2022 Year In Review
Maria |
December 14, 2022

It might be difficult to believe, but 2022 is almost over.

In this episode of Business Casual, our hosts John, Maria, and Caroline will name three significant trends and events that they believe had an impact on graduate management education in 2022.

Listen in as our hosts also reflect on the wonderful moments that have transpired in graduate management education, evaluate the patterns and noteworthy events, and discuss the ups and downs.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:07.530] – John

Hello, everyone. It’s John Byrne with Poets and Quants. You’re listening to Business Casual, our weekly podcast with my co host Maria Wich-Vila and Caroline Diarte Edwards. Can you believe we’re at the end of another year? I can. It’s gone by so fast. And it’s just hard, hard to imagine that we are almost finished with 2022. It’s a good time to just look back at what’s happened in graduate management education, review the trends, the highlights, the ups and downs, and talk a little bit about that. And then in our next podcast, to look forward into 2023, take out the crystal ball and see what lies ahead. So I’m going to go to my two co hosts first and ask them to identify three big trends that they saw or three big happenings that helped to shape the field of graduate management education in 2022. Caroline, why don’t you start?

[00:01:09.030] – Caroline

Yeah, so I think that one of the big things this year has been that we’ve got back to some sort of normal, right? So obviously, 2000 and 22,021 were pretty disrupted by the pandemic. It disrupted some schools more than others and some countries more than others. But the vast majority of school communities were affected and saw periods of longer periods of virtual learning issues with COVID on campus and so on. So at least for a lot of the international schools outside of China and the US. Schools have been able to get back to some sort of normal this year. So I think that is a very welcome development.

[00:01:52.390] – John

That definitely is. And that’s a big deal because we know how disappointed many students were who had to take virtual classes when they signed up for on campus learning. And that’s all back. And so our global immersion and travel, which also disappeared during the peak of the Pandemic and is now back in order. And that means that faculty are doing less zoom, which I’m sure they’re very happy about.

[00:02:24.430] – Caroline

Yes, I think they are. And what I’ve heard from students and faculty is that not only did it make it much harder for classmates to get to know each other and build those relationships, that’s such a fundamental part of the business school experience. And a big reason why people go to business school is to build that network that will have such value for them for the rest of their lives. But also that online, it’s more difficult for students to get the same peer to peer learning. Right? So I think it’s just harder to facilitate a discussion in an online environment in the same way that you can when you’re all together, everyone can see each other in a physical space. From what I’ve heard, that peer to peer learning was much more difficult online. And so I think everyone, both students and faculty, are very happy to be back in the classroom.

[00:03:20.930] – John

That’s right. We’ll get back to you on your next two. We’ll go to Maria for her first of three.

[00:03:26.980] – Maria

Okay, so one of the things that I noticed this year in terms of how the schools were doing admissions or things they were doing in their application process was more and more of a reliance on video. I don’t necessarily mean video as an interview medium. I mean, prior to even issuing formal interview or acceptance invitations or decisions that a lot of schools are having, students either create a video in advance and then upload it on their own or have a situation where they are sitting in front of their webcam and they are given one or two questions. In the case of UT Austin, I think it’s seven questions. It’s funny, I’m like I’ve been saying for years that I wish the schools would rely more on this video. And then UT Austin was like, Great, we’re doing seven of them.

[00:04:14.560] – John

Wow. But yeah, is that good or is that overkill?

[00:04:20.290] – Maria

You know what? If you think about it, it’s a great way. What a great time saver. Because if you essentially replace the typical interview with the sorts of questions you would have asked anyway in an interview, if you start listening to the answers and you can tell right away that this person is just not the right fit to put that diplomatically, you don’t have to listen to all seven answers the whole way through. And I believe that most of these automated video interview platforms actually cut you off after, say, 60 seconds, 90 seconds, two minutes. And so that’s also good because sometimes you’re in an interview and the person is just not taking the hint, and it gets kind of awkward when you’re like, okay, we have to move on now. Thank you. I think that the video utilizing video earlier in the process. I do think that I personally think that it’s more useful if it is a situation where the applicant does not know in advance what the question is going to be, as opposed to some other schools where they actually tell you, okay, we want a minute of you introducing yourself to your future classmates because someone might spend three months on that.

[00:05:26.010] – Maria

And so you might not get an actual authentic idea of who they are. But no matter how you use it, I think it’s very valuable because prior to this, when everything was written, it was really hard to tell if somebody submitted this flawless essay. Was that really their real voice? Was that really their actual writing? And so there were times in the past where I’ve done mock interviews with folks who were essential, like Nobel laureate level writers on paper, and then you get them on a webcam for an interview and they are really not able to speak English fluently. And I remember thinking once, like, oh my gosh, it was a very painful mock interview that I did with someone that I was like, Prince is not getting in. It wasn’t just a question if they’re a little difficult to understand. And this was a rather extreme case of someone who couldn’t understand my questions and I couldn’t understand their answers. And I thought, wow, what a huge waste of time for everyone.

[00:06:19.750] – John

Yeah, there’s no question this is a great assessment tool for admissions on a number of levels, because not only can you tell if a person’s articulate or not, you can tell if they have potential for let’s use the phrase professional presence. Right. And if they do, you know it’s going to be a hell of a lot easier to get them jobs at the end of their two years in an MBA program. On the other hand, it’s quite daunting for many people to do those videos, in particular for international students who are english is a second language, right.

[00:06:57.090] – Maria

But at some point, their lack of English is going to come through, and isn’t it better for them to get rejected earlier on in the process and to get their hopes up? Like, oh, I made it to the Harvard Business School interview and I knew three minutes into that mock that this person wasn’t getting in and they had to wait. And of course, I didn’t say that right, because you don’t want to say that, but I just think it’s better to. Of course it’s going to be hard, but at some point, their ability to speak is going to be found out, and it is, in fact, a relevant piece of information to know, because we were just talking about how much learning happens from your classmates. That happens in the classroom setting and also informally, and that requires a certain level of confidence and competence with language. But then the other thing is for people who say, like, oh, I’m really nervous about the video interview. Video interviews are the wave of the future. I can’t imagine that corporations going forward in this post COVID world are suddenly going to start flying people all over the country for an interview, especially in the earlier stages of a job search.

