Madhav Rajan of Chicago Booth launches ‘Boundless Scholarship Initiative’

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The Indian-American dean of the prestigious Chicago Booth School of Business, announced the launch of the Boundless Scholarship Initiative aimed at attracting the “best and brightest students” to the institution.

This multiyear campaign aims to raise $75 million to provide scholarships to the most promising individuals who will have the greatest impact on the world of business, the University said in a press release Oct. 2.

“In recent years, we have been successful in attracting outstanding students from an increasingly diverse pool of applicants, in terms of backgrounds and career aspirations,” Dean Rajan is quoted saying in the press release. “To continue to get the best students to choose Booth and to maximize their impact on the world, it’s critical that we grow scholarship support.”

Chicago Booth has a long relationship with India and a significant number of its international students are from that country. The school has a full-time MBA program in India

Increasing access to scholarships is one of Rajan’s top priorities, according to the school. He has set a goal of $75 million to underwrite a substantial increase to the school’s scholarship fund.

The Boundless initiative formalizes an effort that began in 2018 to increase the amount of scholarships available to Booth MBA students from a wide variety of backgrounds.

So far, the school has raised $23.3 million, or 31 percent of the goal. In addition to calling upon alumni to invest in scholarships, Rajan has taken other measures to make a Chicago Booth MBA more accessible for students, said Booth, including a zero-percent tuition increase in 2019–20 over the previous year; moving from a per-course fee to a flat-tuition model that makes students’ payments predictable and allows for two additional courses; and a four-year price guarantee for incoming Evening MBA and Weekend MBA students.

Rajan, a graduate of University of Madras, took over as Booth’s dean in July 2017, prior to which he was at Stanford University for 17 years. His primary area of research interest is the economics-based analysis of management accounting issues, especially as they relate to the choice of internal control and performance systems in firms, according to his biography on the Booth website.