economics-schools

This is a highly skewed version of MBA schools. Take it with a pound of salt and don't forget to read the logic and process they have used to make the survey useful for choosing your school.

This guidebook gave us the first business school ranking from the Wall Street Journal (WSJ). When the ranking released, the news has propagated shock among MBA candidates, holders, and applicants, because the WSJ ranking was different from traditional one. This book explains why WSJ ranking is so different from others, and how WSJ evaluate business school in their ranking. If you are considering business school application, this book is must see item as the guide has different perspective from Businessweek, U.S. News, and Financial Times. If you are recruiter, you also have to read this book before visiting campus to find prospective candidates.

However, I would strongly recommend applicants to read other guidebooks, in addition to the book, because there is no single, absolutely right ranking in the world. You should use this book as a source to choose your right business school.

My review is summed up in onw word...this book is ESSENTIAL!

A good reference book for anyone connected with a pension or profit sharing arrangement. It is not a guide to IRAs, Keogh plans, SEPs, rather it focuses on traditional defined contribution and defined benefit plans. While this book seems written for more for budding actuaries, those wishing to study design alternatives or asset management will find this book provides a good background. I find two flaws with the book.

First is the lack of examples. While the book discusses full funding limitations, it does not show you an example calculation. While it tells you how to calculate the minimum liability, it does not show you an example of how to present it in the financial statements. This book is not a text book, but it would be very helpful to see some real examples in practice rather than only discussions about the rationale behind the method.

Second, the single chapter on pension accounting is weak. Issues not mentioned include accounting for minimum liability, disclosures under FAS 132, understanding the relationship between funding and expense, curtailments and other plan amendments, the interrelationships between the conflicting limitations of ERISA/IRC/GAAP, the effect of pension assumptions on the financial statements and the impact of FAS 87 for an over funded plan on the financial statements of the sponsor. The perspective focuses more on the reasons the accounting standards exist, not the strategy or day-to-day issues of how the pension affects the financial statements of the sponsor. If accounting is what you need, buy a current intermediate accounting book.

Very coplete study, covering almost all imaginable subjects, from actuarial maths to investment management to organisation and HR aspects of pension provision. This is not a manual, though. Get a simpler and less in detail book to get a general view of the topic, and then use "Fundamentals..." as reference.

This book only has common sense ideas in it. I generally like the motley fools products. However, this book should be purchased only by those who do not have a basic understanding of how to save or prepare for college. We all know it is best to start saving early and talk to people at the schools about how to get a scholarship.

This book tackles a daunting financial topic and makes it easy to digest. Best of all, it's only 125 pages, so I didn't have to commit hours and hours of my time to learn what I needed to know. The book offered charts, tables and plain English, distilling topics such as the Education IRA (now called the Coverdell ESA), 529 Plans (there are two main kinds of these and you can sock away up to $100,000 or more in them -- who knew??) and even paying for elementary school and grad school. Oh -- and did I mention that it's funny, too?

This book had me both seriously annoyed and seriously confused within just a few pages. In the finest Orwellian tradition, the author redefines "democracy" to include some sort of socialist or quasi-socialist concept of economics that is taken for granted but never clearly defined. Thus, when he argues for "democratic" education, what he really argues for is an education system that follows his view of what a "democratic" society ought to look like - a view that he labels "democratic" without regard to whether it's what the majority wants.

The author correctly emphasizes the importance of cooperation toward shared goals to a democratic society. But he completely misses the fact that cooperating voluntarily in smaller groups is often better than fighting each other in the political arena over who gets to force their will onto everyone. As a result, he does a gross injustice to those of us who view the application of market forces in education not merely as an exercise in self-interest but as a way to achieve the fundamentally democratic goal of helping as many families as possible get as much of what they want as possible in their children's schools.

I do think the author has some worthwhile points regarding the dangers of some particular "reform" ideas that attempt to partially incorporate market principles without incorporating the most important market principle of all: choice. But even those would come across a lot better if the author didn't display an almost blind hatred toward markets.

I originally picked up this book because of its Civic Education chapter. After I read that (excellent) chapter, I started reading other parts of the book as well.

If you care about the future of our schools, our children, and our country, you should read this book. Engel will open your eyes to the real and disturbing trend of corporate influence in public education.

In his conclusion, he urges you to get involved with your local school board, which never receives much input from the community. Go to the board meetings, find a candidate you support and help him/her win, run for the board yourself...just do SOMETHING before it's too late and we've lost control of our schools.