[00:08:00.570] – Maria

Zoom interviews are probably here to stay in the corporate world as well. And so I don’t have a huge amount of compassion for people who get really freaked out about it.

[00:08:11.470] – John

Yeah. And this is something that was started a number of years ago by the University of Toronto and the Rotman School. They were really the pioneers in adopting this technology, and it’s really spread big time to so many schools, including Yale, of course. And I agree this is not only a significant trend and an uptick has occurred more recently, but I think this is probably a really good assessment tool to fine tune your selection of your applicants. Let me throw in my one to start it off. This was the year when really the big brand schools began to embrace online degrees. We have UC Berkeley Haas and NYU Stern both entering for the first time in their part time programs online cohorts, where they had not done online learning before. And yes, these are blended programs, as the best online MBA programs are, but they’re primarily online. And then you had Wharton announced that they were going to start a new executive MBA program. They’re calling it their global MBA program that would largely be online. I think 60% of all the learning will be online. And this is in a market where we already have probably 400 online MBA for the United States alone.

[00:09:39.770] – John

So it’s a highly cluttered, largely undifferentiated market at all kinds of price points. And it’s gotten so competitive, in fact, that today the University of San Diego announced a new online and buffer room where 60% of it is in person. But here’s the catch. They’re willing to pay the airfare of every resident in California who has to fly in for the one weekend per month on campus Saturday and Sunday that program requires. So they’re going to foot the bill for all those airplane flights. If you are in the state of California and you want to take this online program at San Diego, I think that’s really quite something. But it’s a reflection to me of how competitive the market has become. And the other issue with this is who else is going to get into it? Will Kellogg have an online MBA? I would guess probably they will. And I think we’re going to see some of the other big giant schools in the online MBA market now that we have the likes of a Wharton and NYU, stern and Berkeley and Michigan and Rice and USC, and Indiana, of course. And the list just goes on and on because it’s been growing by leaps and bounds in the last few years.

[00:11:06.780] – John

But this has, I think, been a really breakthrough year for the online MBA degree. The other thing that we found, incidentally, is people are using this degree to pivot. Initially, the thought was if you wanted an MBA and you just wanted to learn the business basics and then a deep dive in some electives, but you didn’t really want to change your career, you didn’t want to change disciplines, industries, or maybe even geography. Now people are using online MBAs to do just that, to transition out of an existing career, an existing discipline, a company, an industry, and using that online MBA to basically reinvent themselves, which has long been at the center of what the MBA experience full time has been. So that’s my first one. Caroline, let’s go back to you for your second.

[00:12:03.850] – Caroline

So I think that we’ve seen an interesting development in the admissions market this year in that there has been a decline in application volume. So compared to the boom of applications that was triggered by the Pandemic, this was the hangover year when application volume dropped. However, I think that we have reached the bottom of that and it’s now turning around. So I think from my anecdotal experience with the Fortuna prospect and client pool that November was the point when things have started to turn around, and that is because it’s a countercyclical market. So as economies begin to weaken, there’s a lot of talk of recession, europe heading into a recession, certainly the UK in a recession, and tech companies laying off various financial institutions, private equity and so on have made layoffs already. And so that is triggering increased interest in applying to business school. And so I think that 2023 will be a busy year for the admissions offices. I think they’re going to see an increase over the next twelve months.

[00:13:21.170] – John

And as we’ve talked about before in this regard, we’ve seen business goals respond to these massive layoffs in the tech sector. In particular, Kellogg, for example, waiving standardized tests for laid off tech workers, MIT extending their Round Two deadline to allow laid off workers to study for the gmatter GRE before they take it, and therefore give them a little more time to get into the Round Two competition. And other schools are doing things like just waiving their application fees and whatnot. So, yeah, all that I think, is also going to contribute to a turnaround in application volume because the schools are proactively, reaching out to the market and saying, hey, we want to help you apply here. That’s a really good one.

[00:14:17.780] – Caroline

That’s partly also because they see that there’s going to be an increase in application volume in 2023, but they want to pull some of those applicants forward to this current admission season and avoid that all of those people wait for Round One next year. Right? Because otherwise if they’ve just been laid off, they could easily miss a January deadline and then they may decide, well, it’s a bit late after January to apply for a top US. School this season. So then they wait until September, October in 2023, and then the schools all get a deluge of great applications. And so they’re trying to pull some of those forward into this season. And I think that’s why we’ve seen those outreach efforts that you’ve mentioned by the schools to try and pull some of those candidates into this season so that they get the best of they can smooth the application volume over time and not be rejecting people in the next season that they would have been happy to accept this season.

[00:15:17.510] – John

Yeah, indeed.

[00:15:18.910] – Maria

Maria, another thing that I’ve noticed also ties into this idea of trying to smooth how you’re getting your applications and how you’re processing them. I think this Round One, we saw a number of schools really rely on their waitlist very heavily, much more so than in previous years, because for months we’ve been talking about there’s a recession coming, there’s a recession coming, and nobody really knew if it was coming, but it seemed like it was, and if so, when. And so I believe that a lot of admissions officers in the interest of smoothing, did not want to offer too many of their seats away in Round One, perhaps not as many as they would in a quote unquote normal year. And because I think they’re waiting to see who do we get in Round Two, maybe there are going to be some pretty cool layoffs, which are bad news. Layoffs are bad news for those people in the short term, but it’s great news for us as a school if it really if it means that we get some incredible talent that was otherwise, you know, making 300 grand a year at one of these fang companies or what have you.

[00:16:18.040] – Maria

And now maybe we can lure them over to our business school. Why not wait and see who else is out there? Why not play the field, as it were, and see the other fish in the sea that might appear magically thanks to a recession. And so I think this year we did see a lot of Round One waitlist that would have probably either been accepted in a more quote unquote normal year or perhaps even just rejected. Because if you don’t know if we keep the sort of fish in the sea there are lots of fish in the sea, but there might not be any fish in Round Two. So let’s just keep people in a nice little tank, in a little limbo tank in our living rooms and then decide whether or not we want to what is it, cut bait, whatever it is we want to do with them.

