Dissecting Bloomberg Businessweek’s 2021-2022 MBA Ranking
Maria |
September 21, 2021

The Bloomberg Business Week 2021-22 MBA ranking, coming back from last year’s suspension, is the topic of discussion for this week’s episode of Business Casual with their “interesting” and “surprising” list of top b-schools for this year’s entry.

Listen in as two of our three hosts, Maria and Caroline, who are alumni from HBS and INSEAD and are MBA consultants by profession, explain why “someone who’s been to the school has a much better sense of what the school is about” than “a journalist who cooks up a ranking”.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:07.450] – John

Well, hello, everyone. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants co host Caroline Diarte Edwards and Maria Wich Villa. Maria, of course, is the founder of ApplicantLab and Caroline is the always witty, always sophisticated co founder of Fortuna Admissions and the former director of admissions at INSEAD. Welcome, all. Hey, this week the big talk is all about rankings. That would be the Bloomberg Business Week ranking, which actually was suspended last year. So this year it’s a return. And sure, the results are kind of interesting and we’re going to get it all into this along with what you should discount, what you should take seriously, if anything at all, other than the entertainment value of what’s been published. Let’s just do the simple thing and say who’s on first? Stanford came out at the top of the ranking. This is the third year in a row that the school has been number one and having the best MBA program in the United States. Dartmouth Tuck was number two. Interestingly enough, it’s the second year in a row that Tuck has maintained that number two position, which might surprise a lot of people.

[00:01:25.600] – John

Harvard is number three, the exact place it was for the last two years, two times that Bloomberg Business we put out the list. Chicago Booth is 4th, Northwestern Kellogg’s 5th. Then we have Columbia, UC Berkeley, MIT, Wharton in 9th place, tied not even in sole possession of 9th place, tied with the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. And that, obviously is the big unexpected news in this current ranking. What do you make, Caroline, of Wharton’s poor showing?

[00:02:02.350] – Caroline

It is very surprising, isn’t it? On one hand, the publishers have to make a story every year, right? So if they publish the same ranking every year or with some small variations, then no one would bother reading it. So it’s an eyeballs game. So they’ve got to juggle things around so that people pay attention and they cause a bit of publicity for each new ranking. So I am somewhat skeptical, as you know, about this whole game. But it is disappointing for Water. I know that you noted in one of your articles, John, that there had possibly been some poor feedback from a few of the students, and it’s true that a few respondents can have an impact on the results overall. And so if you have a handful of students who feel a bit disgruntled, then it can skew the results. And I do remember last year, in the spring of last year, speaking to students at a number of schools, and by far the most disgruntled happened to be the student at Water. Now it’s just a sample of one. Right. So it’s not very representative.

[00:03:13.220] – John

But we’ll get to that, though.

[00:03:14.820] – Caroline

Yeah. I mean, she was an international student and she felt that she felt it marginalized. She felt that she wasn’t getting much out of the program there had apparently been some sort of stat online amongst some of the students, and that left some very hard feelings. She also felt her being towards the school and how they handled the pandemic was not as positive as students at other schools that I spoke to who felt more goodwill towards the school and how things had changed. So just one person. But it’s possible that there were a handful of people at Wharton who weren’t happy about how things went during the pandemic and therefore have slammed the school in these surveys.

[00:03:56.760] – John

Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. And if you go back and you look at what happened at Wharton and this is sort of unusual. Yeah. Students that very few MBA programs were happy about having to go online and they were pretty frustrated about not being able to have the normal social interactions that are a key part of an MBA program and that leads to the networking that ultimately results in enduring friendships and support over the course of your career. Now, during the summer of 2020, when most MBA programs have announced plans to go hybrid, Orton was really at that point the only M seven MBA program that took a blended approach off the table and announced that everything would go online. And even before they did that, a student initiated survey at the school found that 78% of the MBA said they were not excited about the upcoming semester. 94% of the students felt the value of their overall MBA experience is diminished by at least 40%. And then when they were asked to rate their expectations for the full semester last summer on a scale of one which meant would rather defer to ten, very excited, 78% of the students rated at five or above.

