BW: Détente in the Admissions Office

Christie St-John, a senior associate director of recruiting and enrollment at Tuck, via Business Week about Tuck's rather an unusual approach in dealing with for-hire B-school admissions consultants:

Rather than keeping consultants at arm's length, for two years in a row Tuck has invited groups of them to campus to learn about the school and about MBA programs in general. "People who have worked with consultants know they serve a purpose," says Christie St-John, senior associate director of recruiting and enrollment at Tuck. "A lot of students feel more secure in knowing they've done the best they could possibly do on their applications."

Along with telling the consultants about the application process and what Tuck looks for in its students, St-John says Tuck spoke to ethical issues, informing the consultants that having essays written by anyone other than the student, or recommendations written by anyone other than the recommender, is strictly against Tuck's honor code.

Source: Business Week by Kerry Miller June 27, 2006

WSJ: Poor Debuts May Mark A Potential Softening

Professor Kent Womack via The Wall Street Journal about the trend of poor IPO debuts remaining underperformers for months to come, with only few of them managing to rise above their IPO prices.

A study published in the Journal of Finance in 1999 found new stocks that have a cold start -- they fail to close above their IPO price on their first day of trading -- decline on average an additional 12% over the next year.

"You may find that some proportion of these deals that go badly at first do in fact turn around. But, on average, the result is that you probably are looking at dead money for quite a while," says Kent Womack, a professor of finance at the Tuck School at Dartmouth College, who co-wrote the paper.

"I think when you see a stock that goes down that much initially, it says a large portion of the early investors were not committed to the deal," says Prof. Womack, who worked as an investment banker and institutional salesman at Goldman Sachs in the 1980s. "And everybody who is still in it is going to say to themselves, 'I ought to think a lot harder about what I own here.' "

Source: Wall Street Journal by Lynn Cowan June 12, 2006