Don’t Believe The Wall Street Journal: MBA Apps Are Up Again & It’s Been Super Competitive To Get In
Maria |
September 28, 2021

The Wall Street Journal recently published the article “MBA Applications at Some of the Country’s Best Colleges Fell this Year” talking about how application volumes at many of the top MBA programs are significantly down from last year’s volumes. In this week’s episode of Business Casual, John, Caroline and Maria dig into this claim and what the story behind the numbers REALLY is (hint – the headline is clearly sensationalist and misleading). 

The team also discusses John’s article about the MBA Admissions Consulting Firm that claims to have the “most former M7 adcoms” on its team. Is this something that really matters when it comes to MBA Admissions Consulting? Should “adcom” experience be a requirement for you when selecting an MBA Admissions coach? And what really constitutes “adcom experience” anyway? (Like many things, this can be subjective!) Listen below to hear what the team has to say. 

Episode Transcript

[00:00:07.270] – John

Well, hello, everyone. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. Welcome to Business Casual, our weekly podcast. We have two very sexy topics to discuss today with my co hosts, Caroline Diarte. Edwards, Maria Wich Vila. Caroline, of course, is the former admissions director at INSEAD and a co founder of Fortuna Admissions, one of the leading MBA consulting firms in the market. And Maria is the inventor of ApplicantLab, which allows applicants to kind of do it yourself approach, gaining guidance along each step of the way to help you enhance your odds of acceptance. And Maria graduated from that school in Boston that we all know and that many people apply to. We want to talk about two things. One is a Wall Street Journal story that appeared under the headline MBA Applications at Some of the Country’s Best Colleges Fell this Year. The story begins with some of the best known MBA programs in the US registered precipitous drops or sluggish interests from prospective candidates this year following a 2020 admission cycle in which applications soared. That’s one thing we want to take on. The second thing we want to take on is a story I’m working on, actually today.

 

[00:01:28.670] – John

And we’ll have appeared by the time this comes out. And it’s about an MBA admissions consulting firm which claims to have more M7 admission officials on its consulting team than any other firm in the world and why it thinks that’s a good thing. So we want to talk about what kind of backgrounds do MBA admission consultants bring to the game and doesn’t really matter if you’re going to get a terrific coaching experience from them, no matter what their background is. Let’s tackle the Wall Street Journal story first. We know that applications at the Kellogg School of Business dropped by 20%, which was pretty dramatic last year, and at Columbia Business School by less dramatic percentage 6%. But we also know that those are the only two schools that have so far reported in this current time period that have had declines. Every other school has had an increase. Michigan Ross, in fact, had an increase of over 50%. Many schools from Cornell to Yale and others have had a twelve plus percent increase. And MIT just announced another increase. In other words, the only two schools so far that are highly prominent in the US that have had a decline are Kellogg and Colombia.

 

[00:02:49.410] – John

And to put a little context around that, if you look at what happened to Kellogg the previous year, their applications were up by something like 54%. Now how come? It’s because they expanded the time in which you could apply to the school because of the pandemic, and they actually announced that they would waive standardized tests. So in came a flood of applicants. Now judged against that period is a more normal application cycle where they did not expand the deadlines, where they ended their policy of considering waivers of candidates and so naturally the application volume fell by 20%. That was a pretty dramatic fall, but it’s a total anomaly. And yet you look at the headline on that Wall Street Journal, you look at the lead on that story, and everything else is behind a paywall. And guess what? You think that there’s fewer people interested in getting an MBA today. You think that schools are hard up to find applicants. Caroline, what do you make of this?

 

[00:03:56.000] – Caroline

It’s a showing about the headline, as you say, and that they’ve exaggerated this. And we were discussing this last week when we talked about the rankings, that publishers often like to dramatize things for the sake of attracting eyeballs and sort of finding a story that isn’t there. And I think that this is the prime case of that. We’re trying to build traffic and create a story where there isn’t really one. So look, I think that last year was definitely a banner year for business schools. Volume has stabilized, but I don’t see a drop in the market. We see very strong demand for the new season. I did actually talk to a journalist for that article. One of the points that I made is that the top schools have a very consistent pipeline. And even though there are fluctuations year to year, yes, there may be a surge because of economic downturn, pandemic, etcetera. And it is cyclical. Despite those variations, the top schools have an incredibly strong presence pipeline of outstanding candidates coming through year in, year out. And the media often like to make a story about doom and gloom for business schools. It’s all going to hell in a handbasket.