[00:17:09.210] – John

It’s such a dreaded place for the applicant to be too look after the marathon that you have to run to do well on the test, to submit really good compelling applications and write those essays and get your recommendations in place and then you get a maybe. And we know that on most waitlists, most people just stay on the wait list because the actual number of people historically that have been pulled off waitlist is a minority, not a majority, right?

[00:17:42.280] – Maria

Yes. Though I do think the waitlist used to serve a slightly different purpose. In other words, I think there’s an evolution of the usage of the waitlist to almost kind of instead of having a round one, round two, let’s just kind of make it one big round that happens to last four or five months. So that way we can look at everyone together in one big bucket instead of trying to rely upon historic. In the past, we normally get X number of people per round from each industry, and so we can try to predict how many people. I think in the past, the waitlist was primarily, okay, we’re going to make this many offers. We think X percentage of people are going to take those offers. But in case fewer people take those offers, we’re going to need a backup plan. We might need 510, 20 people. I think that now the waitlist is being used almost as a way to almost create a sort of rolling admissions. Not really rolling, but almost like, wow, let’s just make it one big happy round. And so if you are on a waitlist right now, if there’s someone out there with a profile very similar to yours and you’re on a waitlist, you might want to find a crowbar.

[00:18:53.930] – Maria

I’m not condoning violence, of course, but there are people right now who are from the round one waitlist who are freaking like, oh, what’s going to happen? And what does this mean? And I’m doomed. And I’m like, not necessarily, really. It’s just a question of is someone just like you but better going to show up in round two? And if the answer is yes, you’re probably not getting off the waitlist. But if the answer is no, you probably have a pretty good shot. So just hang in there. I know. It stinks, though.

[00:19:19.650] – John

Yeah. The other phenomenon about the waitlist is that when more people are put on waitlist by the top schools, yield and every other thing at the schools just below the top schools goes really crazy because you just don’t know. You can’t capture people because they’re being held by, let’s say, the M seven. And so it makes admissions so much more difficult for the schools that are in the ten to 20 rank range because they’re the schools where those waitlists. When people are released from them, there’s a cascading effect to the other schools and it drives admissions people in those schools crazy. I’d say. Another thing that happened this year is what’s kind of hot. And we know that business analytics is continuing to be hot. There’s great demand for people with those skills and many of the MBA programs now have concentrations or majors or specializations depending on what school you go to. This is what they call them in business analytics. That’s very strong. But two areas that have really come up big time in 2022 are things that really reflect what young people are concerned about. One, of course, is sustainability. More and more schools and more deans are trying to differentiate themselves in the marketplace on the basis of sustainability.

[00:20:59.190] – John

They’re recruiting more faculty in this area. They’re doing more joint programming with schools of environmental science. And frankly, the demand by corporations for people who are trained in this area is very high. This is going to be, I think, one of the big things that’s going to happen next year when more schools get on this bandwagon. But it is pretty strong right now and we’re seeing a lot of schools kind of hang their hat on the sustainability movement. And the other area, of course, is diversity, equity and inclusion. Schools have rushed out and hired dei officers and all of this is getting reflected in admissions, faculty hiring and staff hiring. And schools are taking a much more aggressive approach at measuring their improvements in these areas. And I think that’s something that’s going to continue. So business analytics still hop and getting even hotter. Diversity, equity, inclusion, another hot topic where even Wharton has created a major in this field. And then sustainability, where more schools are offering more elective courses, majors and specialty masters in the field of sustainability.

[00:22:28.250] – Caroline

Caroline so another one that I think is part of a long term trend that has continued this year is that with the international applicant pool, candidates are certainly very attractive to the top US schools, but they’re also equally likely to apply to the top international schools. And I think the balance is switching a little bit with the best international applicants, not just considering the US. But also applying to a range of international schools. And so maybe the US. Doesn’t have the sort of hold over the international market that it might have had in the past. And partly, I think that is also driven this year by currency fluctuations. So with the pound and the euro losing value versus the dollar, and the dollar held up pretty strongly this year compared to many other currencies, studying in the US as an international student just looks incredibly expensive, right? And so compared to the cost of studying at London business school or the cost of studying at INSEAD or Ashes or Ie in Madrid, those schools offer a much better value proposition. Especially if you’re doing a one year program. So you’re incurring fees for one year rather than two years, and living expenses and foregone salary, et cetera, et cetera.

[00:23:58.180] – Caroline

So I think that will so that is partly this year driven by those currency fluctuations, which of course may not continue, although it does look like Europe and the UK may go into a deeper recession than the US in 2023. So I would expect that to continue next year at least.

[00:24:21.890] – John

Yeah, and the other thing is, I think most people believe that the full time residential MBA market in the United States is now a mature market. There’s really no more growth to be had, and if anything, it’s been shrinking for a number of years now. And I think that in Europe that’s not true, because in part, the actual number of MBA holders in Europe is far below those in the United States. There are fewer schools of business in Europe than there are in the United States. And so I think the MBA degree at its value is still on a curve that is going up in Europe while it’s going down in the United States. So I don’t see the full time MBA in Europe in a mature situation yet. I still see it as a growth mode. And some of the business schools have been increasing their enrollments in full time MBA programs, which is the exact opposite of what’s happening in the US. So that’s a really good and interesting trend.

[00:25:31.870] – Maria

Maria well, sticking with the idea of trying to smooth things out, I think admissions officers right now, as Caroline pointed out, are hoping to get some folks who might otherwise be thinking about waiting until next Round one. Why not apply this year? Come on, let’s try to see you now. I think that’s sort of a knee jerk reaction and a very understandable one after the fluctuations of COVID and what that meant in terms of application volumes and people deferring and people not enrolling and then deciding they’re not enrolling, and all of that complete uncertainty that really, I think, stressed out a lot of admissions officers. We saw a lot of admissions officers leave their jobs in the past year, year and a half or so. And so I think that was a pretty interesting you know, the great resignation isn’t just applying to.

[00:26:31.370] – John

Everything. So true. Harvard and Stanford announcing their admission officers leaving on the same day. How about that, right?

[00:26:42.130] – Maria

It’s very sweet. Just kidding. I think it was a coincidence, but they held it. Yeah.

[00:26:46.900] – Caroline

And jumped.

