grad change world

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/education/edlife/mba-programs-that-get-you-where-you-want-to-go.html?rref=education/edlife&module=Ribbon&version=context&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Education%20Life&pgtype=Multimedia

Muir Data Systems (data management for the wind turbine industry) and Mission Motors (electric vehicle systems).

To Change the World

Go to Presidio Graduate School

The youngest school on this list, Presidio, has been around only 12 years, created by a lawyer and a former advertising executive who believed that established schools weren’t producing the kind of socially minded graduates the country needs.

Presidio is doing well toward that end. It has placed sustainability directors at companies from Salesforce.com to Facebook, and its graduates have founded sustainability-focused companies like Muir Data Systems (data management for the wind turbine industry) and Mission Motors (electric vehicle systems).

They’re playing in the big leagues as well. Katie Schmitz Eulitt, who holds an executive education certificate in sustainable management from the school, is director of market research for the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, a large-scale effort to move the field of accounting toward the use of sustainability metrics.

The nonprofit organization Net Impact publishes an annual guide to business school programs, and last year Presidio placed No. 1 in social impact and No. 2 in environmental sustainability, after the University of California, Santa Barbara.

At 34, the school’s average student is nearly a decade older than the typical M.B.A. (the average GMAT test-taker is 26). Presidio is also one of just a handful of business schools where women (60 percent) outnumber men. Located in Presidio National Park in San Francisco, it has a campus-lite approach: Most courses are online, with one in-person weekend of classes a month. That helps keep costs down. A two-year degree is $62,400, about half the typical tuition. But those savings come with a price: Sustainability-focused M.B.A.s give up big-time starting salaries. Presidio’s average is in the mid-$80,000s.

William Shutkin, president of Presidio, says that’s not a concern for its graduates. “The decision to choose Presidio is a moral one, because our graduates know they’re doing the right thing,” he says. “But someday in the not-too-distant future, chief sustainability officers will be compensated as well or better than their counterparts. The arc of history is bending toward us.”