Taking on the B-School Boys Club

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Attracting Talented Candidates

That's not to say that students who attend these schools study business in an all-female bubble. Students at Meredith are required to do internships off campus, many of the school's clubs plan events with neighboring coeducational schools, and students will sometimes sign up for classes at other institutions, faculty say. Brittany Morrison, 20, a junior at Meredith College, says she has done three internships, including one currently at an engineering company in Raleigh. At school, she's been able to hone her leadership skills, serving as a leader in students clubs and working on a research paper on female entrepreneurs in North Carolina. She feels that her experience at a woman's business school, coupled with the school's recent accreditation, will give her an advantage when she enters the job market. "Getting accreditation for the school was really important for the school, but even more important for the students," Morrison says. "It's a really tough economy, and having the accreditation will make us stand out to employers because sometimes people don't hear about smaller schools like us."

That opinion is shared by Elissa Ellis-Sangster, executive director of the Forté Foundation, a consortium of schools working to increase the number of women pursuing MBAs. Meredith and Simmons have made a smart strategic move in obtaining AACSB accreditation, because it will allow them to continue to attract talented women candidates who might otherwise consider only coeducational schools that already have accreditation, she says. "Business schools have generally upped the competition for attracting women, so that's another reason it's good for these schools to get accreditation so they can level the playing field in the choices these women have," Ellis-Sangster says. "It's also a very important step in terms of recruiter relations and what parents are looking for in terms of education, so I think having accreditation really steps up the game for them."

Taylor Porter, a first-year student in Simmon's MBA program and a former English teacher, says she only considered attending a business school with AACSB accreditation. Last spring she was choosing among Boston College's Carroll School of Management (Carroll Full-Time MBA Profile), Boston University School of Management (Boston University Full-Time MBA Profile), and Simmons, which had just received accreditation. She was skeptical at first about attending an all-women MBA program but soon warmed up to Simmons after visits to the classroom and talking with students and faculty. She says she was impressed by the school's intellectual energy and cutting-edge research on gender issues. "The conversations that happen in the classroom here are very intellectual, and there's not a lot of the social jockeying that you tend to see in a coed classroom or in an environment where there is sort of a male ethos to things," says Porter, who wants to get a job in the beer and wine industry. "I'm learning to take myself seriously as a business person. I am seen here as an intellectual, not just an intellectual woman."

Damast is a reporter for BusinessWeek.com.

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