The lives of individuals are measured in hours, days, and years. The longer lives of institutions are counted in decades and quarter-centuries. For the Wharton class of 1981, those two timescales intersect. Twenty-five years ago, a cohort of students graduated amid the hoopla of the Wharton Centennial year. Now, those same alumni recognize their own milestones as Wharton celebrates the 125th Anniversary of its founding.
Over the past quarter-century, those Centennial alumni took the lessons from Wharton undergraduate and graduate classes into the real world—a world that was rapidly changing. The Soviet Union disintegrated while the European Union coalesced. The economies of China and India matured, and the Western workforce aged. An Internet bubble burst, and real estate markets boomed. Global stock markets spiked and dropped, then repeated the cycle a few more times for good measure.
Shaped by Wharton, the class of 1981 became leaders in the world—influencing events both global and local, building families as well as businesses. Counted among those alumni are Farouk El-Okdah, WG’81,GrW’83, chairman of the National Bank of Egypt; Akinari Horii, WG’81, Director General, International Department, Bank of Japan; Thomas F. Loeb, WG’81,—Chairman, Mellon Capital Management; Kenneth Moelis, W’81, WG’81; President & Joint Global Head of Investment Banking, UBS Investment Bank; Brian Roberts, W’81, CEO, Comcast Inc.; Philippe Soussand, WG’81—Founder, Soussand Associates; former CFO—Christian Dior and Louis Vuitton for North America; Mark Zandi, W’81, GR’83, Co-founder & Chief Economist, Moody’s Economy.com; David Karlgaard, WG’81, Vice Chairman, Nortel PEC.
This single year’s worth of graduates is impressive for its accomplishments, yet it represents just a small percentage of Wharton’s 81,000-plus alumni worldwide. To understand the interplay between Wharton and economic developments, between individual alumni and world events, Wharton Alumni Magazine drilled down even deeper to discuss the past 25 years with a few members of the class of 1981.
Old Europe Is Renewed and Transformed
Jacob Wallenberg, W’80, WG’81
Chairman, Investor, Stockholm
Jacob Wallenberg’s most vivid memory from the Wharton Centennial has a decided slapstick flair. He was one of the organizers of the student Centennial Ball, spending hours planning and marketing a black-tie bash to commemorate the School’s anniversary. “The event was crowned with a terrific birthday cake that was to be presented to the Dean on the stage of the ballroom,” he recounts. “But the cake was sitting on a huge table with wheels. When they moved the cart, the cake slid off the table and smashed on the floor.”
The cake didn’t quite make it, but the same can’t be said of Wallenberg. He came to Wharton as an undergraduate after serving as an officer in the Swedish armed forces and as an intern at Morgan Stanley, and he left five years later with both bachelor and MBA degrees. As a slightly older student, he found the submatriculation process to be a natural choice. “It was me and the rocket scientists! I was fortunate to be admitted,” he says. “But suddenly as an MBA student, here I was studying and working together with people my own age, with a lot more experience. I enjoyed it immensely. It was a great starting point to working life.”
After graduation, Wallenberg continued what he calls his “American experience” by working at JP Morgan on Wall Street for two years. He then moved to London to work at the merchant bank Hambros, then eastward again, working in Asia for SEB before returning home to Sweden. Today he is chairman of Investor, a holding company with long-term stakes in Ericsson, AstraZeneca, ABB, Electrolux, Scania, and SEB. Throughout his business travels, Wallenberg had an up-close look at some major events.
“For a European, to see the Iron Curtain disappearing in 1989 was extraordinary,” he says. “It created immense opportunity, but above all, freedom—freedom for millions and millions of people. This had a profound effect on the psychology of Europe.”
At the same time, he says, the European Union became stronger and stronger, and commercial markets opened up in Eastern Europe. “This has formed me considerably, coming from a country with borders lined with strong fences 20 years ago, to living in a country that’s a member of the European Union,” he says. “People and goods travel freely, they cross borders; it’s a dramatic difference. And anyone who compares the lines of every airport in Europe from before and after knows what a difference it makes!”
