Thunderbird, as the Garvin School of International Management in Glendale, Ariz., is called, has hired a Spaniard as its next president: Angel Cabrera (no relation to the Argentine golfer), who's the current dean of Madrid's Instituto de Empresas Graduate Business School.

The timing couldn't be better for Cabrera, 36. T-Bird has just cashed a check for $60 million from MBA alumnus Samuel Garvin, founder of Scotsdale (Ariz.)-based Continental Promotions Group, a marketing promotions company. The money will help Cabrera expand the school's executive-education curriculum and its part-time degree programs, and may prompt it to boost what had been a $100 million fund-raising target, Cabrera says.

That might put the school on a firmer footing. T-Bird ranked No. 25 in BusinessWeek's ranking of full-time MBA programs in 1996, but it has since failed to creep beyond the second tier of programs. And teaching international business, the school's hallmark, "is not as different anymore, especially with competition from European schools," the new dean says.

NEW PRIORITIES.  No doubt, one of his goals will be to improve the quality of the student body. In recent years, T-Bird has accepted nearly 75% of its applicants -- giving it a low bar for admissions compared to other schools. Cabrera says he'll probably further reduce the MBA class size, which dipped 10% to 933 in 2003. With "a smaller MBA class, we can work on our professional degrees and executive education," he says. Indeed, distance and executive MBA programs, where Cabrera expects to see significant growth, and nondegree executive education are among his priorities.

Early on, Cabrera says, he also wants to establish a regional center for the school in Asia, where Thunderbird already has a foothold, then integrate it more tightly with the school's campuses in France and Arizona.

Back in Madrid, Cabrera has been replaced by Santiago Iñiguez, director of external relations for Empresas. Iñigues wants to further internationalize the school, enhance its intellectual contribution to the academic community, and strengthen links with its 28,000 alumni and 1,300 students.

If he's successful with goal No. 3, Iñiguez may have more luck increasing Empresas' endowment. In the past three years, he says, the school has raised just $700,000. Notes Iñiguez: "Trying to become more in line with our competitors with regards to fund-raising is quite a challenge, because in Europe there isn't a culture of fund-raising."

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Why Northwestern Is Moving into Miami

In an effort to make its mark in Central and South America and the Caribbean, the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University has decided to start an executive MBA program in Miami.

The move comes as part of a wider international strategy. Already, the school offers joint executive MBA programs with York University's Schulich School of Business in Toronto, with the Leon Recanati Graduate School of Business Administration at Tel Aviv University in Israel, with WHU-Otto Beisheim Graduate School of Management in Germany, and with the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology.

Miami will be the first stand-alone campus for Kellogg outside its Evanston (Ill.) headquarters, although at first the school will probably rent space rather than buy. The new EMBA program will launch in 2005 and is expected to include a combination of long-weekend sessions and intensive weeks for about 50 students. The total cost isn't definite yet but will likely be about $114,000 per student.

"CREATE A PULL."  Market research and discussions with corporate partners encouraged Kellogg to expand to Miami, where the University of Miami's Business School already offers an executive MBA and Madrid's Instituto de Empresas offers an International Executive MBA degree that includes classes in Miami. Even so, "we're not moving into the market with the intention of competing directly with any of the existing schools," says Julie Cisek Jones, assistant dean and director of Kellogg's executive master's programs.

Vanderbilt University and the University of Florida collaborated to offer an executive MBA degree and a certificate in Latin American business in Miami in the late 1990s, but they discontinued the program when it couldn't attract enough students. Kellogg opted for Miami because it couldn't find a place in Latin America that would attract as diverse a group of students and at the same time avoid potential economic or political instability. "You're better off having a place where you need to create a pull rather than a push" for students, says Kellogg Dean Dipak Jain.

Kellogg is also trying to boost its brand in Asia and Europe by offering more nondegree programs for executives. The first two programs -- the school plans more -- will be with partner schools in Japan and Belgium.

The new programs abroad don't have specific revenue targets, Jain insists. Instead, he's looking to develop a more comprehensive global strategy. "We want to make sure that we get all the right inputs so that we undertake the right journey," he says. "If we want to make our education really global, then the curriculum that we teach should also be very global."

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Toward a Better World

The five-year-old Global Social Venture Competition, which began at the Haas School of Business of the University of California, Berkeley, and is now run in conjunction with Columbia Business School, London Business School, and the Goldman Sachs Foundation, wrapped up on Apr. 16 in London.

Judges named four winning teams from among 129 entries in the contest for business plans that would help make the world a better place. The victors, each of which included at least one MBA student, split $100,000 in cash and travel prizes.

The winner in the so-called medium-growth category was an Oakland venture called Schools for Community Empowerment, run by a six-person team of Stanford University and Berkeley students, and a management consultant to nonprofits with a Harvard MBA, among others. The venture aims to create a pilot public high school that incorporates a community center -- including a library, gym, and media center -- in an effort to revitalize the deindustrialized neighborhoods of East Oakland.

TOUGH EXAM.  With its $25,000 in winnings the team will set up administrative and fund-raising offices, says Eric DeMeulenaere, director of East Oakland Community Center & High School, the School for Community Empowerment's pilot project. The prize, he says, will enable the group to "continue to raise the $1.2 million startup funding that we need over the course of the next eight years."

Each of the four finalists presented and defended its business plan to a panel of seven judges, all experts in the interaction between social and environmental issues and business. The judges pressed the teams about the long-term potential of such ventures as well as their potential financial projections.

The other three winners were from the Rotterdam Schools of Management, which proposed creating a ventured called Eco-Friendly Environmental Products (EFAP) to make organic fertilizer; from Cornell University, which proposed an alternative-fuels project; and from Columbia Business School and the New School University, which proposed a real estate venture to redevelop urban neighborhoods.

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