 

[00:05:18.590] – Caroline

People don’t need MBAs any longer. Declining demand. It’s just not happening. We don’t see that there may be greater fluctuations in demand for schools that are further down the pecking order, but the top schools have consistent demand coming through, and we don’t see that changing.

 

[00:05:37.220] – John

That’s true. And the facts are just they’re obvious. Duke of 12.1%. Michigan of 55.9%. Cornell up 12.4. Yale up 12.3. Dartmouth, tuck up 11.0. Mit up 12.0. How in the world you could actually justify coming out with the story saying that things are bad, applications are down? I have no idea. Maria, you don’t trust what the media says even though you had a career in media.

 

[00:06:08.450] – Caroline

That’s why he doesn’t trust them.

 

[00:06:10.650] – Maria

I don’t trust anybody. John. No, you know what’s sort of annoying about this analysis, this quote unquote analysis is that it’s really not an apples to apples comparison. I mean, 2020 was such a crazy year, not just in MBA admissions, but you might have noticed that it was also a slightly crazy year on other facets of life as well. And so to say something like, well, Kellogg’s applications are down. That’s like saying, well, during the pandemic, I placed a lot of online grocery orders. And after the pandemic, I placed a lot fewer of them. And it’s like, well, does that mean that the grocery business is dying? No, it’s just because things are different now. And so I think I actually admittedly my coffee is still kicking in. But I Googled actually what was the 2019 application number to Kellogg? And so it might be down 20% versus last year. But if I did this correctly in my little Handy Dandy Excel sheet, they’re actually up by three and a half percent compared to 2019. So if this were really a doom and gloom thing, we would be seeing this very consistent downward trend even from pre pandemic levels.

 

[00:07:14.460] – Maria

So it’s really not fair to put up this pandemic number, which was crazy because as we’ve discussed in the past, Kellogg extended their deadlines. Kellogg said you don’t need a GMAT anymore, I believe. And guys, correct me if I’m wrong, because like I said, the coffee hasn’t kicked in yet. I think Kellogg actually even said, if we rejected you in an earlier round, you can come back and reapply. Maybe we’ll change our minds, right? So of course a bunch of rejected people were playing. So it’s not at all an apples to apples. It wasn’t an apples to apples comparison. So I get it, man. You need to generate the clicks. If you just say things are going swimmingly, not much change to report, then no one’s going to click on it. And John, you’re the one who was a journalist. Maybe your editor gets mad at you and they walk in and all grumpy and they’re like, nobody’s clicking on your article. Shape up, Byrne.

 

[00:08:05.090] – John

Luckily, I was a journalist.

 

[00:08:09.630] – Maria

You got out.

 

[00:08:12.390] – John

And to your point about catalog, okay, even after the 20% client, the application volume at the school was higher than any Kellogg admissions cycle since 2014. Okay, so of course that wasn’t in the story either. But it just goes to show and we’ve addressed this issue before. Why are there so many people who are so eager to, in one way or another, diminished the MBA? Yeah, I know, it’s the most popular graduate degree in America, and people tend to love success, but they also tend to envy and hate success in people and organizations and everything. When you’re number one, you’re always a target. But why is it so consistent that everyone wants to be a bearer of bad news when it comes to the NBA?

 

[00:09:03.870] – Maria

Maria, why do you think sodonfreude? It’s schadenfreude, right? I mean, everyone loves nobody. The only thing people love more than an underdog story is a fall from Grace story. And I wonder, I actually have not yet clicked on this article, but oftentimes the journalists who love writing these stories themselves don’t have MBAs. And so it’s really great. It’s extra great to be on the outside criticizing things. It’s like when people are like, oh, the Royal family, let’s throw rocks at them. And it’s like, well, is it because you really don’t like them or is it because you’re a little jealous that you’re not in the Royal family. Or maybe I don’t know if that analogy holds up, but you know what I mean. It’s like, well, wait a minute. Do you have an NBA? Like, if you did, you probably would think that it was a pretty valuable experience and maybe you would be a little bit less likely to throw rocks at it. Aka, jealous much.

 

[00:09:51.870] – John

Yeah. And Maria, you have an MBA. Caroline. You have an MBA, Caroline. I bet you are. There are times and people say, hey, do you really think that MBA was worth it? Don’t you regret having gone?

 

[00:10:02.560] – Caroline

Well, they don’t say that to me so often these days, given my profession, I think they can assume they know that the answer to that question. But people do sometimes say to me talk about the bad publicity that these articles generate and the latest tech Tyson has said, you don’t need to go to business school. So people are going to stop going to business school and demand is going to decrease. And the schools aren’t worried about that. They have an incredibly talented pipeline of people coming through who understand the value of the experience they’re going to get and how it’s going to help them in the future. So regardless of the latest headlines and what journalists jump on because somebody has said something critical, it’s like the Elon Musk thing the other day.

