140 students to Storrs on Saturdays to learn about financial decision making. The plan is to expand the program to Stamford starting in spring 2025.
The program began with the realization that many high school students were lacking financial knowledge, a problem that could easily derail their futures. Spurred on by the enthusiasm and generosity of our alumni, we welcomed several high schools to participate in the original program. Since then, it has continued to grow.
This year we’ve extended the program from just a spring offering to both spring and fall. We were able to serve some 280 students from more than nine high schools, including Bloomfield, Bristol, Hartford, Windham and Vernon.
One of the highlights of the program is that these high school juniors and seniors are being mentored by UConn business students, who can explain the real-world financial decisions that they make as college students living on limited budgets. Beyond that, they discuss everything from borrowing money to paying taxes to the cost of rent. They also talk about the cost of higher education and the return on investment, as well as the opportunity to start a business at an early age. All these lessons are extremely valuable, but more impactful when delivered by an older peer.
FLIP also introduces high school students to the experience of being on a college campus, something of particular benefit to first-generation students for whom this experience is very new.
Professor Nora Madjar, our associate dean for undergraduate programs, has been deeply invested in FLIP and recognizes the success of the program.
“These high schoolers are now more knowledgeable about bank accounts, credit cards, credit scores and taxes,’’ Nora said. “They are in a great position to manage their finances, and we ask them to share that knowledge with their family and friends as a way to ‘pay it forward.’ ’’
In the School of Business, we want to ensure that the students who come to us do so with eyes wide open and are fully prepared for the next two- to four- years of their growth and education. The FLIP program contributes to that readiness, and we know it makes a difference in the ultimate success of our graduates.
We appreciate the help and support of so many of our alumni and friends in executing this program and ensuring that our high school students are aware of the opportunities that await them.
UConn Today – When professor Lingling Wang teaches finance to undergraduates, she also shares her personal investment strategy. She explains how she builds her portfolio, mitigates risk, and allocates savings for her teenagers to attend college.
“Not all of my students will be CFO of a corporation, but they will all be the CFO of their personal finances,” she said. “I want them to leave my class with knowledge that will be very useful in their lives.”
Hartford Business Journal – In response to growing industry needs, particularly in the wake of the pandemic, business schools across the country are expanding their offerings in supply chain management.
In Connecticut, several colleges — including UConn, Quinnipiac University and the University of Hartford — are falling in line to help support numerous industries by turning out skilled workers in the supply chain field.
UConn Foundation – UConn has certainly seen big changes over the past 58 years, but at least one thing remains constant: Lawrence Handler ’67 (BUS) just keeps giving back. Handler made his first philanthropic gift in 1968 and as he says, “there’s been no reason to stop.”
In honor of National Philanthropy Month, Handler recently answered some questions about what inspires him to stay involved with his beloved University.
UConn Magazine – Working as the head of an investment management firm for 19 years, Steve Wilson found himself frustrated by the gender disparity he saw in the field. He wanted to hire women as investment professionals but struggled to find enough who were trained and qualified.
“I realized that colleges weren’t preparing enough women to enter the field,” Wilson explains. “I think it was a combination of a lack of awareness of career opportunities and perhaps, to some degree, self-selection — with too many fully qualified women thinking ‘I’m not good enough, so I’m not going to try’ or ‘It’s a hostile space, so why would I put myself out there?’”
Poets and Quants – The success of any MBA program makeover is in how quickly the new program establishes itself. By this measure, the restructuring at the University of Connecticut School of Business has been fantastically — perhaps even unprecedentedly — successful.
UConn shuttered its traditional two-year MBA in 2021 and redirected its resources into two 42-credit programs: a new 100% Online MBA and a part-time Flex MBA, the latter a hybrid program available in Hartford, Stamford, and online.
The Marketing Department at the UConn School of Business hosted its 12th annual Voya Financial Colloquium on the topic of “Social Responsibility and Impact in Business.” The event, held on Oct 25th, 2024, brought together researchers from diverse perspectives to discuss the role of business in economic, social and environmental sustainability.
