NYU Stern MBA Part-time MBA Recruiting

CollegeJournal.com, Nov. 18, 2004: It is 2007. Nothing has changed.

But that’s exactly how some part-timers view the situation at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Last year, Stern created a five-person Career Center for Working Professionals that’s open in the evening and on Saturday to provide career counseling, a database of job postings, networking events, mock-interview programs and seminars on such topics as job loss and career switching. That’s the good news.

The bad news: Stern also decided to bar part-timers from seeking interviews with campus recruiters who are in the market primarily for full-time students. That change has riled some part-timers who feel cheated. They e-mailed me their grievances, contending that they had enrolled at Stern believing they could sign up for interviews with all on-campus recruiters. The critics insist on remaining anonymous because, as one put it, they don’t want recruiters to view them as troublemakers.

"When several classmates and I started to look for post-M.B.A. employment, we were literally stopped at the registration desk for on-campus interviews," a Stern part-timer wrote me. "One lady was so upset that she practically broke down in tears right there and then."

Gary Fraser, associate dean for M.B.A. student affairs at Stern, has heard the students’ complaints and understands their perspective. But he’s not backing down. He says the policy was changed because "hundreds of part-time students went through the interviewing process but with poor placement results." He stresses that the change certainly "was not meant to punish the part-time students."

NYU found, Mr. Fraser says, that part-timers weren’t a good match for many recruiters who were looking for younger, less experienced full-time students. "Some of Stern’s part-time students with seven years’ experience were applying for jobs requiring only four years," he says. "They were too qualified."

Other schools, however, see the differences diminishing. "As the age and experience levels of full-time students have risen to more closely match the profiles of part-timers, we don’t see that much difference between our students any longer," says Stacey Rudnick, M.B.A. career-services director at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas in Austin.

Because more part-time students were looking for jobs than in the past, the McCombs School hired a "dedicated adviser" for them as well as for the executive-M.B.A. program last January. The goal, Ms. Rudnick says, is "to make the part-time students as competitive as those in the full-time class" by offering them career guidance, self-assessment tools, pointers on resumes and cover letters, and easier access to on-campus recruiters. Before, they had to fend for themselves.

Still, opening on-campus recruiting to part-timers can be a delicate matter. That’s because some students receive tuition assistance from employers who understandably don’t expect them to be out looking for a better job on the company’s dime. "We used to e-mail job postings to part-time students, but one supervisor who was in the same class with his subordinate complained to us that he did not appreciate it," one career-services director confides. "So we quit promoting our services very heavily to part-timers."