[00:05:12.860] – John

And this survey reflected 539 members of the Class of 2021, which was just under 70% of the second year MBA. So the disappointment, the anger, the frustration, most of which Incidentally revolved around their belief that the administration was not collaborative, was not engaging in a dialogue with the students, was acting unilaterally on everything related to how it would deal with COVID. I think really seeped into the Business Week ranking. I call it the Revenge of the Cobra Cohort, because as people know, Businessweek has always surveyed the latest graduating class. And so their results are in this survey. And if you look at the underlying scores in the ranking, you’ll find that Wharton score for the topic of learning, which is really made up of the student survey, by and large, is a disaster, an absolute disaster. And just to go back to what Caroline said, I want to underline that because this is really an important point about all these surveys and why everyone should take them with a big grain of salt. If you survey students or recent alumni, graduates of the program, they know without any prompting that the answers are going to be reflected in a ranking that will ultimately have some influence over the reputation of the school and their own degree.

[00:06:48.260] – John

So there is a fair amount of cheerleading in these survey responses, and that cheerleading leads to highly clustered results. And what I mean by that is that the differences between and among any of these student surveys at any of the schools is so small as to be statistically insignificant. It doesn’t really matter, to be totally honest. And when you get a few people who are truly disenchanted, it wipes out that cheerleading significantly and leads to a huge change in result, in part because the overall responses are so clustered together. So that’s exactly what happened to Wharton in this case. So then the question is in the ranking, should that be the case? Should one class disaffection with the school and their experience have such a dramatic impact? Because after all, we all know that Wharton’s MBA program is definitely not a nice place in the United States, if not the world. So what we’re seeing here in this rank is an anomaly, which is as a result of probably poor management of the cold crisis, because in many of the schools, particularly Stanford, Incidentally, the leadership manage this very well, and the students were very happy to be included, embraced their opinions, saw in a truly collaborative process that resulted in what decisions Stanford had to take to deal with the pandemic.

[00:08:23.950] – John

What are some of the other surprises, Maria, anything here pops out for you?

[00:08:28.170] – Maria

Well, I have a positive surprise. I agree with you. I think that asking one class for their opinions, and so you get one disgruntled class. And is that even the right metric to be using? I think that’s sort of silly, but one positive is that they’ve added in, I believe, a diversity metric. And so we’re seeing I believe it was Howard University had a really big jump. And so I think that that’s a good thing, because I think as we’ve expressed before, or at least I’ve expressed before, I don’t think that diversity is just sort of like a politically correct Kumbaya type of term. I think that there is legitimate value in not only educating people from broad swathes of society, but in going to business school with people from broad swathes society of so that you get to learn their perspective because African Americans are what, 13% of the US population? Latinos are 17%. So we’re not talking about like a very niche. If you go to business school with some of these folks, like, oh, man, they’re forcing us. They’re doing all this charade for the politically correct charade. But it doesn’t really matter now.

[00:09:35.740] – Maria

We’re talking like easily 30% plus percent of the population. And in fact, the US will be minority white, I believe, in the next 20 years or so. Hey, I think that it’s not just because it’s sort of the Kumbaya thing to do, but I think that there is legitimate need for business schools to have diverse classes. And so I think that that’s allowing certain schools that perhaps it’s interesting. Right. Because the rankings always change what they ask the schools for. So I think some schools have spent years trying to game the system by upping their GMAT scores and maybe trying to play games with accepting people with higher GMAT scores. And the average GMAT goes up, and then the ranking goes up. And so now I think by, quote, unquote, rewarding diversity, I would love to know more exactly about how they measure that. But by rewarding diversity, hopefully it will now make the schools take this more seriously because they realize that they have to do it if they want to continue to have strong showings.