Aside from the daily conveniences offered via the European Union, Wallenberg and Investor became directly involved in the European Commission’s 14-year-long efforts to create a single European market in financial services. He has also been affected by the rapid economic emergence of China, where he spent part of his early career. “I went to China the first time in 1984. There was one hotel for Westerners. Today, 20 years later roughly, it is just as developed as any American city when it comes to commercial services,” he says. “It’s been an enormous change in very short time period. The changes have been beyond comprehension, which I think everyone would agree with.”
When asked the most important lesson he learned since Wharton, he answers without hesitation, “How to lead people. I was an officer before Wharton, and at Wharton we studied management in class and on teams. So in fact, I’ve been practicing a long time—more than 30 years—but learning to lead is something you never finish.”
Marketing Takes a Central Role
Ann R. Marks, W’80, WG’81
Chief Marketing Officer, Dow Jones, New York
The single thing that changed my life was the Blackberry,” says Ann Marks. “I can keep everything going at work while sitting in the singing circle at nursery school. My life is completely integrated—I work around the clock as both a CMO and a mom.”
She’s able to say that because Wharton to her is not a “single thing.” It’s the destiny she resisted by first attending Bryn Mawr before transferring to Wharton as a sophomore. It’s the intellectual environment she found so stimulating that she stayed an extra year as a submatriculant, leaving Wharton in 1981 with two degrees. It’s the business grounding that served her well enough as a newly minted MBA that she was able to outcompete peers who had five and six years more experience under their belts. And it’s the campus home that feels both familiar and fresh when she visits 25 years after graduation.
“My father and brother both attended Wharton, so it was sort of in my DNA,” she says. Although her interest in liberal arts first led her to Bryn Mawr, frequent visits to Penn to visit her older brother Bruce Marks (W’79), convinced her that Wharton was where she belonged.
As a transfer, she jumped in with both feet. “I dual majored in accounting and management as an undergrad, and in finance, marketing, and entrepreneurship in grad school. I think I was able to eke more out of Wharton than most,” she jokes. At the time, Marks thought her future would be in entrepreneurship, and that’s where she excelled. She remembers her best academic moment as an entrepreneurship class that charged her with generating $100,000 in capital to start a business. She earned an A-plus and became a teaching assistant in entrepreneurial management.
Outside of the classroom, she and her brother put together a real-life business—”The Rip-Off Book,” a coupon package featuring deals from local businesses that they eventually operated on four campuses—Penn, Temple, Pittsburgh (their hometown), and Michigan (the school their sister attended).
Upon graduation, however, Marks found another application for her creativity and business drive as a marketing associate with General Foods in White Plains, NY. During her 14 years there, she found the world of corporate marketing immensely rewarding and surprisingly entrepreneurial.
“It used to take us a week just to set up a meeting. When I started working, decisions and progress occurred at a snail’s pace compared to today,” she says. “The Internet and e-mail has changed that.”
In the time since she began at General Foods, the role of marketing had changed significantly. Marketers have to move quickly to identify and adapt to new trends and technologies. They have to fulfill the growing demands that marketing generates measurable results. As a result, marketing strategy is more commonly recognized as a core business function that creates real shareholder value.
“Wharton taught me how to think analytically and this is required in all business fields, not just consulting and investment banking,” she says. “It has served me well in my marketing career.”
The reward—and challenge—for Marks culminated in a seat at the table as a C-level officer. After a tour of duty at American Express, in 1998 she became Chief Marketing Officer for Dow Jones.
“Maybe if I didn’t have a family I would be on a CEO track, but a CMO track is okay with me,” she reflects. “I have a very demanding job with more than a hundred people reporting to me. And I’m the mom of three children under 10, which I think is the most demanding job of all.”
Entertainment Becomes Digital
Paul Vidich, WG’81
Adviser for Video Strategy, AOL, New York and Dulles, VA
Before Paul Vidich completed a Wharton MBA in 1981, he was a journalist. Twenty-five years later, he still works in the media, but now he’s the man being interviewed, not the other way around. And the media itself is generations beyond the trade magazines where he toiled pre-Wharton.