[00:26:47.950] – Maria

They did. I mean, it’s really it’s really cute. But I mean, seriously, like, what an interesting thing that so many people are feeling burnt out and the fact that so many heads of admissions of so many schools are also clearly also clearly feeling burnt out because a lot of them decided to leave. And what’s interesting is that a lot of them decided to leave, and it’s not like they went to other schools. A lot of them decided to leave, and they either stayed in academia but in a completely different role that has nothing to do with admissions, or they kind of some of them just left academia altogether. And so I just think that was an interesting that’s certainly not something I think I’ve ever seen, ever, including yeah.

[00:27:28.530] – John

At Michigan Ross, the two top heads of admission left within just months of each other. One going to McKenzie in a sort of recruitment role and another going into a private company in a role to recruit leadership talent. So the pressure is on. The admission officer is really intense, and it partly relates to rankings because the deans are pressuring admissions officers to admit a certain profile that will reflect well in rankings. And in US news, we know obviously, they weigh GMAT and GRE scores and acceptance rates, and that’s a factor. And then in the Financial Times, they weigh things like gender and international composition of students. So there’s the pressure that occurs because if the school goes down in a ranking, more often than not, it’s because of admission statistics. And then there’s the new found pressure, particularly in the US. On diversity and its importance. And in truth, the schools, at least on the gender side, have made great strides. More schools are at or near gender parity than ever before their full time MBA programs, particularly at the elite schools. And there’s no evidence that there are more women in the applicant pool.

[00:28:59.610] – John

So that means these schools have worked hard to bring them in, and probably at the expense of other schools, rank further down on the list. And when we talk about that, I’ll also talk about rankings, because I think this has been a year where the MBA ranking has you can look at it very differently, right? Number one, the economist decided they’re going to get out of rankings altogether, and that means full time MBA, executive MBA, and Masters in Management rankings. You have Forbes, which hasn’t published a ranking for three years. Usually theirs comes out every other year. It’s now in year three, and we’re going to go into year four soon without a Forbes ranking. And then you have very serious questions raised about flaws in the Bloomberg Businessweek ranking by a very respected and admired academic who’s basically engineered the metrics that Business Week puts out and shown that the weights that they’re applying or say they’re applying are not actually doing. And if they did apply those metrics to those weights, the ranking would be remarkably different than the one that they published. And it would be kind of embarrassing, frankly, which suggests that someone is putting their hand in the black box of methodology and monkeying around with things.

[00:30:31.390] – John

And then on top of all of this, you have law schools, some of the most prominent law schools in the United States, saying they will no longer cooperate with US. News on the law school rankings. That has not spread to the business school community, because I think, frankly, business schools acknowledge that rankings they reluctantly acknowledge that rankings have been good for the MBA because it adds to mind share. If people see rankings, they know that it’s a sign that business education is important. The fact that NBA programs are ranked by US. News, financial Times economists, business Week, and Forbes, and then many other players suggest the importance of business education as well, and reminds people when these things come out that, oh, I don’t have a degree, but should I? And it opens their minds to the possibility of going back to school for graduate management education, which is a positive thing. And I think it’s why the business schools have not followed the law schools in walking away from the US. News ranking. But it’s clear that rankings are under more attack than they’ve ever been. They’re getting diminished as a result of the concerns over the Business Week ranking, the withdrawal from the market by the economists, the lack of publication of a ranking by Forbes.

[00:32:03.660] – John

So I think that’s really an interesting trend, because what it’s going to do is going to give greater importance to the rankings that remain primarily of the Financial Times and US. News in the United States. So I think those are pretty good trends and things that have happened in 2022. I wonder if you folks out there have highlights or trends that you think need to be explored. And if you do, Drop me a line, because in our next podcast, we want to focus on what do we expect out of 2023? Anyway, we hope all of you out there have a great holiday. We wish you the best and thank you for listening. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. You’ve been listening to Business Casual.

2022 Year In Review
Maria |
December 14, 2022

[00:00:00] John Byrne: Well hello everyone, this is John Byrne with Poets and Quants, welcome to Business Casual, our weekly podcast with my co-hosts Maria Wich-Vila and Caroline Diarte Edwards. Today we have a special guest, Heidi Hillis from Fortuna Admissions. She is based in Australia, is a senior expert coach for Fortuna, and has three degrees, all from Stanford, a BA in English literature, that’s my degree, an MA in Russian studies, and an MBA from the Graduate School of Business. And we have Heidi here to discuss some really fascinating research. Here’s what Fortuna did. They dug into the last Two class profiles of the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

That’s the class of โ€˜23 and the class of โ€˜24. They looked up all these folks on LinkedIn to identify a little bit more about their backgrounds, including their former employers and their places of undergraduate education to come up with an incredible analysis. Heidi, welcome.

[00:00:46] Heidi Hillis: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

[00:00:48] John Byrne: Heidi, what is, what are the big takeaways from your deep dive discovery?

[00:00:54] Heidi Hillis: It’s hard to know even where to start. I think there’s a quite a few interesting kind of trends that we’ve seen that have taken place over the years. We were mentioning before the call that traditionally there hadn’t been, 10 years ago, if you’d looked, you wouldn’t have seen so many tech companies represented, but now there’s a big presence of tech companies who are feeding a lot of these MBA programs in Stanford in particular.

I think that the thing that was really interesting was, looking, not just at where the companies that were feeding the students, the applicants to Stanford. When they were working there, when they were applying, but actually the paths that they took prior to their current job.

So how many people were working, if you look at McKinsey, for example, or Bain and BCG, those are obviously companies that feed a lot of applicants to the program, but we found 20%, which seemed to be normal of, the class came from consulting, but if you actually look into the numbers in their background, You would see that actually 37 percent of these two classes had worked at McKinsey sometime prior, or actually in consulting, so it was, it’s The kind of the patterns that are behind, what you would normally see in terms of what Stanford tells us.

So you get a sense of the paths that people have taken. And so that’s something that was really interesting to see.

[00:02:16] John Byrne: Absolutely. And of course, this is this analysis goes so far beyond what any applicant would learn by simply looking at the class profile that the school up because, this level of detail is never available to people.

[00:02:33] Heidi Hillis: No, and yeah, for example, you could see that, Stanford will say that they have around, each year around 50 percent of applicants are international, which is a great statistic and gives you lots of hope if you are an international student. But when you dig into the numbers, you actually understand that.

