The Star-Ledger, August 26, 2010, Thursday

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The Star-Ledger (Newark, New Jersey)

August 26, 2010, Thursday

Business schools building top-notch facilities to attract students

Yale University's School of Management, which aspires to be among the world's best business schools, crams its students and faculty into 19th-century homes and former astronomy buildings linked by a rabbit-warren of basements.

That's a far cry from Harvard Business School's 33-building riverfront campus, which boasts a chapel, health club and its own art collection.

To help catch up, Yale is planning a glittering $180 million structure designed by Lord Norman Foster, who built London's "Gherkin" tower. The new building, scheduled to open in 2013, will help the school keep pace with its rivals, said Dean Sharon Oster.

"You can't be in a dump if everyone else is in a spectacular building," Oster said.

Elite business schools are locked in an "arms race" of building bigger and more elaborate business campuses to recruit the best students and faculty and climb magazine rankings, said Yale finance professor Matthew Spiegel. New buildings mean more office space for faculty and more classrooms for profitable executive education programs. Larger schools can also enroll more students, who pay as much as $80,000 per year in tuition, room and board and other expenses.

Business schools are now splurging on high-profile architects to create imposing glass-and-steel structures, with everything from meeting rooms for student teams to cafeterias with organic cuisine and health clubs.

"The better the experience people have, the better they feel about the place, the more likely it will be that they would support it at some point," said Robert Dolan, dean of the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, in Ann Arbor, which opened a 270,000-square foot, $145 million building in 2009.

Since the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania opened its $140 million Jon M. Huntsman Hall in 2002, rival business schools have scrambled to keep up.

The University of Chicago opened its $125 million Harper Center in 2004, while Michigan's building debuted last year. Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Business, in Cambridge, Mass., will open new facilities this year, and Stanford Graduate School of Business, near Palo Alto, Calif., will follow in 2011.

Along with Yale, Columbia Business School in New York and Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, in Evanston, Ill., are also planning new buildings.

Harvard's buildings, the first of which were built in 1927, sit on a 40-acre bend in the Charles River across from the rest of the university.

More recent additions include a glass-and-concrete chapel with a koi pond, housing for 400 visiting executives, a health club with three basketball courts and a student union designed by Robert A.M. Stern.

The University of Chicago's new business school building, designed by Rafael Vinoly, who was inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright's 1910 Robie House across the street, is oriented around a six-story, glass-and-steel atrium that acts as the school's "living room."

The social space has helped change the view that the business school is a haven for math geeks and social misfits, said Stacey Kole, a deputy dean.

"We're working hard to break that perception," Kole said. "When you come to campus, you see more activity. It's a much more positive place to be."

Applications jumped 30 percent the first year Chicago used the new building in its marketing, although improved rankings helped drive the increase as well, she said.

While a business school's physical condition isn't the most important consideration, "you do consider the facility, you do consider what school will allow you to access the latest technology," said Ashil Ann, 26, who has applied to Columbia, New York University's Stern School of Business and McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University.

The high cost of attendance contributes to students' rising expectations -- and the growing size and complexity of the new facilities, said Jonathan Levav, an associate professor at Columbia.

Two years at Columbia Business School costs an estimated $168,307 for tuition, room and board and other expenses.

While universities across the United States have cut back on construction because of falling endowments, business schools are immune from the reductions because of their ability to raise money, said Ronald Ehrenberg, an economics professor at Cornell University, who studies higher education.

"Graduates of business and law schools are often the wealthiest alumni," Ehrenberg said.

"It is easy to raise the funds to build buildings from donors to those schools."

Yale has raised about half of the $180 million needed for its building, and will seek another $25 million from donors

and borrow the remainder, Oster said in an interview conducted in a full-scale mockup of Yale's future classrooms, erected in a warehouse off-campus.

Naming rights for the building will cost a benefactor $100 million, she said.

"We want to build a great business school," Yale President Richard Levin said.

GRAPHIC: 1. MIT Sloan School of Business Management's newest building, E62, in Cambridge, Mass. Elite business schools are locked in an "arms race" of building bigger and more elaborate business campuses. 2. First-year management student Rami Husseini takes a finance qualifying exam in one of the conference rooms at the new building. PHOTOS BY KELVIN MA/BLOOMBERG NEWS

LOAD-DATE: August 26, 2010