 

[00:10:56.150] 

Right.

 

[00:10:56.650] – Caroline

I mean, fundamentally, it doesn’t change anything about the business school experience and what you’re going to get out of it. And candidates know that and recruiters know that.

 

[00:11:06.870] – John

That is really true. If anything, I would think that what makes the job of selecting talent at these business schools so difficult is that there are so many highly skilled people who deserve to be admitted and so many of them are turned down. It’s the opposite problem. In other words, there’s a surplus of quality applicants that cannot be served by the limited supply of seats in the classroom. So I would think the greater worry at most business schools is, are we rejecting someone who potentially could be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or could be the next big entrepreneur who’s going to shape the way things are done in his or her industry, unless about, oh, our applications might be down by two or three or four or 5%, or in the case of Kellogg 20%, which still happens to be higher than any other application volume they’ve had since 2014. I’m sure that that’s true. Now, when you were at INSEAD, you certainly didn’t worry about application volume.

 

[00:12:18.760] – Caroline

No. And when I took the role, I spent some time looking back through the statistics, and clearly there was a cycle that is correlated with the economic cycle.

 

[00:12:30.250] 

Yes.

 

[00:12:31.000] – Caroline

But what I also observed was that there’s an incredibly consistent pipeline of strong candidates coming through. And when there’s a surge of applications, for example, if there’s an economic downturn. That increased volume is not always of the same quality as that consistent volume that’s coming through year by year. So therefore, the fluctuations sometimes it’s not necessarily terribly helpful because you get people throwing their head into the ring for the wrong reasons. Right. And they’re not necessarily the best qualified candidates and the best prepared candidates. So it’s somewhat misleading to say that a huge surge in application volume is a great thing for business schools because actually they don’t necessarily need all of that additional volume. And they may be dealing with more candidates who are less well prepared. The top schools have a very loyal base. The pipeline coming through year by year, regardless of the cycle. And all those headlines are just a distraction, really. And it doesn’t really say much about actually what is going on fundamentally.

 

[00:13:38.310] – John

Absolutely. So I want to turn to another topic because it’s ever present in my mind because I’m writing about this today. So a few days ago, one of your competitors and this goes to both Maria and Caroline sent me an analysis of their rival firms and how they compare with them on the basis of one metric. How many M7 admission officers actually work for them as consultants. And this firm, it’s Stacey Blackman consulting by their own count, says they have 21 former members of M7 admissions offices, including the trio from Harvard Business School and Stanford School of Business, on their team. And we know that when Fortuna was founded, its differentiation in the market, in fact, was that Fortuna put together a team of people who had worked in ad compositions at some of the best schools, including INSEAD, Wharton, you even had as advisors, former ADCOMS at, I believe, Berkeley and Chicago booth. So my question is, do you really have to have experience, inside experience, privilege, information of being on the inside of the admissions process, having read thousands of applications, maybe interviewed thousands of students as well, having sat in dozens or hundreds of admissions committee meetings where there were conversations and discussions, if not debates about giving candidates and whether they were worthy enough to be accepted.

 

[00:15:17.880] – John

Is that a prerequisite to being a good admissions consultant? Now, Maria, you should take on this because you didn’t have ADCOM experience, correct?

 

[00:15:29.990] – Maria

I do not have official Adcom experience. I am always very transparent about that. I was an admissions volunteer for a student organization that was trying to bring more applicants to campus. So at HBS, the way how it works. So different schools have different levels of student involvement in the admissions office. At some schools, the students are reading files and assessing them. At some schools, the students are doing interviews. At HBS, the students are really not involved in the admissions process. Most people who are students at HBS who do anything with the admissions office, are they’re section admissions reps? And that might sound very exciting to an outsider, but all it is is you’re a tour guide, right? Whenever there’s a visitor who’s going to come sitting on your class, you go to the admissions office, you make sure they’re happy. You do small talk, and you walk them to the classroom. So I sometimes see people at various firms say, like, oh, my name is so and so. And I was a Harvard admissions rep. And it’s like, I know what that means. That means you were a tour guide. There are also people in the Harvard admissions office, for example, who might just be processing some of the files or who might be in the interviews.

