Tag Archives: MIT

We Are One MIT, One Society, As We Pay Tribute To Officer Sean — Tom Kochan

MIT Sloan Prof. Thomas Kochan

From WBUR, Cognoscenti

“Today, and in the days ahead, we will come together to give new meaning to President Rafael Reif’s call to be ‘One MIT.’ The many comments of students who had gotten to know Officer Sean Collier as a friend, peer, and respected professional are heart-warming and a tribute to him and to our community-of-one culture. By celebrating that as we grieve for Sean, his family, and for MIT we might just demonstrate the spirit of solidarity so badly needed in other parts of our society.” Read More »

U.S. Immigration Policy Is Killing Entrepreneurship. Here’s What to Do About It — Bill Aulet and Matt Marx

MIT Sloan Sr. Lecturer Bill Aulet

MIT Sloan Asst. Prof. Matt Marx

From Forbes

When we teach our introductory entrepreneurship class at MIT, we take it for granted that each of our 75 students will be able to start an American company upon graduating.

But many of them lack one thing they need to be able to do so—permission from the United States government to continue working in our country.

In this academic year, three in 10 MIT students, including four in 10 graduate students, are not U.S. citizens or permanent residents. So for them our entrepreneurship class is likely to remain just an academic exercise. Their student visas expire when they graduate, leaving them with two options, to leave the country or find an existing company to sponsor them for a chance at an H-1B visa.

Read the full post at Forbes Leadership Forum

MIT’s first Music Hack Day–Where entrepreneurship, computer engineering, and music combine — Philip Cohen, MBA ’13

MIT is known for its excellence in computer engineering. It also has an outstanding, but lesser-known, music and arts program. On Veterans Day weekend, computer engineering and music will connect on the MIT campus, and the result could be important innovations in the way music is produced and enjoyed. Read More »

From Data to Decisions: Lessons from Davos, 2012

We are at the beginning of the Big Data era, and there is widespread anticipation that this will be a huge benefit to companies. I’ve been attending the World Economic Forum in Davos and in my `Data to Decisions’ panel we heard CEOs tell how Big Data can reinvent everything from CRM to internal processes to product design.

We also heard that there are significant challenges in data sourcing, permission agreements, data quality and of course privacy concerns, as most Big Data is personal data about customers. Fortunately these challenges can be addressed by conventional business practices.

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Antoinette Schoar: The case for unwinding Fannie and Freddie

MIT Sloan Prof. Antoinette Schoar

From CBS News

Today Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac–two government-sponsored enterprises originally designed to increase the availability of loans and thereby raise levels of home ownership–dominate the US mortgage lending market. Fannie Mae, which was established in 1938 as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, provides local banks with federal money to finance home mortgages. Freddie Mac, created in 1970, underwrites mortgages that fall below a certain size threshold with the intention of helping homeowners get access the housing market. These mortgages are cheaper since they implicitly–and after 2008 explicitly–benefited from a government guarantee.

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