As many of us were busy preparing to welcome new students for the academic year, the College was involved in engaging future Mendoza hopefuls in Notre Dame’s Pre-College Program.

The Pre-College Summer Scholars Program affords the opportunity for exceptional high school students to earn college credit through academic seminars and experiences with Notre Dame faculty, staff and students during the summer. Historically, the College has offered pre-college Summer Scholars programs in accounting (“The Language of Business”), marketing (“For the Common Good”) and analytics (“Moneyball: The Analytics of Sports”). This year, we launched a Pre-College Leadership Seminar called, “The Power of Investing: The Wealth Gap, Financial Literacy, and the Miracle of Compound Interest.”

“The Power of Investing” was a competitive, seven-day program for academically talented students who have shown impressive leadership within their communities. Students earned one credit for the program, which was paid by Notre Dame. The program was sponsored by the Notre Dame Institute for Global Investing (NDIGI) with lectures taught by finance faculty and guest speakers. The goal of the course was to demystify the field of investing, show how finance principles can address the growing wealth gap and declining financial literacy, and encourage students to get started on their own journey of wealth creation in order to grow the good in business.

At the end of the seminar, students were tasked with designing a creative way of attacking the issue of wealth inequality. The winning team’s presentation, “Closing the Wealth Gap: Starting with Criminal Justice,” examined the impact of incarceration on employment, income and wealth. Their creative solution focused on preventing incarcerations, financial education within the prison system and delivering support resources upon an inmate’s release.

Another goal for the course was to broaden the pipeline of women and underrepresented minorities coming into Mendoza. The Office of Pre-College Programs delivered an exceptional group of truly diverse students for us to engage. Each and every one of them brought a unique perspective to our class discussions and, if they enroll next year, would enrich the community here at Mendoza.

NDIGI was excited to sponsor this seminar because it allowed us to showcase Mendoza’s outstanding faculty, passionate alumni and welcoming community. Not only did the program engage students from a variety of backgrounds, it also focused on a topic intentionally chosen to attract students who would align with our mission to grow the good in business.

Students left “The Power of Investing” with a positive impression of Mendoza and the discipline of finance. One participant noted, “I greatly enjoyed the collaborative and intellectually stimulating environment. I loved the fact that we focused on issues greater than ourselves, issues that we can make a difference in through business. Investments and finance can be powerful forces for good in the world, and this Leadership Seminar gave me new and renewed insights and views onto how to tackle some of those issues.”

The success of this new Leadership Seminar would have not been possible without the support of the faculty, staff, alumni and students in Mendoza, including guest speakers:

We look forward to leading another successful summer of “The Power of Investing” in 2022!

Kristen Collett-Schmitt 
Associate Dean for Specialized Master's Programs and Associate Teaching Professor of Finance

Mark Dumich
Associate Director, Notre Dame Institute for Global Investing

In his homily for the 2021 Opening of the Academic Year Mass, Father John encouraged us not to put aside the challenges of the past year too quickly. For in the midst of trial and tragedy, we can find the grace see the needs of others more clearly, the call to use our gifts to comfort others and open ourselves more to the help of God and others, and the blessedness of participating in the profound mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection. This message of service and faith has always been at the heart of our mission at Mendoza.

We have much to look forward to in the year ahead. (Check out the Mendoza “Fast Facts” info sheet for an overview of the enrollments this fall.) Here are just a few highlights:

Mendoza Centennial: We will continue to celebrate the legacy of the College through 2021-2022. If you haven’t already, please consider submitting an essay to the “Century Mark: Make Your Mark” project and be sure to pick up your special Centennial t-shirt from Faculty Support.

Please save the dates for future Centennial events, include a special Centennial Mass presided over by Father John and the blessing of a new icon for the Stayer chapel on September 30 in the Basilica; the Mendoza Centennial Deans Panel on November 19 featuring Carolyn Woo, Roger Huang and myself, which will be moderated by Brett Beasley, who authored the new edition of “O’Hara’s Heirs.” (Faculty and staff will receive copies.) We also are planning a Mendoza tailgate on October 23 (USC game). Details on these events will follow.

CARE Conference 2021: Accounting for Sustainability and Responsible Investing: The CARE Conference, held online September 22 and September 29, will focus on the critical topic of climate change. The conference will feature more than 70 industry and academic experts including accountants, finance professionals, law professionals, policymakers, economists, investors, climate scientists and scholars. (See full agenda.)

Tom Mendoza Presents: The highly successful online series returns this fall with a conversation between Tom and Jeff Smith, the CIO for World Fuel Services (WFS) who has been called “one of the most experienced chief information officers in the world.” The event will take place at 11 a.m. to 12 p.m. EST on Sept. 17.

Undergraduate Honors Program: In January, we announced the creation of a new Business Honors Program, which is designed to challenge the most gifted undergraduate Mendoza College of Business students with a rigorous, specialized course of study and programming. The inaugural class of Business Honors students is underway with 57 undergraduate members chosen from a large number of applicants.