“This year’s topic is near and dear to our hearts, as it dovetails with the soft launch of our new MS program in Social Responsibility and Impact in Business. In our program, we think of this as encompassing many areas – it’s not just environmental sustainability, but also economic and social sustainability, as well as fair labor practices, and more,” said UConn Marketing professor Christina Kan, who organized the event.
The colloquium featured four distinguished speakers – Professors Martin Mende, Gergana Nenkov, Anita Rao and Michael Posner – each of whom approached the topic from a different lens – including marketing and law – as well as different methodologies – including experimental and econometric approaches.
The colloquium fostered an energetic discourse between speakers and participants. Faculty and doctoral students from all over the UConn campus attended, including marketing, law and the Human Rights Institute. Also in attendance were guests from UMass and URI.
Below are profiles of the guest speakers and an abstract of their presentations:
Martin Mende, the J. Willard and Alice S. Marriott Foundation Professor in Services Leadership at Arizona State University, provided an overview of multiple papers at the intersection of a sustainable future and financial inclusion. He first discussed how the United Nations (UN) 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can serve as a fruitful foundation for impactful marketing research, and the areas in which consumer research has made progress, as well as opportunities for future research. Second, he described how financial inclusion is critical for progress toward many of the SDGs. He presented insights from field studies on how mainstream banks can more successfully operate in banking deserts by increasing consumers’ perception of communal financial orientation. He also shared results from a series of studies on racial discrimination in financial loan services.
Gergana Nenkov is Associate Professor of Marketing at the Carroll School of Management, and Affiliate Faculty at the Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society, Boston College. Her presentation featured research on how to enhance environmental sustainability. While the “3Rs” of sustainable living – reduce, reuse, recycle – have been widely promoted, consumer practices that reduce consumption waste by extending products’ lifespan have more direct environmental benefits. Professor Nenkov shared research identifying strategies to extend product lifespans through encouraging consumers to: 1) reuse and 2) repair their products. She found that transformation salience (i.e., giving products a new life by transforming them) can be harnessed to increase the duration of product usage. She also shared insights that promoting repair behavior as a commitment to one’s products can be an effective communication strategy, especially among a brand’s loyal consumers, who are particularly inclined to upgrade rather than repair their branded possessions.
Anita Rao, the Beyer Family Associate Professor of Marketing at Georgetown University, explored how animal welfare labels impact consumer demand for fresh meat products in the German grocery retailing sector. Her research approach exploits the quasi-experimental variation in consumers’ exposure to the label to measure the impact on (i) choices of meat labeled with the highest animal welfare standard, and (ii) the change in the willingness to pay for meat associated with the highest animal welfare standard. Her findings reveal that the share of households’ meat purchases with the highest animal welfare standards goes up by 2.19 percentage points and the willingness to pay increases by 0.31 (EUR/500g) for the average German household after the label introduction. Altogether, her research speaks to the notion that consumers are actually willing to change their behavior when presented with accurate information on the conditions under which animals are raised.
Michael Posner is the Jerome Kohlberg Professor of Ethics and Finance at NYU’s Stern School of Business, and the Director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at the School, the first-ever human rights center at a business school. He offered a thought-provoking presentation on human rights in business. He noted that over the last 30 years, there has been increasing attention to the obligations of global companies to protect human rights in their business operations. Initially most companies drew the line at abiding by local laws in the places where they do business. Gradually many companies have come to realize that they need to do more. As the European Union starts to build a more ambitious global regulatory model, Professor Posner assessed the current state of efforts to promote human rights as a core business priority, especially for large multinational companies.
Wallethub – Reward credit cards are best suited for consumers that can readily take advantage of the benefits offered by card membership. Most travel, hotel, and other like vendors offer rewards programs to consumers with points or other benefits that just sit in accounts until they can be used, or worse yet, expire. For airlines, the best rewards are free or upgraded travel on that airline. If the airline does not provide regular service to locations frequented by those business travelers, it may be hard to justify membership in that club. If membership is free with no obligations, then it membership doesn’t really matter.