75 percent of the people who get into Stanford actually went to a U. S. University. So even if you’re international, it does have does seem to have kind of an advantage of having been educated in the U. S. That seems to be something that they look for. However, I think. The concentration of universities in the U.

S. that are feeding to Stanford is something also that, if you’re looking at it, you might find a little bit dis, disconcerting. There’s a few programs that are really, obviously the top. Programs as you would expect places like Harvard, Stanford, Yale, the Ivies but if you look at the international universities very diverse from all over the world, really lots of people from different places, which is also really interesting.

[00:03:38] John Byrne: Yeah I tell you, one of the things that struck me in the data is how consistent it is. 10 years ago, we did the same exercise at Stanford and a bunch of other. Schools from Harvard and Dartmouth and Columbia and talk and a few others and back 10 years ago, we found that 25. 2 percent of the class of 2013 were from Ivy League colleges.

And the Ivy League 8 schools, not including Stanford. And if you included Stanford, it would have been 32. 6%. So now, let’s move forward to your data. And in 23, 30. 7 percent went to Ivy League schools, even above the 25. 2. And in 24, 27. 9 percent went to Ivy League schools. So it looks like Stanford has gotten even a little bit more elitist than it was.

Yeah,

[00:04:41] Heidi Hillis: It’s, it is it’s what the data says, right? Obviously, this is a sample. We have 80 percent of the two classes. So we don’t know where those other people went. And that might skew the data a little bit in another direction. But it is, if you look at there’s 15 schools, that include the Ivy’s and then you have UC Berkeley and obviously Stanford that really are contributing, 49 percent of the class of 23, 47. 3 percent of the class of 24. So that is a pretty heavy concentration and But, if you actually look into the data, you see a lot of people also, each of these is actually an individual story.

You see a lot of people who come from other schools as well. So it’s not like you have to give up hope if you come from a different school. I see a lot of individual stories that, from the whole range of U. S. schools that really are feeding into Stanford. So I think what the data doesn’t also tell you, unfortunately, is how many of these Of people from these backgrounds are actually applying.

So

[00:05:39] John Byrne: good point.

[00:05:40] Heidi Hillis: It’s it’s hard to know. And sometimes I think people this is. A path that a lot of people who go to these schools plan to take from the very beginning. So I would see, it would be interesting to know that I don’t know that we will ever find that out. But, um, that’s something to keep in mind as well.

[00:05:56] John Byrne: Yeah. And that’s a fair point. Because how reflective are these results of the applicant pool reflective of an elitist attitude probably a combination of if I had to guess, but, it is what it is, and these institutions obviously are great filters, so you come from McKinsey, Bain, BCG, and you go to Harvard or Stanford or Penn, and you pass through a fine filter, and it makes you less of a admissions risk than if you went to, frankly, the University of Kentucky and worked for a company that no one knows of.

That’s just the reality of elite MBA admissions, right?

[00:06:40] Heidi Hillis: Yeah. And so you will see that the people who are not going, you’ll see a lot of the people who you would, the profiles that you would expect, the Harvard undergrad that then goes to Goldman that then was working at a PE firm.

That’s a really typical profile that you’ll see. But you’ll also see some really, unique and interesting ones, which I think, Okay. Helps you understand that if you don’t have that path, you also have a real chance at these schools, and maybe even more of a chance, again, not knowing, how many of those Goldman P.

E. Harvard grads are applying. So I’m thinking of the guy that I saw who he went to UPenn undergrad, studied engineering, started out a kind of pretty typical path working in private equity, but then made a big pivot to work for go to Poland where he was working in a real estate investment firm and the head coach of the Polish lacrosse team.

So you have really interesting profiles like that, that you can see that. aren’t necessarily taking that typical path. And sometimes that really does help you stand out.

[00:07:42] John Byrne: True. Maria, what surprised you most about the data?

[00:07:48] Maria Wich-Vila: Wow. I think we already covered, the, one of the biggest ones was the number, the percentage of people who would had some sort of either their undergraduate or graduate education within the United States.

Intuitively, I had felt that was true. And sometimes when I try to, give some honest, tough love to applicants from certain countries, and they’ll say, oh, but Maria, I think you’re being a little too pessimistic. After all, X percent of the applicants at these schools are international, and Y percent are from a certain geography internationally.

I’ll say yes, but that doesn’t mean that they’re all Solely from that area. A lot of them are, do have significant international educational experiences. I think another, speaking of the international piece the percentage of people who had significant international work experience as well was something else that really jumped out at me.

Because it would signal to me that Stanford really does value this global perspective both within probably its domestic applicants and also its international applicants. So I thought that was also a really interesting piece of data that jumped out at me.

[00:08:52] John Byrne: Now remind me what percentage was that?

[00:08:56] Heidi Hillis: People who are international

[00:08:58] John Byrne: who have had international work experience.

[00:09:01] Heidi Hillis: I think it was 30%.

[00:09:02] Caroline Diarte Edwards: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it’s pretty

[00:09:04] John Byrne: impressive.

[00:09:04] Caroline Diarte Edwards: 30%, which I was thrilled to see. As well as coming from in Seattle and Europe. Obviously the international schools put a heavy emphasis on international experience and I hadn’t fully appreciated that. A school like Stanford would also.

really value that to the same extent. And it’s great to see that candidates are making the effort to get outside of the U. S. and get international experience because I think you gain so much from that exposure. And you bring more to the classroom if you’ve got that experience. I know that both Maria and Heidi.

I’ve worked outside of the home countries as well. Pre MBA and I think that you just have so much more to contribute to the whole experience. And it was great to see that 30%.

[00:09:50] John Byrne: What else struck you, Caroline?

[00:09:53] Caroline Diarte Edwards: We talked about the concentration of academic institutions, and I was also surprised about the concentration in employers.

So while there is a very long list of employers where the students have worked pre MBA when you dig into the career paths that they’ve taken there is some interesting concentration. Heidi had noted that the reports that There are 26 companies that account for nearly one third of the class in terms of where they were working right before Stanford.

But when you look at their whole career history, those same 26 companies represent over 60 percent of the class. So that is, yeah, that’s quite extraordinary that so many of the class have experience of working at quite a short list of companies.