 

[00:16:39.270] – Maria

They might be the notetakers in the interviews, and yet they can still, those people can credibly say, I worked in the admissions office, but did you really like if you were just taking notes during the interview? I’m sure that you have some experience and some insight, but it’s probably not super valuable. Now, my role was a little bit different in that I was working with. There was specifically an admissions officer devoted to diversity recruitment. And so I was working with him to try to figure out how do we increase the pipeline. And when we talk about increasing the pipeline, we want a quality pipeline. And from my conversations with him, I was able to glean. What does Harvard define as a quality pipeline? Number one. And then number two, I think that you just have to have a lot of experience doing this, right. So when I started in this field for years, I did not charge anything because I was like, I’m learning. If you’re willing to learn along with me while I help you, why should I charge for that? I would not charge money for my advice. I would not be able to sleep at night.

 

[00:17:38.110] – Maria

I can’t. It was too Catholic of an upbringing for me to be able to charge money for something if I didn’t think it had value. So I think there are also other ways to get a lot of information, like those of us who are members of AIGAC, which is the Association of Independent Graduate Admissions Consultants. I think that’s what that stands for.

 

[00:17:56.610] – Caroline

Thank you, Carol.

 

[00:17:57.430] – Maria

Carol is giving me the thumbs up over the Zoom. Thank you. I just call it AGAIC, but I don’t think about what it means anyway. Every year we have a conference with admissions officers. We sit in rooms with admissions officers. We do exercises where we discuss hypothetical made up candidates with admissions officers. And so we say to them, what would you accept this hypothetical candidate with a 720 and the 3.2 GPA over this other candidate with a seven, eight? We get to learn how they think. It’s not as good as having been sitting there for years and years reading thousands. But you do start to glean information. We visit the schools every year. You start to glean information. You see who gets in and who doesn’t, you see which essays tend to work and which ones don’t. And so after you do this for several years, as long as you have the experience and you start to be able to do pattern matching, I think that’s key. And I think the other thing is also the ability to communicate. Right. There might be people out there who fundamentally have a great understanding of what a business school is looking for.

 

[00:18:58.400] – Maria

But if they don’t know how to help somebody else convey that or communicate that effectively, if they are a bad writer, for example, then they’re not going to be helpful as an admissions consultant. So I think it helps. I’m not going to pretend that it doesn’t. But I also think that there are other ways to gain that expertise.

 

[00:19:14.650] – John

That’s true. And I interviewed another person who owns a firm who does not have many former adcoms on the staff. And here’s what he said. Who would you hire a film critic or a director to get behind the camera of your film? A food critic or a chef to prepare a meal for your most critical professional dinner? Are those questions actually beside the point?

 

[00:19:40.140] – Caroline

Caroline, my perspective on this was and I started for Tuna, as you know, with Mash and June a few years back, after having worked with several years and having observed that more and more of our students were working with counselors. And after looking into this, I realized that a lot of the people that they were working with and paying for a lot of money didn’t know very much at all about integrity and what it took to get in. And when I looked at it a little bit more deeply, I discovered that a lot of people who are sort of set up shop as advisors were people who had graduated from a school, and then someone had approached them and said, oh, I’d really like to go to that school as well. Can you help me? And they sort of started advising someone. It’s snowball from there and sort of fallen into it that way. And I knew from having studied on my MBA and then gone back two years later in the admissions office that as a student, I knew nothing about how admissions worked. And it was a whole new world being behind the closed doors of admissions.

 

[00:20:45.890] – Caroline

And as a student and Alum, you might even not really know exactly why you got it, never mind why anyone else would get it right. It’s not necessarily something you’re exposed to when you attend the school. So that was where we were coming from. We saw that there was a gap in the market where there were a lot of counselors out there who are not giving very good advice. And I also knew that from the fact that sometimes those coaches would approach us with questions that were incredibly basic. Right. I mean, they hadn’t even read the website. So it was concerning that people were paying them large sums of money for their advice. And therefore we set up fortunate with the idea of bringing together a team of people who had that insider expertise. And I completely agree that the insider expertise alone is not sufficient to me. There are sort of three different elements to the skills that a good admissions coach should bring to the table. So one part of it is that school insight and understanding the admissions process and the DNA of the school and who is a good fit for that school and helping people understand where they should apply and where would be a good fit for them and helping them navigate through the process and understand what is expected of them and how they can best put their best foot forward in the process.

 

[00:22:16.270] – Caroline

And then the second part is just being a good coach right there’s universal coaching skills of being a good listener, being able to hold up a mirror to someone and help them understand what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are, help them think about their future and what they want to do in the short term, in the medium term, and how they see their career evolving over time and really spending time to get to know them and give them some good advice on what they have achieved to date and what the skills are that they’ve developed. Because that’s sometimes not so obvious for someone who is in their mid twentys and they are working alongside people who have very similar profile. And it might be difficult for them to sort of figure out what is unique about my story. And often a coach who’s coming to their profiles with a fresh set of eyes and understand their full history can really see the things that stand out in a way that is very difficult sometimes for the individuals too, because it’s difficult to see the forest for the trees. Right. So there’s that sort of coaching element and then there’s being able to shape the story and help somebody articulate their story effectively and get that down on paper and help them coach them for the interviews and so on.

