Welcome Back!

I am delighted to welcome new and returning students back to the Carlson School. Students ignite the campus with energy and anticipation; faculty and staff who have spent the summer preparing for the semester are ready to go, and I am reminded why I love the start of the school year. After 20 years at the Carlson School, the headiness of a new academic year is just as invigorating as when I started as a rookie faculty member here.

This fall, we welcome an outstanding group of new students: 470 undergrads, 250 Part-Time MBA students, 99 Full-Time MBA students from 16 states and 7 countries, 55 CEMBA students and 112 specialty Master's and PhD students.

Carlson is truly "In search of the best." We make an effort to seek out the best students, staff, corporate partners, alumni relationships, and faculty. Thirty percent of our second year Full-Time MBAs are coming back to school with job offers in hand from their summer internships. Our faculty sets the bar for knowledge creation. The latest Academic Rankings of World Universities* puts the U of M's business and economics faculty 14th in the world in intellectual contributions, second only to Berkeley among public universities.

We should all be very proud.

...but not complacent. How can we continue to raise the bar? I would love to hear your thoughts as we strive to create the best possible experience for all our stakeholders, especially our students.

* The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) has become the most influential ranking worldwide of the intellectual contributions of universities. Started in 2003 by the Center for World-Class Universities (CWCU) of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, and updated on an annual basis, ARWU uses six objective indicators to rank world universities, including the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, number of highly cited researchers, number of articles published in top journals, number of articles indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index, and per capita performance with respect to the size of an institution. More than 1000 universities are actually ranked by ARWU every year and the best 500 are published on the web. The Economics and Business Rankings can be seen on their site.