The Smeal Executive MBA Team Blog

Among top Executive MBA programs nationwide, more than 60% of students cover some or all of the program costs on their own. Lack of or limited corporate financial support should not be a barrier to your enrollment in an Executive MBA program. Several student loan products are available to help cover the costs of the program.

All candidates are eligible for the federal Stafford Loan program which provides up to $20,500 in low-interest federal student loans per academic year. In addition, federal graduate PLUS loans can cover all remaining costs of the program. Low interest rates and flexible repayment timelines make these products an attractive option for those considering an Executive MBA. For more information on student loan options, please visit the Penn State student aid Web site. To learn more about financial aid options, please contact the Executive MBA Program office at 1-866-999-EMBA.

Scholarships are regularly offered to students who work for the non-profit sector.  To learn more about scholarships that Smeal offers to executive MBA students, please contact us directly at 866-999-3622 or visit our website www.smeal.psu.edu/execmba.

While the stock market is generally believed to be merely a barometer of economic health, new research co-authored by one of our EMBA professors here Penn State’s Smeal College of Business finds that the pessimism in our stock markets may actually be the cause of our struggling economy, rather than just an indicator of it.

In the current financial crisis, the rapidly spreading negative beliefs about the value of mortgage‐backed securities may have contributed more to the economic meltdown than the actual properties of those securities. That is, negative perceptions about the economy may weigh more heavily on economic performance than the actual health of production and investment activity that drives the economy.

“Our research shows that markets can exacerbate the negative,” says Anthony Kwasnica, associate professor of business economics at Smeal, who conducted the research along with Shimon Kogan of the University of Texas and Roberto Weber of Carnegie Mellon University. “Even when fundamental economic properties remain unchanged, we find that financial markets can lead investors to highly pessimistic beliefs that become self-fulfilling and can cause the economy to underperform.”

Kwasnica says that short selling and other techniques that reward negative performance communicate pessimism about the economy that can infiltrate the markets and may actually cause economic performance to dip into the negative.

Kwasnica just completed teaching an EMBA favorite this past week, bringing an incredible amount of current events into our dynamic classroom environment.

Cardiff University in Great Britain is holding a conference next month to mark the 30th anniversary of a seminal book in the management discipline co-authored by Charles Snow, Mellon Foundation Faculty Fellow at Penn State’s Smeal College of Business.

“Organizational Strategy, Structure, and Process: A Reflection on the Research Perspective of Miles and Snow” will be held Dec. 3-5 in honor of Snow and Raymond Miles, professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, co-authors of one of the most influential books in the strategic management literature, Organizational Strategy, Structure, and Process.

The conference, which is sponsored by Cardiff University and the Advanced Institute for Management Research, will feature presentations from researchers in various fields who have used the Miles-Snow strategy typology in their research. Approximately 20 researchers from management, marketing, information technology, and public sector management will present at the conference, and Miles and Snow will deliver the opening address. The conference papers will be published in a book.

Originally published in 1978 and reissued by Stanford University Press for its 25th anniversary in 2003, Organizational Strategy, Structure, and Process bridges the fields of strategic management and organizational behavior. The book has been cited in more than 1,100 scholarly works, has been translated into Japanese, German, and Chinese, and is used widely in classrooms around the world.

Smeal Executive MBA students learn from the 7th best faculty in the US, 17th best in the world.