 

[00:23:43.670] – Caroline

So there’s the sort of the more content oriented piece as well. So I think all of those three elements are very important. And when we hire people at Fortuna, we’re not just looking at the school expertise, we’re very much looking. And we put people through their paces before we hire them to screen for those other elements as well. So all of those three pieces are super important. And I agree with Maria. Over time you can build up that knowledge of the schools through diligence and experience. We can certainly build that up. Unfortunately, too many people don’t take time to do that I think so. I think one of the tricky things for candidates these days is just the process can be a bit overwhelming because there is so much information out there.

 

[00:24:34.500] 

Right.

 

[00:24:34.840] – Caroline

When I applied to business school, I ordered the brochure. I filled out a form. There wasn’t this overwhelming wealth of information online with a lot of good advice and a lot of bad advice. And then how is the candidate supposed to know which is rich? Right. And so one of the things that we do is help people sort of navigate through that process and figure out what it is that they need to know. What are the good information sources help dispel some of the myths and take some of the anxiety out of the process. And having the experience from being behind the closed doors of admissions can give us some confidence in the advice that we’re giving people that we’re not guessing, that we actually can say with some authority how the schools evaluate candidates, what they like to see, what they don’t like to see. And through our experience of both being in the schools and now working with hundreds and hundreds of candidates, that Fortune, how an individual’s profile will stand up in comparison to other people in the pool. And we stay in touch with the schools as well. That’s very important to us to maintain, to keep our knowledge up to date.

 

[00:25:51.980] – Caroline

And I am in regular contact with my former colleagues that is here, as are many of my colleagues at Fortune, with their former colleagues. And so we do our best to maintain those relationships and stay on top of things so that our knowledge is always current.

 

[00:26:10.090] – John

All good points. And actually, in many ways, I think, like everything in life, it comes down to practice. Right. So a personal story. I recently went to a teaching hospital to have my eyes examined. I’m getting to that age when things get a little blurry here and there. And I do have cataracts. They’re not severe, but I had a surgeon look at them at the teaching hospital, and she was terrific. I loved her. And then I asked, well, how many of these procedures have you done? And she said, 25. And I said, no offense, but I want someone who’s done thousands of these. And I think the point here that I’m trying to make is that regardless of whether or not you have inside information about a particular school’s admissions processes, regardless of how far removed you are from the school and how perishable that information might be, the number of people you’ve worked with over the years and helping them with their applications and all those applications that you’ve seen and how they differ from each other and all the outcomes that you’ve seen those students get is what could make you an incredibly valuable and helpful counselor to others.

 

[00:27:25.320] – John

I’m sure both of you would agree with that. Now, Caroline, would you have someone operate on your eyes who’s done 25 cataract surgeries?

 

[00:27:35.770] – Caroline

Yeah. Well, it does sound rather early stage.

 

[00:27:40.990] – John

You’re so diplomatic. Maria, how about you?

 

[00:27:43.740] – Maria

That’s the best words. Not me, John. I want the person to operate on my eyes who ran admissions for the medical school. Oh, that’s who I want operating.

 

[00:27:59.910] – John

All right, there you have it. I don’t know if we came up with one way or the other. I think there’s both ways. You can be a great coach whether or not you have ADCOM experience. And if you do have ADCOM experience, obviously you’ve seen a lot and you see how subtle differences and nuances can make a difference in a candidacy and you see how different people in admissions committee room react to it but that may not be necessary to make you an excellent coach. In fact, I’m willing to bet on it that there are coaches out there who are as good or better than those who have admissions experience and vice versa. So there’s no one rule to apply and it may just be some differentiation. But if you don’t look for those other points that Caroline mentioned, a good listener someone who is empathetic to the process, someone who keeps in touch with the schools and knows their cultures. Someone who knows what these different schools are looking for, even though your own experience may be for one school, if you’re not doing all those other things, you’re not going to be any good at the job of helping others get into their dream school.

 

[00:29:04.360] – John

All right, Maria, Caroline, thank you, as always. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. You’ve been listening to Business Casual.

 

Don’t Believe The Wall Street Journal: MBA Apps Are Up Again & It’s Been Super Competitive To Get In
Maria |
September 28, 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!