The book contains 50 personal statements and not much else. The personal statements were not relevant to me or my friends. I did buy this book and others. I think the best ones were Insider's guide to med school admissions by Toyos and Princeton Review. Read this one in a bookstore and you will see it is not worth it.

A great book for those interested in getting an overview of the admissions process and writing your personal statement. I really found this book helpful and resourceful. I recommend it!

Well-written, concise, and not condescending like so many of the books written by admissions department people. The 50 essays are alone worth the price.

This book was not for Gen Y. The language was boring, there was too much hype and not enough substance, and basically I the book was written for 50-year-olds not my generation. If your in college or high school (or you're a parent buying a gift for someone that age) look for something that takes a look at investing from a more Gen Y perspective, something you can relate to. This book doesn't cut it.

This was a good book. It was very simple and it was pretty interesting. I would recommend this book for teens beginning in the Stock Market.

Leibowitz is a teenager with a sensible, cautious approach to the market. He explains concepts well and urges readers to invest for the long term, based on research not rumor. I don't understand the reviews that call this book dangerous--he's quite conservative in his advice and not at all oriented towards making a quick buck like you might expect for someone that young. This would be an excellent introduction to the market for someone totally unfamiliar with it, which is clearly who he thinks his audience is.

If you want to read the story of a guy who thinks it would really be nifty to do important public service work while still pulling down six figures, this is the book for you. Kahlenberg makes law students like myself who are legitimately dedicated to public interest law look like idiots. From tacky comments about distinguished lawyers he labels "sell-outs" for their choice to move to private work to the hilarious account of his (very sincere, I'm *sure*) questioning an interviewer at Arnold and Porter about whether a liberal would feel comfortable at the firm (like they're going to tell you no) the book is pretty useless. Kahlenberg wants you to think he's really upset that he just tried and tried and couldn't get a public interest job, but let's face it -- he went to Harvard Law. If he was the least bit honest at any time, the book would be worth reading. There's no way Coles read this book before agreeing to write the foreword.

This book is a compendium of irritating whinings by a naive liberal intent on saving the world. I was very much disappointed. Skip. Or borrow the book from the library.

Broken Contract is the chronicle of Richard Kahlenberg's struggle to justify his classical liberal ideals with the harsh reality of law school: most entering law students have a desire to use the privilege of an education in the law to help the poor and downtrodden of society, "but upon graduating, the vast majority [scramble] to fill the ranks of the nation's top corporate law firms" (from the front flap). Through the framework of his struggle with these powerful opposing forces, Kahlenberg presents us with a fascinating look at Harvard Law School, its culture and the nature of the law education of the late 1980s. He paints a portrait of everyday life as a law student, scrambling for Law Review positions, summer internships, judicial clerkships and ultimately, for a job after graduation.

As Kahlenberg searches for a job and dogmatically asks each interviewer about the firm's pro bono work (he is interested in little more), he occasionally comes across as an elitist; his sense of noblesse oblige is mildly nauseating. Throughout the book, Kahlenberg operates on the assumption that class-action lawsuits are morally right, that cases brought by poor people are just, that all big corporations are evil, that people have to sell-out to earn big salaries and that "conservatives" are willing to do anything to guarantee the rights of the rich.

However, don't let these relatively small negative aspects of the book deter you from reading it, even if you identify yourself as a conservative. His larger point is this: "since each of us struggles daily with good and bad impulses, we might want to restructure our social institutions in order to make it a little easier to do good" (235). This book does not target a certain ideology, except perhaps greed. Kahlenberg does not pull any punches and the targets of his criticisms span the ideological spectrum (although he does let a few more land on the right side of the spectrum).

Broken Contract rates a full four and a half stars. Broken Contract challenged me to think critically about my motivations for attending law school and broadened my perspective on life in general and on the legal community in particular.

If you are looking for a decent critique of Friedman, that goes beyond a rehash of the leftist, elitist, collectivist nonsense that only plays in the ivory tower world of college campuses, as opposed to the real world, then don't look here. Not an original idea in the entire boring, poorly written, pathetically reasoned diatribe.

If you studied economics, or more importantly, critical reasoning in college, you will be very disappointed in this hackneyed effort.