[00:10:29.870] – John

That’s true. And I think the fact that diversity, equity, and inclusion have become a major priority among American corporations as well as the business schools makes me think that the time is right to at least take a look at this and maybe incorporate it into a ranking. In this case, Business Week. For the very first time out of this diversity evaluation, they waited at about 8.6%, which is the least of all the five factors that they evaluate. And I think it’s a good idea. The problem always is in the execution, right? I mean, that’s where every good idea either succeeds or fails. And there’s some tricky things that go on when you try to get a handle on diversity because it really is a complicated subject. And in this case, what the magazine actually did is that the percentage of Blacks at any given school were multiplied by 1.7 times. In other words, they were given much greater value in the diversity ranking than the percentage of Asian Americans whose percentage was actually discounted by giving them a multiple of 0.4 because they are overpopulated. Right. Compared to Blacks and Hispanics. But I can imagine that that would be quite a controversial issue in and of itself, given the lawsuits that we’ve seen against Harvard in the past is at the undergraduate level from Asian Americans who felt they were disadvantaged in the admissions process there.

[00:12:00.800] – John

Also, when you look at the results of the survey, they are kind of surprising. North Carolina State and George Washington University are way up there. In fact, they’re number one and number two on the diversity index, Howard is number three. And that allowed Howard to Zoom into the top 25 for the first time ever. And while I agree it’s great, Maria, to see an HBSC in the mix of the top schools, you have to wonder now because virtually all the students at Howard are black, does that make for a diverse class? Because if you add up all the white, Hispanic, and Asian American students at Howard, the percentage is zero. So therefore, Howard’s student population does not have 85.3% of the US population in it. It starts to get very tricky that way. The other issue that’s not addressed. And this is as important as diversity, which is inclusion. It’s important and crucial to have a mix of very diverse students. But it’s equally important to have a culture where differences are respected and valued. And I think one goes hand in hand with the other. Now that second thing, inclusion is so much harder to measure, but it could actually take a stab at this in the student surveys, because after all, those are surveys that get at least the latest feelings.

[00:13:30.410] – John

And despite the cheerleading that goes on, I would suggest to you that if people from a diverse background felt that they were unwelcome or that their opinions were not treated with the respect and the value of their classmates, I think they would be far more likely to answer those questions honestly than the more typical questions that are on the survey. So there is that I think business we should be congratulated for trying to get their arms around this very big and complicated issue that’s assumed a lot of importance in American society with the murder of George Floyd and the kind of reckoning that has occurred in this country over that there’s probably a better way to measure it.

[00:14:15.990] – Maria

Yeah, no, I agree. I think that putting it down to race, it’s always bother me. It’s overly simplistic. Right. Because you might have a black or Hispanic MBA student whose father runs a private equity firm, and they attended Exeter and Stanford for undergrad. And you might have a white person seriously, though, you might have a white person who had a single mother, or you might have someone from the Asian American one is one that also has never sat well with me. Right. Because we’re going to take a couple of dozen countries and lump them together. So someone from Lao or Cambodia has a very different Asian American experience than someone perhaps from China or India. Some Asian Americans have parents who are neuroscientists, and some have parents who are working in the service industry. So I think I would love more for diversity to be more about socioeconomic background and opportunities growing up.

[00:15:20.290] – John

Yeah, I totally agree with that. Having had a mother who could not read or write, having had both parents who never had the benefit of College education, and we were largely factory workers and being a first year College student, I totally agree with you. But almost a more interesting piece here, the data that comes from their examination of diversity. And this is data that we’ve seen here and there where a few schools have released, but we’ve never seen a great apples to apples comparison. And I’m going to give Business with a lot of credit for publishing the underlying data of its diversity index, which is far more revealing than where any given school might rank. So for the first time ever, you’re able to see what percentage of the class is actually white, black, Hispanic, Asian American at all the schools. And one of the surprises is actually Wharton. Now, white students at Wharton in this latest incoming class are at a minority. They’re 48% of the student body. Sure, that’s a heck of a lot more than 11% of the black students or the 8% of the Hispanics or 26% of the Asian Americans.