[00:10:46] Heidi Hillis: I think that’s reflective of, if you really think about it, you have a lot of these companies.

You’re talking about the Goldmans and the Morgan Stanley and McKinsey that have really large programs that recruit out of undergrad that are really training grounds for. A lot of people that then on to do, work in industry or go on to work for in finance in particular, a lot of people starting out at some of these bulge bracket banks and then going into.

Private equity or smaller firms. So the diversity within finance in terms of where they were working prior to MBA is quite large compared to consulting because there just aren’t as many consulting firms, but a lot of people in financing, a lot of different firms, but they, a lot of them really do start out in these training programs, these analyst programs that are so big and popular.

[00:11:34] John Byrne: Yeah, true. And looking back, I did this exercise as well. The feeder companies to Stanford 10 years ago in the class of 2023, 22. 8 percent from McKinsey, Bain, BCG, and your data, 22. 5 percent work there. Incredible consistency over a 10 year period. When you look at the top six employers 10 years ago, they were McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, and JP.

Morgan Chase. They accounted alone for 34 percent of all the students in the class of 20, 2013 at Stanford. In your data for 23 and 24 they account for 29. 8%, just a few percentage points less. So remarkable consistency. And I think you’re right, Heidi, this is a function of the fact that these firms bring in a lot of people who are analysts and actually expect them after 3 to 5 years to go to a top MBA school.

So there’s a good number of them in the applicant pool to choose from and let’s face it, they’re terrific candidates.

[00:12:46] Heidi Hillis: Yeah. I think another pool of really terrific candidates that you see, and I don’t know what the 2013 data was saying, but is the US military, which is really, I think, again, something that I felt having worked with lots of military candidates myself, understand that, Yeah, intuitively, I would have expected, but to see it in the data is actually really interesting.

You just see Stanford in particular, I think, is really looking for leadership potential, and it’s so hard to show that as an analyst, as a consultant, but as in the military, these people have such incredible leadership experience that it really helps them to stand out.

[00:13:23] John Byrne: Yeah. And let’s tell people what the data shows.

How many out of us military academies,

[00:13:28] Heidi Hillis: In all in total, we had, 20 over the two years. So that’s in the two classes that we found. So that’s, a pretty large number. And they come from all the different academies, right? So you’ll find them from different, not academies, in the army, navy and the marines.

So you’ll see that. And you also see quite a few, in the data we’ll, we see a lot from the Israeli military as well, but that’s actually a little bit difficult to because every Israeli does go into the military. So it’s they have that in their background. Any Israeli candidate would have Israeli military background as well, but again, that’s.

Place that people can really highlight their leadership. So you had eight people from who had been, who were Israeli and obviously had military experience where they were able to demonstrate significant impact and leadership prior to MBA.

[00:14:18] John Byrne: Yeah. In fact, 10 years ago, roughly 2%. of the class went to either West Point or the U.

S. Naval Academy. Good number of people actually from the military. Maria, any other observations?

[00:14:34] Maria Wich-Vila: Yeah, I was also surprised at the fact that within those top employers And when we look at the tech companies, it was Google and Facebook and Meta with a pretty large showing. Google was actually the fourth largest employer after the MBBs and, but then, I was expecting there to be an equal distribution amongst those famous large cap technology companies.

So I, I would have expected even representation amongst Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Amazon, et cetera. And yet. Apple and Amazon only had one or two people each versus Google at 25. So I thought that was really fascinating and it makes me wonder if perhaps it’s a function of maybe Google and Meta might give their younger talent more opportunities to lead impactful projects, perhaps.

I’m just guessing here, but maybe Apple and Amazon perhaps are more hierarchical. And maybe don’t give their younger talent so many opportunities, but I was really surprised by that. I would have expected a much more even distribution amongst the those famous those famous tech companies.

[00:15:40] John Byrne: Yeah. You’re right. And I crunched the numbers on the percentages and Google took three and a half percent of the two classes and that’s better than Goldman, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase. Facebook had 2. 7 percent and Microsoft at 1. 5, and I was shocked at Amazon because, Amazon is widely known as the largest single recruiter of MBAs in the past five years.

At one point, they were recruiting a thousand MBAs a year, but in, in one sense, maybe Amazon quite doesn’t really have the prestige. For Stanford MBAs who might rather work elsewhere, I think that might be is, you look at the employment reports at a lot of the other schools and Amazon is number one at a number of schools and very low percentage of people from Amazon going to Stanford.

We don’t know, of course, how many. Leaving Stanford and going back to Amazon, but it can’t be that many.

[00:16:41] Heidi Hillis: I wonder if there’s something about just a proximity effect here. You have the plate, like the meta and Google just being so close to Stanford, maybe it just, attracts more people applying because they.

They’re almost on campus and maybe, just being Amazon all over the world and different places could be not attracting as many. I don’t know.

[00:17:03] John Byrne: Yeah, true. The other thing, the analysis shows, and this is what you also gather from the more public class profile is really the remarkable diversity of talent that a school like Stanford can attract year after year.

It is, it blows you away, really. The quality and the diversity of people despite the concentration of undergraduate degree holders or company employers, it’s it’s really mind boggling, isn’t it?

[00:17:33] Heidi Hillis: Yeah, they come from everywhere and really interesting paths and even the people I think that, have those kind of typical paths, you see a lot of diversity within them as well.

So I think, even if you’re coming from a Goldman or a McKinsey having lived in another country or gone to done a fellowship abroad or running a non profit on the side. These things are actually what helped them to stand out. But you do see some really interesting, I think, profiles, too, of people who’ve just done, you get a sense of what it would be like to be in the Stanford classroom.

People from really unique and different backgrounds. People who come from all different countries and lawyers, doctors people who have run, nonprofits in developing countries people running large programs for places like Heineken or Amazon too. But, it’s a real diversity of backgrounds.

[00:18:27] John Byrne: Now, Heidi, I wonder if one is an applicant. Is this discouraging to read and here’s why if I’m not from Harvard, Stanford, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, and if I didn’t work for McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Goldman, Google am I at a disadvantage and should I even try? Some people look at the data and come away with that conclusion.

