Clear Admit: “What’s the Secret Behind Record-Breaking Career Placements at SMU Cox?” 01/13/2023
Jason Rife, Senior Assistant Dean of the Cox Career Management Center and Graduate Admissions, discusses the symbiotic relationship between Cox admissions and career placement that benefits student job quests and results in strong post- graduation employment placements. “In 2020, we started bringing together career and admissions,” he told the Clear Admit podcast. “The CMC participates in the admissions interview process. We have candidate-by-candidate discussions with both teams in the same room. Now the admissions team is much clearer on what the career placement team is looking for in terms of a successful student. And career has a better perspective on what admissions is looking for in terms of building out a class.”
Forbes: “University of Texas Has Blocked TikTok—Does It Address Security Threats or Inhibit the Educational Experience?” 01/19/2023
David Jacobson, Clinical Professor in Strategy, Entrepreneurship and Business Economics, believes efforts to reduce the cybersecurity risk posed by the Chinese-owned mobile app TikTok are warranted. After Texas Governor Greg Abbott banned TikTok on all public university-owned devices, the University of Texas at Austin went a step further, blocking TikTok access on UT wi-fi and all UT networks. Jacobson says, “TikTok compromises the security of users and makes them vulnerable to a variety of malicious behavior from [the Chinese government].”
Spectrum: NEWS 1-TV: “Energy Summit in Dallas” 02/15/2023
Bruce Bullock, Director of the Maguire Energy Institute, helped oversee the largest gathering of energy thought leaders in North Texas history—nearly 300 from across the nation—at the Bush Presidential Center for the SMU Cox Maguire Energy Institute’s “Energy Outlook ’23: Stewarding a Sensible Energy Future” symposium. The two-day event was designed to foster collaboration and understanding that prompts action among energy executives across all industry sectors. The Texas grid was among many hot topics that garnered media coverage. “We need more energy generation that’s reliable,” Bullock said at the symposium. “We have international trade relationships. We have commerce relationships with virtually every country in the world. We don’t have an electricity relationship with Louisiana. That just doesn’t make sense.” Read more about the symposium here.
Fortune: “Here Come the Activists: Corporate America Girds for a Challenging 2023 Proxy Season” 03/06/2023
Shane Goodwin, Associate Dean of Graduate Programs and Executive Education, explains that gauging a company’s vulnerability to activist investors is really up to CEOs and CFOs as public companies brace for a tumultuous proxy season. They anticipate increased shareholder activism, which could mean votes against directors. “If you’re thinking about all the governance-related issues for your board, how to run your business in a profitable way, and creating value, that’s your best inoculation to any activist or any bad conversation with your shareholders, in general,” says Goodwin.
C-SPAN: “Michael Davis on Federal Banking Regulations” 03/15/2023
Mike Davis, Senior Lecturer in Strategy and Business Economics, weighs in on C-SPAN on whether federal banking regulations are to blame for the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, putting much of the onus on bank management. “There were some really obvious mistakes made by the bank, and the fact that the regulators didn’t pick up on that—we’ve got to figure out why,” Davis says. “An awful lot of banking is risk management, and SVB did a terrible job of risk management. They didn’t manage the risk on the deposit side, and they certainly didn’t do a good job managing risky investments.” (Read Accounting Professors Hemang Desai and Gauri Bhat’s Silicon Valley Bank failure analysis here.)
Austin American-Statesman: “Opinion: The Herd Heads for Texas; Is Economic Freedom Why?” 03/29/2023
Robert Lawson, Jerome M. Fullinwider Chair in Economic Freedom and director of the Bridwell Institute for Economic Freedom, researched U-Haul’s one-way rental prices from 378 different American cities and found that rental prices for trips moving to Dallas were typically far more expensive than those leaving Dallas—as much as 89% higher. Lawson and his co-author published their findings in a paper in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology. In a follow-up opinion piece for the Austin American-Statesman, Lawson contends that “locations with more economic freedom like Texas really are attracting people away from less free locations like California and New York, and you really can see the evidence of that in truck rental prices.”
Poets & Quants: “Changes Are Coming to B-Schools’ MBA Class Profiles: How & Why” 04/12/2023
Marci Armstrong, Professor of Practice in Marketing, served as co-chair of the 14-member Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) 2022 Task Force, which completed a biennial revision of its Graduate Management Education Admissions Reporting Standards for business schools. The task force wants GMAC’s revised MBA reporting standards to more accurately reflect business school diversity. “Our student body grows and diversifies with people of varying undergraduate and generational backgrounds and racial and gender identities,” Armstrong told Poets & Quants. “I believe our efforts to revise the admissions reporting standards cannot be more timely and necessary to reflect the changes we have all witnessed in the past years.”
Fox-4, KDFW-TV: “Federal Reserve Expected to Raise Interest Rates Again” 05/03/2023
Dean Stansel, Research Associate Professor at the Bridwell Institute for Economic Freedom, recommends consumers remain calm in the face of another Federal Reserve interest rate hike and a potential U.S. government debt default. “Basically, people should just continue to live their lives and make good choices financially,” Stansel told Fox-4—“and try not to get caught up in the daily fluctuations of the Dow Jones and what have you.”