As a special adviser to AOL for video strategy, Vidich is immersed in the current debate over digital content distribution and copy-protection. In fact, he’s one of the people that has shaped the debate—his work as EVP of strategy, business development, and technology for Warner Music Group helped make iTunes Music Store possible, proving that digital music could be profitable.
“I never wanted to be in a rock band, never had great aspiration to be in the music business,” he confesses. “But I did have aspiration to be in the business side of the media.”
When he graduated Wharton, he joined CBS Cable. It was a time of transformation, with cities being built up for cable, narrow-casting channels proliferating, and industry- defining successes being built by independent, entrepreneurial companies (such as CNN and ESPN) and larger media companies (such as MTV and Nickelodean).
By 1987, the industry was maturing and consolidating. Vidich moved to Warner Communications in a role of corporate development and acquisitions. In that capacity, he helped complete the merger between Time Inc. and Warner Communications. Time Warner almost doubled in size, rolling music operations into Warner Music Group, where Vidich became the executive in charge of strategy, business development, and technology.
At Warner Music, he considered several opportunities to grow the music business, and digital distribution over the Internet would be the means.
In 1998 he led Warner Music to a breakthrough, testing the ability to deliver music electronically over broadband in Time Warner Cable’s San Diego service. “We showed that it could be done and the consumers liked it,” he says.
But before this success could be leveraged broadly, along came Napster. In 1999, the little file-sharing application roiled the landscape of digital distribution. Napster became one of the fastest-growing Internet services ever—adopted by some 50 million people. Threatened music publishers and record companies cried foul over widespread copyright violations, and rancorous hearings and civil suits forced a legal shut-down. The one-time category killer Napster itself was out of commission, with nothing to replace it.
Despite industry outcry, the phenomenon proved that consumers were hungry for digital distribution. “We knew this new way of consuming music was going to transform the business,” Vidich explains. “What was lacking at that time was a legitimate service that provided music in a way that was as convenient as Napster, but allowed the people who owned the underlying rights to make money.”
Vidich clearly saw an opportunity for Warner to sell music within a legitimate service. However, music companies had never been technology providers, and their experiments in subscription services like Rhapsody and MusicNet met with indifference.
Then in 2001, Steve Jobs and Apple unveiled the iPod—a portable music player with a 5 GB hard drive that “put 1,000 songs in your pocket.” But where would the songs come from? Someone had to feed iPods a regular diet of new music—something Apple couldn’t provide alone.
That’s where Vidich and Warner Music fit in.
“We saw in Jobs and Apple all the elements that were needed in order to provide the consumer platform for distributing music digitally,” says Vidich. “We sat down with Steve and agreed that consumers needed to be able to use their purchased downloads in convenient ways. It may sound intuitive now, but it was counter intuitive at a time when peer-to-peer piracy was rampant.
“We did our deal with Jobs,” says Vidich. “We introduced him to the CEOs of Universal Music, BMG, Sony, and EMI, and he replicated the deal that we had done.”
The result was iTunes Music Store—a huge success right out of the gate, selling music from all four major labels (Sony and BMG subsequently merged) and (later) independents. The store proved what Vidich had long believed—that online music sales were viable. By February 2006, the store had sold over 1 billion songs—more than 80% of worldwide online music sales.
Says Vidich, “I believe if it hadn’t been for the deal that Warner did with Apple, then the launch for iTunes wouldn’t have happened. The iPod would never really have taken off the way that it did.”
When Warner Music was sold in 2004, Vidich returned to Time Warner, joining AOL with a specific focus on creating video products and services that would have the same impact as the iPod and iTunes had on music.
As a student, he didn’t perceive the media business as a popular destination for his classmates, but when opportunities in the industry called, and he answered.
“We didn’t anticipate the technologies,” he says. “Business school provided me with an analytical framework for looking at the world from a business perspective.”
Continual Reinvention and Learning
Beth Kaplan, W’80, WG’81
Co-founder and Managing Partner, Axcel Partners, LLC, Baltimore
Today when I look back, I’ve taken more risk with my career than I ever thought I would take,” says Beth Kaplan.