[00:18:52] Heidi Hillis: I think it’s a reality check for a lot of people. I think it’s just, it’s really, it just helps people understand, what it, the difficulty of this, why it’s so competitive, but I think that there is, again, behind the kind of the percentages, you do look at these individual profiles and I would get, I would actually take a lot of hope from it if I were looking, as an applicant, because especially if you are.

Maybe a little bit more of a big fish or small fish in a bigger pond or big fish in a smaller pond you go to Rice or you go to Purdue or, and you do really well, those are the people who, they’re definitely looking for that diversity of background as well as the international.

I think that’s really neat. think that, instead of looking at the data and saying, why not, why I shouldn’t even apply, it’s why not me look at these other profiles of people who have taken really unique paths that that do get in. So I think it is actually a Kind of a mix of both, it is a reality check for a lot of people, but it’s actually, there is so much diversity in the data as well.

I think also one thing that we haven’t really covered is about is just the prevalence of social impact in, that’s really taken hold of the class. I don’t, again, going back to your 2013 analysis, I’m not sure how easy it was to tell that, but a lot of you can see reflected in the both the types of organizations people are working for, but also their titles and the kinds of work that they’re doing that that there’s a huge 40 percent of the class of the two classes had some kind of social impact in their background.

Whether that’s, running their own nonprofit on the side or volunteering or. Running trans transformational kind of programs within companies that are, either in finance or consulting or in industry. That’s a big trend. I think that people can take heart from as well.

So if you’re working if you feel like you’re in an organization where you’re not getting the leadership that you. can use to highlight your potential for Stanford, that’s definitely a place you can go is working for in volunteer capacity for a non profit or on the board of a of some kind of foundation.

Those are the kinds of places that you can highlight your potential

[00:21:00] John Byrne: true. And I know we have a overrepresented part of every applicant pool at an elite business school are software engineers from India. And I wonder in your analysis, how many of them did you find from like the IITs?

[00:21:18] Heidi Hillis: That’s a good question. The IITs, it was again, it was one of these you have about 50 percent of classes internet, so 25 percent of the class. was educated outside of the US. The IITs are going to be up there. Let’s see from India, 2. 1 percent of the class came from India. So probably, I don’t know offhand exactly how many of those were IITs, but

[00:21:43] John Byrne: I’ve had a lot of them.

[00:21:45] Heidi Hillis: Yeah, probably a lot of them. Although I think, that’s the other thing is that people who come, to work with me from India, they feel like if they haven’t gone to IIT, then that’s going to be a disadvantage. But I think, you’ll find that there are, there’s representation of other universities as well.

Definitely.

[00:22:00] Caroline Diarte Edwards: Yeah, I was just looking at the list of undergrad institutions. And for example, you’ve got Osmania University from Hyderabad. So it is not, it’s not all IIT. Okay.

[00:22:12] John Byrne: Yeah, exactly. And Caroline, 1 of the things about the institutions that are really represented here and that I don’t really see unless I missed it.

I didn’t see a Cambridge or an Oxford. Two of the best five universities in the world. And I wonder if that’s just a function of fewer people in the applicant pool or what? What do you think that could be about?

[00:22:36] Caroline Diarte Edwards: I had a look through the uk Institutions and you have got cambridge in there.

I think I also noticed. Bristol university there are a few different universities. So i’m aston university, which is not it’s not on a par with Oxford or Cambridge. So I think that speaks to the point that Heidi made that you don’t have to have been to an elite school to get into Stanford.

Aston is a good solid university, nothing wrong with Aston, but it’s not it’s not one of the top UK universities. So there’s definitely some interesting variety in the educational backgrounds of the students going to Stanford. And

[00:23:16] John Byrne: then, yeah, it is if you’re a big fish in a small pond, like Afton, you’ll you could still stand out in the pool.

[00:23:26] Heidi Hillis: Absolutely. There’s a lot of really interesting background, you have look hard on blue and you have Miami University and some really smaller universities abroad. I think. Again, it’s really, if you look at that, it does give you hope because it’s really what you do afterwards and if you, obviously, if you come from one of these schools, you probably want to be in the top, 5 percent of the graduating class, you want to show that you have the GPA that can support an academic background that they feel comfortable that you’ll be able to compete academically, but, and maybe that’s what you’re Offset by the, the GMA or the scores, you don’t know, we don’t have those on here.

But, um, the path post university really becomes much more important in those cases. What you’ve done since then where you’ve, how you’ve risen from starting at a entry level position to, running a division or heading a country group or something like that.

[00:24:21] John Byrne: And as far as Cordon Bleu goes, every good business program needs a Cordon Bleu, for God’s sake, right?

You want to eat well at those NBA parties, don’t you?

[00:24:32] Heidi Hillis: Absolutely.

[00:24:35] John Byrne: Maria, I’m sure that was true at Harvard.

[00:24:38] Maria Wich-Vila: I wasn’t the one doing the cooking but I certainly, I was certainly a member of the wine and cuisine society where I happily participated in the eating and consuming a part of that.

But to, to the point that we were just recently talking about. regarding being a big fish in a small pond. Not only have I seen it personally with applicants that I’ve worked with who did not attend these elite universities, but even many years ago, I attended a, an admissions conference where Kirsten Moss, who was the former head of admissions at Stanford, she actually told stories about how they’ve accepted people who even attended community college.

But within the context of that community college, they had really moved mountains. And she said that one of the things that they look for is, Within the context and the opportunities that you’ve been given, how much impact have you had? So maybe you don’t have an opportunity to go to Yale or MIT or IIT for your undergraduate, but whatever opportunity you have been given, have you grabbed that opportunity and really made the most of it and really driven change?

So she specifically called out, I believe, I believe there were two students that year at the GSB who had both started their educations, their higher educations at community college. Anything is possible. It really is about finding the people who, wherever they go, they jump in and make an impact.

[00:25:55] Heidi Hillis: Yeah, I think that to that point, I think it can almost be a more difficult if you’ve gone to Harvard and then worked at one of these, gone on one of these paths because we know that there’s, that’s an overrepresented pool in the applicant pool to stand out among those to have had that, that pedigree sometimes can be a disadvantage, right?

If you haven’t done as much as you should have with that, or if you started at that high level to show that level of progress over the course of your career is actually a little bit more difficult. Okay. And coming from a community college and rising to, a country level manager in some places is actually puts you at a significant advantage, I would say.

