Following on the heels of a Wall Street Journal article–punctuated by mbaMission Founder/President Jeremy Shinewald’s comment that the Wharton School had lost a step to Harvard Business School and the Stanford GSB–Ankur Kumar has announced that she will be resigning from her position as the school’s director of MBA admissions and financial aid, a role she has held since 2009, at the end of this week. “This is not a decision I made impetuously, and I did not want to start an application cycle that I could not commit to finishing,” Kumar stated in an email to her colleagues, adding that she has been “pursuing several different opportunities in New York City in the past few months.”
The Wall Street Journal notes that Maryellen Lamb, the newly appointed deputy vice dean for admissions, financial aid and career management, will take the reins of the admissions office. Wharton issued a statement praising Kumar for maintaining a high rate of female enrollment and for being innovative in introducing the team-based discussion component of the school’s application, but that anyone will be deceived by the spin seems unlikely. Wharton’s application volume has fallen as others’ have risen, and the blame seems to have been placed on the newly replaced admissions director.