It has paid off personally and professionally. She’s achieved success in several careers, including retail, a sector she never considered as a student, and venture capital for the internet, a business-transforming phenomenon that barely existed in 1981. Now she’s a co- founder and principal of Axcel Partners, LLC, a Baltimore- based venture capital firm. Kaplan’s continual career reinvention might have seemed eccentric to her 22-year-old self, but her adaptation illustrates the flexibility and constant learning rewarded—and required—in today’s job market.
In hindsight, her student years show signs of the varied career she’d carve out. Her friend and classmate Ann Marks recalls, “Beth was always in everything.” Chairman of the Student Activities Council, editor of the Wharton Account, choreographer for the Wharton Follies, radio host for Focus on Youth, manager of Hill House, Beth’s interests were clearly too broad to be fulfilled with a single career—or a single degree. She graduated with both BS Econ and MBA degrees. She says modestly, “I did a range of things at Wharton, but five years is a long tenure.”
Her post-Wharton journey began at Procter & Gamble. “The context of the work was everything that I loved,” she says. “It was strategic, it was marketing driven, and it was about leadership and teamwork. Sometimes people say, “I never really used what I learned in business school,’ but I used what I learned in business school practically every day.”
She stayed for 17 years, eventually moving to Baltimore to become president of Noxell, P&G’s domestic cosmetics division. She planned to stay for life, but left to join the “other side” of the consumer equation as senior executive vice president of marketing for Rite Aid. “A lot of people thought I lost gray matter upstairs,” she says of her decision. While now retail is a hot area centered at Wharton’s Jay H. Baker Retail Initiative, at the time her career move seemed unorthodox for a successful consumer products executive.
“It’s not for the faint of heart,” she says of the change. “You grow up in one system, and then you move to a different system.” She saw an opportunity to make an impact on Rite Aid, a company with lean management and an aggressive growth strategy. Some fundamentals of the business were the same, but she had to learn how to manage purchasing, operations, and human resources in a retail environment. She worked long hours six days a week, and she loved it. Kaplan brought insight from P&G and rebuilt the store design around its main customer—women. She built the beauty business through innovative initiatives, including the launch of Rite Aid’s wildly successful cosmetic money-back guarantee. She augmented the vitamin and nutrition lines, eventually partnering with GNC, and increased floor space for profitable greeting cards.
In 1999, the Internet was booming. Rite Aid invested in Drugstore.com, and Kaplan herself moved into the new frontier with the Internet Capital Group of Wayne, PA. Recruited by a Wharton contact, she became a managing Director of Operations. Once again, she was learning a brand-new business. “It was like drinking from a fire hose,” she says, “a totally different kind of work, sitting on boards, helping to shape business models, and coaching young management teams.”
Internet Capital Group at that time had raised billions through an IPO, but the landscape was about to change when the Internet stock bubble burst. Kaplan toughed it out to enter venture capital on her own terms with her own strategy. In 2001 she and her husband co-founded Axcel Partners, LLC. She’s continued with that venture ever since, although the ever-energetic Kaplan couldn’t resist another turn in retail, serving as executive vice president and general merchandise manager for Bath and Body Works flagship stores, a Limited Brands beauty superstore, from 2002 to 2005. “It really was an interesting combination of all my experiences,” she says. “I was in charge of brand management, retail and even venture capital, so it was very much like a start-up.” The downside to her dual role was that she was commuting from her home in Baltimore, living during the week in a hotel near Limited Brands’ Ohio headquarters. She logged long days without distractions, but she admits “after a few years it got a little old.”
Now she concentrates on Axcel Partners, sitting on the boards for some of her promising investments like MinuteClinic, a chain of no-appointment medical offices hosted inside drugstores. Even more crucially, she has time for her personal life. Her philanthropic and volunteer activity includes a long commitment to Wharton that has deepened in recent years as she was chairman of the Wharton Undergraduate Board, and was recently appointed to the Wharton Board of Overseers.