[00:26:31] Maria Wich-Vila: Because it’s hard for those people, it’s hard for those people to stand out, but also I think some of them go on autopilot, right? I think some people are on this kind of achievement, elite achievement treadmill, where they’re not even really thinking about what do I want to do with my life?

They’re always reaching for whatever that next, what’s the best college to go to? It’s Harvard Princeton. Yeah. Okay. Now that I’m here, what’s the best employer to work for? It’s McKinsey, Bain, BCG and without actually perhaps stopping to think about what is my passion? What impact do I want to make in the world?

And so I feel sometimes those autopilot candidates, I feel a little bit bad for them because they’re doing everything quote unquote and yet sometimes when you speak with them, that passion just isn’t there. And I do think that may ultimately harm them in the very, very elite business school.

Admissions because business schools want people who are passionate because at the end of the day, in order to do hard things, you’re going to need passion at some point to get you through those low periods. And so I think that’s something business schools look for. And I do think that sometimes these.

These kind of autopilot candidates might sometimes be at a disadvantage.

[00:27:29] Heidi Hillis: Yeah, I think that, to that point look in the data, when you look at it, you see so many people who’ve gone to McKinsey, Bain, Weasley, or Goldman, but then there’s a, you see a lot of success for people who’ve actually pivoted.

So those pivots that are post The second or third job really do show you that, if you’re if you get a candidate who’s coming from, still at McKinsey, okay, that’s fine. They have to be the top 5 percent of McKinsey, like they have to be going to get so many McKinsey applicants that the only the, you can look at the data in a couple ways.

One is, oh, my God, they took 12 people from McKinsey and the others. Oh, my God, they only took 12 people from McKinsey, right? That’s So if you want to be one of those 12, you have to be the top 12 in the world, right? Whereas if you’ve gone to McKinsey and then done an externship at a health care startup and then moved on to be a product manager at for health at Google, that kind of a path is definitely showing a little bit more, maybe risk taking, maybe ability to follow your passions.

So I think that. When I see candidates who come to me, for example, and they’re like, not thinking about applying now, but maybe in a year or two, I say, look for an externship, maybe think about pivoting out of one of these places and looking for some operational experience.

And because you see in the data that works.

[00:28:42] Maria Wich-Vila: And they’re doing themselves a service not only in terms of enhancing their admissions chances, but even just in terms of determining, what do I want to do with my career? If I do eventually want to go into industry, what functional role do I want to have?

What industry do I want to work in? So it’s, it actually benefits them in the long term to do that as well, even if they don’t go to business school. I think those secondments and externships and second job, post consulting jobs are extremely valuable. Totally agree with you.

[00:29:06] Caroline Diarte Edwards: And I’m sure they also bring more to the classroom as well.

I would think that’s also why Stanford is selecting some of those candidates, because not only have they worked at McKinsey, but they’ve also led a non profit in Africa or worked in private equity or whatever it is. So they have much more breadth that they can bring to the classroom. And I think that It’s seen as a very valuable contribution

[00:29:29] John Byrne: in Heidi.

Did you see that? The majority of the candidates to examined actually did work in more than one place, right?

[00:29:37] Heidi Hillis: Yes, most of them did. There were very few that, you see working at one place. And I would say that those are people that would have really risen through the ranks.

Someone who’s worked at Walmart and become, started in, I don’t know, in one state, but then to become a regional manager and things like that really are going to onto a global role. The people who have stayed at one place really have shown significant career progression within that.

And then the other people I think you do see a lot of movement. The big. The most typical would be from investment banking to private equity and then you do find in finance, there’s a little bit less kind of movement into other industries. You see a lot of people staying within finance, but within finance.

Yeah. Yeah. The other industries, especially consulting or other, tech, people are really moving into other places and it’s becoming, it is a little bit difficult. We have these categories that we’ve talked about, for example, healthcare, but it’s hard to categorize some of these companies.

Are they healthcare? Are they tech? There’s a lot of overlap. And so everything’s a little bit of tech in something nowadays. So whether it’s finance and fintech or education and ed tech or health care and health tech, these are all merging and combining. It’s hard to categorize them.

[00:30:53] John Byrne: So looking at the data here I wonder if you’ve seen your old classmates in the sense that these new people are very much like the people you went to school with at Stanford. I

[00:31:05] Heidi Hillis: put this out and it’s really interesting to a lot of my classmates downloaded the report and read it. And a lot of them came back and said, oh, boy, I would never get in now.

It’s these people are super impressive. I think that you see a lot of. It’s just become more and more competitive. And I think that with more information and more people every year applying, it is becoming really difficult. I think that you do see a lot of, I am encouraged by the diversity part of it that you see still Stanford.

I feel like they do take risks on some really interesting profiles and candidates that maybe some other schools are less likely to do. And so that’s what does give me. A lot of hope when I get some kind of really nontraditional candidate who wants to, their dream school is Stanford. I feel like, I say all the time, there’s a 6 percent chance.

You’re going to get in, but there’s 100 percent chance. You won’t get in if you don’t apply. So you’ve got to, you got to give it a go. And that’s, the attitude that we take to it.

[00:32:04] John Byrne: Indeed. So for all of you out there read Heidi’s article on our site, it’s called who gets in and why exclusive research.

Into Stanford GSB and I’ll tell you one conclusion I have about this is that, man, if you really want to get into Stanford, you need a Sherpa, and and Heidi would be a great Sherpa for you because the, just the profiles of these folks, where they’ve been, what they’ve done, what they’ve accomplished in their early lives is so remarkable that To compete against, in this pool for a spot in the class you need every possible advantage you can get.

And and having an expert guide you through this trip probably would be a really big advantage. So Heidi, thank you for sharing your insights with us and the research, the very cool research.

[00:33:01] Heidi Hillis: Thank you

[00:33:03] John Byrne: and for all of you out there. Good luck. And if you want to go to Stanford, you got to check out this report.

Okay. It will inspire you to up your game, even if you are from Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, or wherever McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Goldman, Google, you want to look at this report and you want to really think about. What it will really take to get in. I think it will inspire you, motivate you to really put your best foot forward.

Thanks for listening. This is John Byrne with Poets& Quants.

Maria

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