MBA students at the Haas school at UC Berkeley will this week host a rather unusual case competition. Instead of scrutinising the usual corporate case, the competing teams will investigate how to help the Oakland Unified School District, in California, which has been in state receivership since 2003 due to financial troubles.
A Stanford graduate, Barak Ben-Gal, has been trying to help the 40,000-student Oakland district sort out its finances since 2004. The competition will bring together teams from the University of Southern California, UCLA, MIT, University of Georgia and Brandeis University to help him in his task.
The competition is the brainchild of Anna Utgoff, who will get her MBA from Haas this year, together with other members of the Haas Leadership in Education Club. “This year we hope to provide Oakland with some good ideas for how to make its schools stronger, and we’ll get some talented MBAs excited about careers in education in the process,” she says.
The competition will take place on March 1 and 2 and the judges will include Mr Ben-Gal, Bill Ouchi of UCLA’s Anderson school, Misha Simmonds, associate partner for the NewSchools Venture Fund, and Brendan Cullen, managing director for Education Pioneers.