“My father passed away about a year ago, and it was really important for me to endow a scholarship in his memory,” she says. “Meeting the first scholarship winner was very touching—my dad’s name was carried on through the scholarship, and I’m able to provide an opportunity to another young woman.” Even more importantly, her new schedule allows her more time for her two young sons. “I didn’t want to wake up one day, and say, ¡®Oh no, they grew up and I wasn’t even there!’” says Kaplan. “Everything that I learned at Wharton has allowed me to get where I am in my life. And that means that now, for the first time I have a level of flexibility to enjoy it.”
Cementing the Asian Economy
Leslie Koo, WG’81
CEO and Chairman, Taiwan Cement Corp., Taipei
Leslie Koo has helped build many bridges during the past 25 years. Some of them, like the graceful Green Lake Suspension Bridge near Taipei, are made of concrete from the Taiwan Cement Corp., the company he runs. Others are figurative—the bridges between businesses, between East and West, between mainland China and Taiwan. To build those, Koo has needed something even stronger than cement—negotiating skills, business strategy, financial smarts, and cross- cultural fluency. And he gives Wharton some of the credit.
“The Wharton experience was very important to me,” Koo says. “It was not only a learning experience, but also a confidence building exercise, especially for Asian business people like myself. Going through Wharton, it’s like being with the best of the best in the world. After the successful completion of the curriculum, you get the sense that you can compete with anyone, do business with anyone—and anywhere—in the world.”
When he graduated with his MBA, he returned home to join the Taiwan Cement Corp., part of the Koo Group controlled by his father, C.F. Koo (a longtime friend of the Wharton School who passed away in 2005). Beginning as a specialist in the Electronic Data Processing Center, Leslie Koo made an immediate impact by designing and implementing a distributed-processing decision-support system—the first of its kind in Taiwan. By 1991, he was president and COO, and in 2003 he became CEO and chairman.
From the beginning, he had a great sense of responsibility to the company, and to his country as well. “I was quite optimistic,” says Koo, of his return to Taipei. “I had a very strong sense of commitment and mission. My family has been associated with the economic development of Taiwan for a long time. To us, it’s more of a carryon or legacy issue, following the footsteps of my father and other family members who have contributed so significantly to the Taiwanese economic development.”
Taiwan’s rapid economic development in the 1960s was often referred to as the Taiwan Miracle, but Koo sees nothing miraculous about it. “I think it has to do with the Taiwanese people,” he says. “The Taiwanese business community is very much aware of our country’s situation in terms of lack of natural resources, and being squeezed especially from mainland China. The only way to really have a foothold in the international scene is to be successful economically. What we had achieved was a part of the Taiwanese commitment to hard work and business.”
Koo demonstrates that commitment through his many roles in Koo Group companies and other business and community ventures. He is the chairman of Ho-Ping Power Co., Ta-Ho Environment & Technical Services Co., Ltd., China Synthetic Rubber Corp., Continental Carbon Co., and Synpac Inc., as well as director of Taiwan Stock Exchange Corp., Taiwan Polypropylene Co., Ltd., and Far Eastone Telecommunications Co., Ltd. He serves as a business ambassador through leadership in the Taiwan Britain Business Council, Chinese National Association of Industry and Commerce, ROC-USA Business Council, Sino-British Culture and Economy Association, and the Taiwan Cement Manufacturers’ Association.
During his time leading Taiwan Cement Corp., Koo has weathered storms during regional economic changes and political challenges for his country, which is not officially recognized by any country with diplomatic ties to the People’s Republic of China. While Koo says Taiwan and Koo Group were not heavily impacted by the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s, the handover of Hong Kong from the British to China in 1997 was a critical turning point.
“We prepared for the worst,” says Koo. “We had a subsidiary in Hong Kong that was privately held until 1997 when we IPOed the company. Now this publicly listed company is a financing source, and also a vehicle to tap into the Hong Kong capital market for our Chinese expansions. On one hand, we are able to get cheap capital from Hong Kong, and on the other hand, we shield the Taiwanese operation from the Chinese political risk.”