[00:16:38.530] – John

But it’s somewhat a surprise because if you looked at Northwestern, Kellogg, white students are 64% at Columbia, they’re 63% at MIT, they’re 60% at Harvard 53, Chicago 55, and Stanford 52. So just I think shining light, who is the chief justice of the Supreme Court, who once said the benefit of transparency is like sunlight. It just provides a lot of clarity and cleanness to it. And it also, frankly, puts peer pressure on each of these schools to do better. Now, one other interesting aspect of this is that obviously, Businessweek ranks the international schools, and Businessweek chose not to impose a diversity index or measure on any of the international schools. And I think that kind of makes sense to me because internationally people have very different views of diversity than they do in the United States, where we are very much focused on underrepresented minorities. But, Caroline, is it possible to measure the diversity of the European, the Asian, the Indian schools?

[00:17:52.780] – Caroline

Oh, you’re right. The definition is nothing different. So the school talks about diversity as the multiplicity of nationalities and cultures that you have represented at the school. Similar picture at London business school, where you have often no single nationality, representing about more than 10% of the class and 70 different nationalities in the cartoon. So that creates an incredibly diverse environment, and that has long been the case. So you’re right that the perspective on diversity and how measuring diversity is quite different. And the business suite ranking is reflecting very much US perspective on what is diversity and what progress needs to be made with regards diversity. So it’s complex in the many layers of it.

[00:18:48.740] 

Right.

[00:18:48.900] – Caroline

And I’m sure the European and international schools could also make a lot more progress on some of the aspects of diversity that Maria mentioned associate economic diversity. And I’m not sure to what extent that is being measured and captured anywhere. But I know from my experience that there is often a lot more economic, financial need and need some financial support at those very international schools because candidates are coming from countries where they haven’t had much the same earning power as candidates from the US or the UK or Western Europe, and therefore, it’s much more difficult for them to fund their studies. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are sort of low down socioeconomic ladder in their own country. Right. So it was a very complex question. But it’s interesting in the international ranking that you have Bocconi at number three in front of business school. So I haven’t had a chance to dig into that yet to understand how that came about, but I don’t think anyone else would put the Cody at Buffett’s yet in Munda Business school.

[00:20:06.730] – John

I’d have to agree with you, even though I have a lot of Italian blood in me. Hey, I like pasta and I love pizza. I love the country of Italy, and it’s my favorite place to go for vacation and Bocconi school. Let’s face it, it’s a really good school. But not INSEAD, not London Business School, not HCC, Paris, not IESE and Barcelona either. I don’t think you can argue about Cambridge and Oxford and a lot of other great European MBA experiences. Certainly good school, but I’m pretty darn skeptical about it being ahead of in Seattle and the business school. And there are always, like, wacky things to any given ranking in any given year. This year, four schools actually fell out of the top 25 in this ranking, including the University of North Carolina’s. Keenans Vlagwood Business School, which actually plunged 15 places to rank 33rd in the previous ranking, ranked 18th. And then even this is surprising to me. The University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, which plunged 14 spots to rank 30th from 16th. And of course, Washington’s Foster School has been a great beneficiary of the success of Amazon, Microsoft, Starbucks, and other really big, important companies in the Seattle area that has really elevated its status in probably the last decade or more.

[00:21:46.320] – John

And then you have the crazy things I’m going to ask for Caroline Marie, after I mentioned some of these crazy things, how does an applicant treat this? I mean, is there anything here that’s really valuable? What can you discount? What can you take seriously but just stir out a few other facts, okay. William and Mary, they lost 24 places in the ranking. They now rank 58th from 34. Syracuse, they lost 17. Utah lost 16. As I mentioned before, UNC lost 15 spots. And then you have the schools that actually where the champagne quarks are inevitably popping instead of people crying in their beer. Miami University of Miami’s Business School up 26 places to 46 from 72. Rutgers Business School in New Jersey of 25 to 37. Howard University, as we mentioned before, in the top 25 for the very first time, ranking 23rd. That’s a 22 place improvement in this, mind you, is over a period of time when really there were no substantial changes to any of these MBA programs whatsoever, nor was there any substantial change in how employers view these programs. So this is a direct result of methodology and the wackiness that rankings bring to the game.