Marketing and Graduate Enrollment: The MGE team delivered an exceptional recruiting season performance—accomplishing the enrollment journey “quint-fecta,” or five-for-five on the following year-over-year performance metrics:

Master of Science in Business Analytics-Residential: This Specialized Master’s Programs (MSBA-R) has two cohorts this year with 77 total students (including MBA/MSBA dual-degree students), and has two new academic co-directors, Sharif Nijim and Seth Berry, who are focused on building a strong community among the students. They kicked things off with a team building exercise at Cultivate last week during orientation (see photo to the right).

Master of Science in Accountancy: With enrollment hitting 87 students, MSA is marking its first full year as a STEM-designed program for the analytics concentration.

Executive Master of Nonprofit Administration: EMNA currently has 112 new and returning students. The program had a successful summer term that offered a hybrid learning arrangement to support the nonprofit working professionals during the pandemic.

Master of Nonprofit Administration-Residential: MNA has its largest class ever with 44 students. The program added two credit hours to degree requirements with a fall interterm on leadership development and spring interterm on board relations.

Master of Science in Management: The program is offering two cohorts for a second year, with a combined enrollment of 84 students. It also is launching a new leadership portfolio course and concentrations in finance and marketing.

Master of Science in Finance-Residential: This is the first year for the MSF-R program, which is led by academic director Katherine Spiess. The program started in the summer semester with an enrollment of 22 students and their performance was quite impressive.

I’m pleased to announce the 2021 recipients of the Mendoza Mission Research Award, an annual recognition of Mendoza research papers that exemplify the College’s imperative to “Grow the Good in Business.” This year, six papers were chosen from nominations submitted across the six academic departments and nearly all of our major research areas:

Matt Bloom, Research Professor of Management & Organization; “Stories of Calling: How Called Professionals Construct Narrative Identities” (Administrative Sciences Quarterly, 2020). The paper explored how people find deeply meaningful work by studying people who experience their work as a life's calling. The findings provide insights into how people find a calling, and how they are able to sustain this deep connection to their work over long periods of time.

Yixing Chen, Assistant Professor of Marketing; “Improving Cancer Outreach Effectiveness Through Targeting and Economic Assessments: Insights from a Randomized Field Experiment” (Journal of Marketing, 2020). What should health care institutions do to boost cancer screening rates while saving more money for the health care system? Combining machine learning and a large-scale field experiment, this NIH-sponsored study develops a personalized outreach program that can simultaneously improve liver cancer screening rates by up to 24 percentage points and return on outreach program by up to 96%.

Zach Kowalski, Assistant Professor of Accountancy; “Can Ethics Be Taught? Evidence from Securities Exams and Investment Adviser Misconduct” (Journal of Financial Economics, 2020). In 2010, the investment adviser qualification exam reallocated coverage from the rules and ethics section to the technical section. Comparing advisers with the same employer in the same location and year, the research found those passing the exam with more rules and ethics coverage are one-fourth less likely to commit misconduct.

Sophie Shive, Viola D. Hank Associate Professor of Finance, and Margaret Forster, Teaching Professor of Finance; “Corporate Governance and Pollution Externalities of Public and Private Firms” (Journal of Financial Studies, 2020). The number of U.S. publicly traded firms has halved in 20 years. How will this shift in ownership structure affect the economy's externalities? Using comprehensive data on greenhouse gas emissions, the paper finds in part that independent private firms are less likely to pollute and incur EPA penalties.

Daewon Sun, Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations; “Responsible Sourcing Under Asymmetric Information: Price Signaling versus Supplier Disclosure” (Decision Sciences Journal, 2020). This paper studies a firm’s responsible sourcing decision, along with the optimal strategy to communicate that decision to uninformed consumers. The results imply that stakeholders, such as governments and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), should focus on both improving market transparency, by encouraging firms to make their suppliers more visible, and promoting socially conscious consumption among consumers.

Katie Wowak, Associate Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations; “The Influence of Female Directors on Product Recall Decisions” (Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, 2020). The paper investigates if adding female directors to a firm’s board of directors changes whether and how quickly the firm recalls defective products. The research found that compared to firms with all-male boards, those that have female directors announce high severity recalls 28 days faster or a 35% reduction in recall timing. They also find that for low severity recalls, which can be hidden from regulators, firms with female directors announce 120% more recalls, in comparison to a firm that has no female directors.

Research plays a critical role in advancing our academic reputation. My congratulations to these faculty members for their significant contribution to Mendoza’s research excellence and for their research that sheds light on how business can be used to advance the common good.

These researchers as well as those from last year will be invited to share their research in an event to honor the research and to celebrate how research can help advance our imperative to “Grow the Good in Business.”

In Notre Dame,

Ken

Ken Kelley, Ph.D.
Senior Associate Dean for Faculty and Research 
Edward F. Sorin Society Professor of IT, Analytics, and Operations