Now Koo’s company is once again facing significant opportunities, investing heavily in the People’s Republic of China. Between 2004 and 2008, Koo expects to invest more than $700 million U.S. dollars in mainland China, operating five manufacturing sites with more than 8.1 million tons of annual capacity in the Fujian, Guangdong, and Guangxi provinces.
“That’s twice the size of what were able to do in a 50-year time span in Taiwan,” he says. “We’re literally building up 100 years of capacity in a five-year time.” The goal is to become the third-largest supplier in mainland China.
There are additional benefits and risks for his company, which is treated as a preferred investor because China considers Taiwan to be Chinese territory.
“At this moment, China is changing from the manufacturer of the world to the market of the world,” says Koo. “For Taiwan, we are in a very unique position. On the one hand, we’re Chinese, and on the other hand, we’ve been associated with the international business community for so long. There’s an opportunity for ambitious Taiwanese business people to transform their companies from domestic Taiwanese companies, to become regional strong players, and even become global players.”
That ambition is evident in Taipei 101, located in the Taipei Financial Centre. It is the first and only building in the world to break the half-kilometer mark in height—the tower has been the world’s tallest building since 2003. It’s a powerful symbol of the country’s economic development, and it’s built of concrete from Taiwan Cement Corp.
World Interconnections Grow
Michael Dee, W’81
Managing Director and Regional Head, Morgan Stanley, Houston
In 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, Michael Dee was there with a sledgehammer in hand. He had been far away on a business trip in St. Louis when his now-wife Shelly called him and told him that the wall dividing East and West was crumbling. The two got on a plane and together participated in the dismantling of a Cold War landmark. The first day the Brandenburg Gate permanently opened between East and West, Michael and Shelly passed through.
That may have been the last time that Dee went deliberately looking for history, but it wasn’t the last time he was involved. But when Dee graduated in 1981, he did not anticipate involvement on a world stage. At that time, he had left the United States only once for a trip to Toronto. Since then, he has spent 15 of the last 25 years abroad, doing business in more than 30 countries.
Even as a student Dee made an impact, albeit on a more personal scale. A former top amateur pairs skater, he implemented his athletic connections and organization acumen by pulling together a Showcase of Champions to benefit the Elwyn Institute, a school that educates children with Down Syndrome. Drafting 110 classmates from Stouffer College House, as well as Olympic luminaries including Peggy Fleming and Scott Hamilton, Dee’s ice show raised close to $100,000. Seated among the audience members were 4,000 children with disabilities who saw the show for free.
For his efforts, Dee was honored with the Sol Feinstone Undergraduate Award for instituting orderly and constructive social and educational change, but the biggest reward came through finding a way to assist his sister, who has Down Syndrome. Says Dee, “The day of the show was one of the most emotional days of my life.” He still counts the showcase as one of his most memorable achievements, holding up among the string of successes during his 25-year career with Morgan Stanley.
He vividly recalls his first day on the job as an analyst in mergers and acquisitions. “I was a numbers geek who assembled the data and crunched the ¡®nums’ so our senior bankers could advise the titans of industry on billion dollar mergers (back then a billion was really serious money).” he recounts. “I took this job because it was only for two years and was widely acknowledged as the hardest job on Wall Street, at the best firm, in the toughest city.”
He stuck with Morgan Stanley, but he didn’t stay in New York. He was given the opportunity to work in London, and from there, he and his wife (“the adventure queen,” as he calls her) were hooked, following London with lengthy stints in Hong Kong and Singapore. Says Dee, “I started going to China in 1994, when China really started to get hot economically. I worked on a number of Chinese deals, and I was there right at the beginning of the Asia crisis. It was a pretty amazing time to be there. I think our firm played a very instrumental role in trying to help countries raise money and stabilize themselves. We were the only firm in Asia that increased head count in 1998. Everybody else was cutting back. That was a bold, critical decision in building our Asian franchise. When I look back, I see that period of time as an inflection point internationally, and it’s been really fun to be involved.”