[00:23:19.330] – John

So, Maria, how should they just treat this? Is this pure entertainment? So if you do well, you have bragging rights, but don’t take them too seriously. And if you do poorly, just say Business Week is an idiotic publication with Editors who are mindless.

[00:23:41.070] – Maria

I like how you ask the question, and then you verbatim said what my answer would have been.

[00:23:48.030] – John

You want to steal your Thunder.

[00:23:50.370] – Maria

Yes, I agree, because I agree with you completely. I think look, these rankings, as Caroline said at the beginning, this is for clicks. This is to generate buzz and discussion and get people coming to their website and blah, blah, blah. And yeah, like you said, it gives a couple of perhaps otherwise overlooked program the chance to update the website with an exciting banner that proclaims their new ranking. But I would not take it seriously at all in terms of, look, if you’ve done the research and you have a specific career goal or a specific geographic goal with your career and you’ve done the research and you’ve found certain programs that will give you the steps that you need to take towards reaching those goals, then don’t pay any attention to these rankings. It’s just sort of a big circus.

[00:24:40.310] – John

Yeah. Caroline, I assume you agree.

[00:24:43.190] – Caroline

Yes, I agree with that. As you know, John, the world of education and well, at least traditional educational institutions, which many of these schools are it’s not known for the rapid pace of change.

[00:24:56.960] – Maria

Right.

[00:25:00.930] – Caroline

Exactly. It’s somewhat artificial. Right. That things have not changed that much from one year to the next. It takes much longer, really. The changes happen over a much longer period in terms of how a school stands versus its peers. So you can’t really put much weight on changes from year to year. And also, you said earlier, a lot of the data clusters together. There can be very small differences that result in quite dramatic outcomes in the final ranking. So I think it gives a false impression that there’s a big difference between some of these scores, whereas in fact, when you dig into the data, the differences are not so dramatic. I think it’s interesting for candidates to read through the rankings, get beyond the headlines, don’t just look at the bare ranking itself, but dig into it, understand the methodology and figure out which data points are useful for you, because every ranking methodology is different and they may be using criteria that are completely relevant to you as a candidate. So if you’re going to look at it, spend a bit of time understanding it and reading beyond the headlines.

[00:26:31.160] – John

Yeah, that’s really true. And a good example of how close these schools are is in the compensation data, let’s face it. So compensation and placement in the Bloomberg Businessweek ranking are more heavily weighted than any other factor. And that tends to be true across all the rankings, whether it’s the Financial Times, US News or what have you. Almost always, compensation, placement are the most heavily weighted factors that result in a school’s success. And we know that both of those compensation and placement are dramatically impacted by the school’s location, by the industry choices the students make in deciding where to pursue their careers, and by the school’s overall reputation, which determines, in fact, whether McKinsey Bain, BCG, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs even show up to recruit the students. And so you can get compensation very high at schools that you might not think about. And the differences among the best schools is often so slight as to also be statistically insignificant. Now, I should point out that this is the 20th time Business Week has published a ranking. And one confession I have to make, and this is for total transparency is I created this ranking back in 1988.

[00:28:04.010] – John

So I am the Doctor Frankenstein who created the monster who now runs the Earth, terrorizing all the business schools and creating lists that obsess every applicant, student and alumni of the schools.

[00:28:19.690] – Caroline

Thank you for that job.

[00:28:21.430] – Maria

Yeah, great.

