HEC in the press

This cycle, HEC Paris received roughly 2,700 applications. Ultimately, the school made offers to 18.9% of applicants, making it more selective than Chicago Booth, MIT Sloan, and the London Business School. Overall, the class features 295 students in the fall intake, who bring a 690 average GMAT to the school, writes Poets & Quants. 

As MBA programs worldwide continue to meet expectations despite the challenges posed by COVID-19, b-school faculty and staff believe the most recent crisis will foster growth within student communities and higher education as a whole. TopMBA caught up with Professor Anne-Valérie Corboz, newly-appointed Associate Dean of Executive Education at HEC Paris, to find out what the future holds for business schools.

HEC Paris heads the ranking for the second year running, thanks in part to a sharp rise in the global MBA table from 19th to ninth. There were also improved performances in the custom and open executive education tables. The school was ranked second for its Masters in Management, writes the Financial Times. 

Raneem Alnrshe won a place on the MBA programme at HEC Paris in March, just as France and much of the world went into lockdown. The 27-year old Syrian, who was working as an architect in Abu Dhabi at the time, is typical of the diverse, highly international students who apply to European business schools every year. But like many of her cosmopolitan intake in 2020, she had to overcome an obstacle course to start the new academic term on campus, writes the Financial Times. 

Eloïc Peyrache, interim dean at top-ranked HEC Paris, said one explanation for the school's performance was investment in its MBA, which is also now highly ranked, with a growing appeal to international students and faculty. “We’ve become global partners of companies which come to . . . recruit from us worldwide,” he added, in an interview with the Financial Times. 

Mr Agon certainly took to L’Oréal’s ways. Growing up in Paris, his father worked in pharmaceuticals while his mother was an architect. But the young Mr Agon wanted to travel, and that partly drove his decision to join L’Oréal as a salesman in 1978 straight out of HEC, one of France’s top business schools. The other factor was his affinity for marketing, writes the Financial Times. 

Camille Zivré and Lucille Collet, who have been friends since meeting five years ago as first-year students at HEC Paris, decided to run their own hackathon to give students and graduates a chance to modestly contribute to finding solutions to some of the many problems presented by the current crisis. Backed by HEC and fellow French higher-education institutes SciencesPo and Ecole Polytechnique, the event gathered 1,400 hackers and mentors, who developed 103 projects in 48 hours to support health professionals, governments, businesses and local communities, writes the Financial Times. 

Half of the companies "attacked" by major activist short-sellers are delisted, suspended from stock exchanges, or go bankrupt, says new research. Developed by Professors Luc Paugam and Hervé Stolowy from HEC Paris and Yves Gendron of the Université Laval, this new paper analyses the short, mid and long-term consequences of Activist Short-Sellers' “research reports” on the market value of the companies they target, writes Value Walk. 

There's little doubt that government-ordered business shutdowns to stop the spread of Covid-19 damaged the US economy, but the exact cost has not been clear.

Researchers from HEC Paris business school and Bocconi University in Milan have reached a sobering calculation: the closures beginning at the pandemic's onset in March through May saved 29,000 lives -- at a cost of $169 billion, or around $6 million per person, writes the AFP news agency. 

The pandemic appears to have accelerated many firms’ thinking on “Working from Anywhere”. Many high-tech companies have promoted the idea of allowing permanent remote working to employees post-pandemic. But decision-makers need to weigh up this enthusiasm with several potentially negative knock-on effects, writes HEC Paris Professor John Mawdsley, in an op-ed for Forbes.