This pandemic year brought challenges, uncertainty, and also many rewards. Our community came together with great heart, and by working together, we continued to learn, grow, and innovate.
Here's a look back at some of the highlights.
We welcomed students safely back to campus.
Our full-time, evening & weekend, and executive MBA, undergraduate, PhD, and MFE students started their studies on campus.
Students didn't waste any time jumping into the swing of things. And we celebrated with our pandemic graduates at belated commencements.
We launched a new way for working professionals to complete a Berkeley Haas MBA.
Online instruction during came with unexpected upsides, including flexibility for learning in remote locations. Now, evening and weekend MBA students can enroll in the new Flex option, taking their core MBA courses online and then choosing to take electives in person or online. The new format makes the MBA accessible to a more diverse array of students in different stages of life, such as those with young children at home.
The Biden Administration tapped Haas faculty expertise.
We expanded our faculty with ten new professors, whose expertise includes innovation and corporate strategy, health care markets, and housing.
We mourned the loss of Professor John Morgan.
John Morgan was an economist who found elegant new ways to analyze the world through the lens of game theory. During his nearly two decades at Berkeley Haas, Morgan left his mark through his prolific and wide-ranging research, his unconventional teaching that drew on strategy games he invented, and his generous leadership and mentorship.
Morgan passed away on Oct. 6 at age 53.
We doubled down on our work to increase diversity, equity, inclusion and a sense of belonging for all members of the Haas community.
In the spring, we adopted a new five-year DEI Strategic Plan. And thanks to generous donations, we created new fellowship programs aimed at increasing access to business leadership and scholarships for underrepresented groups.
We enrolled the most diverse full-time MBA class in the history of the school.
Data-driven faculty research shed new light on systemic racial, ethnic, and gender disparities.
We also bolstered the Haas School Board, adding more diverse leaders with deep corporate experience to help Dean Harrison achieve Haas’ ambitious vision of addressing society’s biggest challenges and opportunities: innovation, inclusion, and sustainability.
Two influential women joined our senior leadership team, and two professors stepped up to lead the faculty.
As conversations about race and social justice swept the country, members of our community shared their perspectives in the Haas Voices series.
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We nailed the rankings again.
US News ranked all three MBA programs in the Top 10.
The Haas Undergraduate Program was ranked #3.
The Master of Financial Engineering Program was again ranked #1 by TFE—and jumped to #2 in Quantnet's ranking.
We put our heart into sustainability.
By the end of 2023, our goal is to retool all core MBA courses with cases and assignments that will empower students to address climate change and other sustainability challenges through business.
In 2021, more than 100 students signed up for the new Michaels’ Graduate Certificate in Sustainable Business.
About 68% of the members of the Class of 2021 took a sustainability elective.
Our real estate program also shifted its focus to sustainable development and finance.
The generosity of alumni funded new spaces for students to gather.
Our entrepreneurs innovated, disrupted, and landed major investments.
We're so proud that PitchBook’s 2021 university rankings placed UC Berkeley as the top public university for startup founders and second among both private and public universities.
This year, five Haas startups made the Poets & Quants top MBA startups list, raising a record total of $125 million. They included Oishii, founded by Hiroki Koga, MBA 17 (right), which raised $50 million, and Oxygen, founded by Hussein Ahmed, EMBA 18 (left), which raised $33 million. The list also included Kyte, a car-sharing startup co-founded by Ludwig Schoenack, MBA 19; Time by Ping, a timekeeping automation company co-founded by Kourosh Zamanizadeh, EWMBA 18; and healthcare startup Twentyeight Health, cofounded by Amy Fan, MBA/MPH 19 (center).