From 2000 to 2004 Dee was Managing Director and CEO of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Asia in Singapore, where he took another opportunity to help pay forward the value of his Wharton education. Committed to expanding access to business education internationally, Wharton in 1998 joined with Singapore Institute of Management to help establish Singapore Management University, Singapore’s third university and only undergraduate business school. Through his Wharton connections, Dee became a trustee of the nascent university, which just graduated its first full class this year.
Two years ago Dee and his family relocated to Texas, where he became managing director and the regional head of Morgan Stanley’s Houston office, with primary responsibility for the Investment Banking Division. In September 2005, he found his new hometown wrapped up in the human tragedy of Hurricane Katrina when the city hosted hundreds of thousands of evacuees. As a member of the board of the Greater Houston Partnership, he went to the Astrodome, the stadium that provided temporary shelter and services for thousands.
While the faith-based community was serving meals, the Texas Medical Center was providing health care, and the United Way was fundraising for cash, there was no mechanism in place to accept donated goods. Dee volunteered to take on that task.
He helped set up an Internet site on the Greater Houston Partnership server and began a telephone line staffed by secretaries and executives alike, each volunteering for an hour at a time.
Says Dee, “We just had all these calls coming in; a taxi company in Las Vegas said they would hire 100 people. We had a guy in Tennessee with an 18-wheeler filled with refrigerated food. So we set up this system whereby people, literally from all across the country, were able to donate goods and services, and we would match them up with the people that needed those services.” The project continued for a month until the website was developed to the point that donors and recipients could match themselves up. “We kind of put ourselves out of business, so to speak. It was incredibly successful.”
Dee considers himself fortunate to be able to help on that level when called, and especially fortunate for the day-to-day support of his family and the challenges of rewarding employment. He says, “25 years later I’m proud to say I am still at Morgan Stanley and as excited about my work as the day I arrived. Wharton let me do this.”
One Year in the Life of the Wharton School
Centennial: 1980-1981
Philadelphia Inquirer wrote, “The quality of the faculty and student body seems stronger than ever.”
Professor Lawrence Klein won the Nobel Prize in economics.
The expansion of Dietrich Hall began with a $15 million budget; the original building cost $3,600,000 in 1952.
Two $1 million gifts endowed the Reginald H. Jones Professor of Corporate Management and the Joseph Kolodny Professor of Social Responsibility.
Two new research units were founded: The Center for International Management Studies and the Reginald H. Jones Center for Management Policy, Strategy, and Organization.
Wharton began international co-ventures with Shanghai Jiao-Tan University of China and Nomura Research Institute of Japan.
There were 1,928 undergraduates, 1,300 MBA and MS students, 81 Executive MBA students, 239 doctoral students, and 1,487 evening students.
There were 10,000 participants in Executive Education at 200 different seminars.
Wharton’s endowment was $16 million, compared to Harvard’s $80 million.
The School had $12 million in corporate and foundation grants for research projects and contracts—the most for any business school.
School won the Western Electric Fund Award for “innovation in undergraduate business education for administration.”
The average Wharton freshman scored 1350 on the SAT—the highest for any undergraduate school in the nation.
For graduating MBAs, the average GMAT was 620 and GPA was 3.38. There were 3,300 applications for 620 MBA spots.
20% of the MBA class was from outside the U.S., with the most students from Japan, Mexico, India, France, and the Philippines. Wharton students hailed from 83 countries.
27% of the MBA class was female—a huge increase from only 4% in 1972.
2,100 recruiters representing 600 companies visited campus for MBA—the most who visited any graduate business school that year.
The job market was strong, with the average MBA granted 27 job interviews and receiving 3.8 job offers.
The average salary of a Wharton MBA was $30,200. Salaries were highest in consulting ($40,000) with investment banking second ($36,000).
The average salary of a Wharton undergraduate was $17,500, with each receiving three job offers.
The U.S. Postal Service honored Wharton’s founding by issuing a stamp with Joseph Wharton’s portrait and the words “Professional Management.”
SOURCES: WHARTON PUBLICATIONS, NEWS RELEASES, AND PRESS CLIPPINGS IN THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA ARCHIVES
