page_title: Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management
section_title: MBA program
hierarchical_section_title: Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management / MBA program
caption_attribution_description: English: Sage Hall exterior
context_page_description: The Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management is the graduate business school in the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell University, a private Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York. It was founded in 1946 and renamed in 1984 after Samuel Curtis Johnson, founder of S.C. Johnson & Son, following his family's $20 million endowment gift to the school in his honor—at the time, the largest gift to any business school in the world.
  The school is housed in Sage Hall and supports 58 full-time faculty members. There are about 600 Master of Business Administration students in the full-time two-year and Accelerated MBA programs and 375 Executive MBA students. The school counts over 15,200 alumni and publishes the academic journal Administrative Science Quarterly.
context_section_description: Johnson offers a two-year full-time MBA program, which consists of one semester of mandatory courses (core), one semester in immersion, and an optional second-year concentration. Unlike other MBA programs whose mandatory courses occupy the entire first year, Johnson utilizes an intense first-semester core model, allowing students to engage in an immersion (concentration) and specialize before interviewing for summer internships. Students who do not have a business background before matriculating at Johnson may attend a week-long MBA math boot camp to get up to speed, and orientation consists of a two-week leadership course that culminates in the Johnson Outdoor Experience (JOE), a two-day adventure-based activity in the Finger Lakes foothills. For the Class of 2018, the number of applications jumped from 1,704 to 1,960, a 13.1% increase over the previous year.  Overall, the program enrolled 284 students, up from 274 for the previous class.  Despite this increase, the program is harder to get into, with the acceptance rate dropping from 32.4% to 27.3%.  Entrance statistics for the Class of 2018 include an average score of 700 on the GMAT and a median of five years of work experience. The student body is international and diverse, with 38% of students holding citizenship outside the United States. Women comprise 31% of the Class of 2018.
  The core curriculum consists of one semester, divided into two halves. The first half focuses primarily on the internal aspects of the company and includes the courses Managing and Leading in Organizations 1, Microeconomics for Management, Financial Accounting, and Marketing Management. The first half then culminates in the Marketing Case Competition, sponsored by S.C. Johnson & Son. The second semester focuses on the external aspects and includes the courses Statistics for Management, Managerial Finance, and Strategy. This half culminates each year in the Integrative Case Competition, sponsored by Citi.
  The elective curriculum can be chosen from over 80 courses within Johnson and over 4,000 offered across the Cornell campus. Within Johnson, the diverse selection includes courses such as Applied Portfolio Management, Behavioral Finance, Estate Planning, Power and Politics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Strategy & Tactics of Pricing, Entrepreneurship & Private Equity, Six-Sigma Quality & Process Implementation, and International Mergers and Acquisitions. Johnson students are allowed to matriculate in graduate-level courses in any Cornell college, including Cornell Law School, Cornell School of Hotel Administration, NYS School of Industrial & Labor Relations, and Cornell College of Engineering. Elective curriculum students can also complete a field study or independent student research project instead of a class. Field studies allow students to work together in a team closely with faculty members to launch a product, develop new businesses, or research a real-world issue. Independent student research projects provide an opportunity for a student to work with a faculty member to develop deep insights on a particular topic of interest. These options allow students to create a second-year curriculum that is aligned with their personal and professional interests.
  MBA students at Johnson are graded on a curve, with fixed grade point averages set at 3.3 for core courses and 3.5 for electives. In most courses, the grade consists of roughly 10% class participation, 10 percent individual case assignments, 40 percent exams, and 40 percent team presentations or papers. To graduate, students must have grade point averages of at least 2.7 overall and 2.5 in core courses. If a student drops below or near these thresholds, he or she receives an academic warning. The student is offered help in the form of academic counseling and tutors to improve academic performance. For the Class of 2016, 94 percent of students had job offers at graduation, with compensation packages including a $121,000 annual salary and a $30,000 signing bonus, on average.
caption: Sage Hall has housed Johnson since 1998.
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