Schirin Rangnick, Senior Photography

The Master of Advanced Management program at the Yale School of Management announced last week that it will open the program to students outside the Global Network of Advanced Management — a consortium of business schools across the globe created by the SOM in 2013. 

The MAM program is entering its ninth year at the SOM. It was created by former Dean Ted Snyder to expand the SOM’s global footprint, according to Maria Del Camino de Paz Espiago, associate dean of Global Network programs. The program is designed as an additional year of study for students who have completed their MBA at one of the other schools in the Global Network. The SOM also announced that it is now requiring applicants to have a GMAT or GRE score when applying to the program.  

“The Master of Advanced Management Program helps bring together students from all over the world and exposes them to a program where they learn about the intricate connections between business and society,” de Paz Espiago said. “Through our expansion of the program, we hope that we will be able to access an even wider swath of perspectives further enriching the program.” 

Students within the program are required to take one core Global Issues course and then can craft a course of study within finance and management that best suits their interests and needs, according to de Paz Espiago. 

According to Snyder, the program has evolved significantly over the last decade. He said the program added a required seminar, which serves to increase cohesion between students. These changes, Snyder said, have led many schools within the Global Network to recruit students who wish to study at Yale through this program.

“The change to invite a small number of non-[Global Network] schools is intended to strengthen our relationships with other schools,” Snyder wrote in an email to the News. “But the spaces for non-GNAM schools is limited. Yale SOM has decided to allocate the difference between the program capacity and the average number of students that we’ve matriculated from GNAM to the ‘non-GNAM’ schools.” 

The current program has up to 68 spots, according to de Paz Espiago; however, the program has only accepted 55 students on-average from the approximately 300 students that apply to the program. Administrators believe that this number of students works well, she said. By opening up the program to students from schools outside the Global Network, de Paz Espiago said that the program hopes to fill all 68 spots. 

School of Management Provost Edi Pinker explained that the current program is self-selecting since it is highly specialized and occupies a “unique niche” within the SOM and the larger management community. Pinker explained that the changes to the application process could be attributed to a regular review of the school’s programs and a desire by the new Dean of the SOM Kerwin Charles to expand the footprint of the SOM. 

“After Dean Charles took over in 2019, we reviewed many of the programs within the SOM to study how we can expand their impact,” Pinker said. “We hope that through this change we will be able to expand the number of schools and areas across the globe we can access.” 

While neither de Paz Espiago or Pinker pointed to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic affecting the number of students who had applied to the program, de Paz Espiago said that the program was entirely virtual last year because the overwhelming majority of students within the program were from outside of the United States. 

De Paz Espiago explained that the program’s admissions process occurs in three cycles. She said that the first two rounds will still only be open to students within the Global Network, but that the third round of applications will be open to students from any business school. 

“We were pleasantly surprised to see the support from the other schools within the GNAM,” de Paz Espiago said. “We were expecting some pushback, but all the schools were supportive, viewing this as a way to strengthen the program.” 

There are currently 31 schools in the Global Network for Advanced Management.