[00:28:23.350] – John

I should also say that because I was in the lab as Dr. Frankenstein creating the monster, I know what limitations there are to data. I know what limitations there are to these different methodologies that are created to crank out these lists. And I know kind of where the holes are and what to look for. As I pointed out, the 20th. And during those 20 lists, Kellogg has landed in first place five times in the Bloomberg Business Week ranking, Wharton and Chicago Booth four times each, Harvard and Stanford three times each, and Duke’s Fuqua School once, just to put all of that into perspective. Now the thing about the ranking is that no matter what we say about how frivolous it can be, how misinformed the Editors can be in choosing what factors to weigh and how much each factor should get, people do pay attention to these lists, which is why we’re devoting your podcast to this one. It does affect application volume. It actually affects alumni giving alumni whose schools rank high tend to be in more generous moods than alumni whose schools rank low or who fall in the ranking. It does affect careers in many cases.

[00:29:52.340] – John

Dean searches now have specs in them that will actually literally say your job will be to improve the school’s rankings. It even affects faculty recruitment, because I have heard in some cases, believe it or not, faculty from certain countries where rankings are really important, like China or India, for that matter, might choose one school that’s ranked higher than another in evaluating a job offer. So there is some consequence to all this, and we just want to actually put some reasonable and sensible expectations around it, read it for the entertainment value it provides. Look over the long term to see what a school’s results are, and look over numerous rankings, not only one. And the benefit of the business school ranking game is that you have five legitimate media organizations that rank the Financial Times, The Economist, US News, obviously this Business Week one, and then Forbes. And those are really the five rankings that are followed by most folks and at poetry points, what we try to do is simply match them all together. So in one shot you can see where every school ranks across all of the five most influential rankings. And if you’re interested in reading more about the Bloomberg Business Week ranking, as is often the case, we too here at Poets and Quants are.

[00:31:24.400] – John

And I’ll admit it, we’re obsessed with rankings. We think they’re a lot of fun. And we’ve done two stories on the Bloomberg Businessweek ranking, the ten biggest surprises in this year’s list, as well as just our overall analysis of the latest ranking, the 20th in Business Weeks history. So, Maria, any final words to add because your alma mother finished third?

[00:31:51.170] – Maria

Oh, no. I’m going to ask for a refund. Who cares? Harvard could be 300 and it still would have been the right program for me. Like who cares? My final thought is sort of a relatively small one if you are looking to go to school in Los Angeles. I don’t understand why USC is doing better than UCLA in a number of rankings. USC is a fine, wonderful school with some real strengths. But I think the quality of the experience at UCLA is much, much stronger. And I am flummoxed by seeing this one again. USC is beating out UCLA. Take it from someone who’s lived in Los Angeles for over 15 years. UCLA is a little bit better. Sorry, Bloomberg. I’m sorry. USC.

[00:32:39.530] – John

Totally agree with you. No doubt about it. No doubt in my mind at all. And Caroline, any final words for someone who’s an amalgam of the school that finished behind IMD IESE, Bin School and Bocconi?

[00:32:53.330] – Caroline

Well, as you said, it gets juggled around every year so I wouldn’t set too much store by these rankings. And someone who’s been to the school has a much better sense of what the school is about and what is the value of having done that? MBA then, frankly, a journalist who cooks up a ranking so I wouldn’t worry about it.

[00:33:19.140] – John

Indeed. There you go. So for all of you out there, thanks for listening to Business Casual. Our weekly podcast with my co host, Caroline and Maria. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. Thanks for listening.

Business School News | General | P&Q Podcast "Business Casual"
Dissecting Bloomberg Businessweek’s 2021-2022 MBA Ranking
Maria |
September 21, 2021

[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 ‘23 and the class of ‘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

New around here? I’m an HBS graduate and a proud member (and former Board Member) of AIGAC. I considered opening a high-end boutique admissions consulting firm, but I wanted to make high-quality admissions advice accessible to all, so I “scaled myself” by creating ApplicantLab. ApplicantLab provides the SAME advice as high-end consultants at a much more affordable price. Read our rave reviews on GMATClub, and check out our free trial (no credit card required) today!