Many MBA applicants feel that they are purchasing a brand when choosing a business school, but the educational experience is what is crucial to your future, and no one will affect your education more than your professors. Each Wednesday, we profile a standout professor as identified by students. Today, we focus on Joel Greenblatt from Columbia Business School (CBS).
An adjunct professor in finance and economics, Joel Greenblatt (“Value and Special Situation Investment”) is also the founder of and a managing partner with the hedge fund Gotham Capital. In addition, Greenblatt founded Value Investors Club (www.valueinvestorsclub.com), a members-only, online investment community where the top experts in the industry share ideas. The author of several books, including You Can Be A Stock Market Genius Even If You’re Not Too Smart: Uncover the Secret Hiding Places of Stock Market Profits (Simon & Schuster, 1997) and The Little Book That Beats the Market (Wiley, 2005), Greenblatt is also chairman of a network of charter schools in New York City called the Success Charter Network.
A 2006 New York magazine article titled “How Is a Hedge Fund Like a School?” details Greenblatt’s early work with P.S. 65Q. Using a system comparable to the one Greenblatt employs in his Value Investors Club, the school collects data on its students and develops benchmarks for success. The article notes that if Greenblatt can “produce excellence at one school—and another and another—with the same money the city uses to produce mediocrity, the public, he believes, will realize that there is a better way and begin insisting on it.”