Make no mistake, the Friedman statist economics is certainly not immune to criticism. This just isn't it. It's almost like you're in a time warp swept back to the age of Ricardo, Marx and other collectivists with absolutely no memory of the total discrediting of that theoretical nonsense by the real world over the past 50 years.

Am still trying to understand the critique of capitalism as "failure" in Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea where the people are demonstrably freer, certainly better off economically, and with real prospects for steady improvement in their lives than most other people throughout the world.

I mean where do you knuckleheads see a better life, the state managed economic paradises like Nigeria, Kenya, Burundi, Argentina, or maybe Brazil? Get real. Friedman at least is right in that sense: freedom is the single most important factor in improving the quality, and importantly, the length of ones life. And capitalism is the only economic system consistent with individual freedom. But the free market does not mean that an imperial Federal Reserve must exist to "plan" (read: control) your economic life.

Of 12 reviews of this book at this time, 5 are 5 stars, 1 is 4 stars and 6 are 1 star. It is clear that this is a book you will either love or hate. If you have already decided that laissez faire capitalism is the best of all possible systems, don't read this book; you will hate it.

As for myself, I have a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University, and was committed to the idea that free markets/free trade is the best solution for all economic problems -- this is the basis of current economic theory. I chanced upon a book entitled Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes by Paul Bairoch. One of the chapters shows that historically, free trade has the opposite effect of the one that I had been led to believe in graduate school. Among many historical examples presented, Bairoch showed that the colonies did very poorly under a free trade regime. I was extremely puzzled at this contradiction between historical experience and theory. I asked some of my mentors about this, and was even more surprised by their reactions. In graduate school we studied only theory, with virtually no relation to actual economic history, and my mentors, well known professors at distinguished universities, seemed fairly unfamiliar with history and seemed to think it irrelevant. Their attitude struck me as pre-scientific; one decides on a priori theoretical grounds that the heavier stone will fall first and never bothers to actually drop two stones and check whether or not it is true.

After this failure of my colleagues to reassure me of the validity of neoclassical views and rebut Bairoch, I started investigating the validy of this model on my own. In the process I read this book and found it very enlightening. It contains enough data to convince one who is open minded that the free market model does not actually work in practice, great as it appears in theory.

It's interesting to see that after the historical record of the past few decades, nicely put together by Rayack, monetarism and his apostle Friedman are still enjoying some popularity here and there around the world. I guess it's mostly due to the power of the corporate rulers of the world, pumping enormous money into their propaganda apparatus staffed by political commissars mistakenly called economists.

It's their job to instill in minds like that of Jerroldd the belief that, for example, South Korea flourished thanks to laissez faire economic policy while abundant evidence points to the contrary. It seems characteristic that Jerroldd doesn't even try to refute a single claim that Rayack makes. Instead, he resorts to vague cliches about academic Left, supposedly out of touch with reality. Ironic, isn't it?

This book is extremely superficial and unimaginative, giving only scant information and profiles from a number of companies of a few finance careers.

In my opinion there is more and better objective information on Finance and investment banking careers in the Vault Career Guide to Investment Banking and in the Vault Guide to Finance Interviews, which have the added benefit of being able to be purchased on vault.com and downloaded immediately. Good luck.

In my opinion there is more and better objective information on Finance and investment banking careers in the Vault Career Guide to Investment Banking and in the Vault Guide to Finance Interviews, which have the added benefit of being able to be purchased on vault.com and downloaded immediately. Good luck.

resource.

The point of writing the application essays is to emphasize your candidacy while presenting yourself as unique "fish" among the "school" of applicants. While the examples and critiques are mildly interesting, they don't do that much to help you be yourself.

A better, and more holistic analysis of positioning your entire application is presented in the Richard Montauk book, "How to Get Into the Top MBA Programs."

If you're interested purely in the essay portion, the Harry Bauld "On Writing the College Application Essay" is much better because it adds a human (and humor) element to writing. (Don't be misled by the undergraduate flair: Harry Haggard and Sarah Bleary review B-school applications, too!)

These essays are outdated, answer irrelevant questions and are entirely too long. They are good only to read and say - "I can do better than that." Besides, reading other people's essays is not as useful as a good book full of advice on which topics to cover and how to write. Save your money.

While not as good as Montauk's "How to Get Into the Top MBA Programs," this book is much shorter (1/3 the size) and may be better if you're on a tight deadline. Found that the essays provided some good guidelines. Helped me get into UCLA, so it was definitely worth the read.