Ruminations On Business Education
Maria |
January 18, 2023

With their special guest Sangeet Chowfla, who recently stepped down after serving as CEO of GMAC for ten years, our hosts John, Maria, and Caroline will discuss a variety of intriguing topics on this episode of Business Casual.

It’s going to be a fascinating discussion amongst four different professional viewpoints with years of diverse experience, so pay attention!

Several current difficulties that the MBA business has been dealing with over the past few years will be the focus of the discussion, including the following:

  • Sangeet Chowfla’s view of the three waves of management education
  • The relatively small flow of students applying for the MBA
  • The state of business schools across the globe and their competence level
  • Are MBA rankings even relevant to the industry?
  • Why are some people so negative about MBA?
  • What is the long-term importance of Hispanic workers and MBA aspirants in the US economy?

Episode Transcript

[00:00:07.050] – John

Well, hello everyone. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. Welcome to Business Casual, our weekly podcast with my co host Maria Wich Villa and Caroline Diarte Edwards. Caroline, of course, is the former admissions director at INSEAD, cofounder of Fortuna Admissions. And Maria is our resident Harvard MBA founder of Applicant Lab. We have a special guest and a special occasion for the guest today. It is someone who I believe knows more about the MBA and management education than anyone else in the world, and I really mean that. Sangeet Chowfla was the CEO of GMAC, which, as many of you know, is the administrator of the GMAC test. But more importantly, an organization that is an advocate for graduate management education has done a lot of survey work to inform prospective students and school leadership of big and small trends in the field. Sangeet, welcome.

[00:01:10.630] – Sangeet

Thank you, John. And you are too kind.

[00:01:13.360] – John

And Sangeet is just stepped down after a ten year run as CEO, and he made some really interesting changes at GMAC. Of course, he also ran the organization during a very difficult time through the pandemic when the organization had to shift very quickly to online testing. Other thing that Sangeet, which I think was a really smart move, was he began to diversify the organization. He acquired the MBA Tour, which, as everyone knows, is a major player in the admissions fairness business. He also acquired business because in the UK, a website that provides information for applicants all over the world, and also acquired a test in India while he was CEO. Now, one of the things I want to announce today is that we are very lucky and very privileged because Sangeet is going to be writing a monthly column for us, the first of which has just appeared on our site. And we want to talk to him about that because he raises some really interesting issues. And one of them is his view that there have really been  waves of management education. We are currently in the third wave. Sangeet, can you take us through that?

[00:02:31.580] – Sangeet

Yeah. And thank you, John. Thanks for inviting me. When you think about management education, and first of all, let me preface that most of my comments are about the interface between the student or the prospective student and the business school. It’s not about the teaching the faculty, which are all important factors, but it’s about who do schools recruit and what attracts students to particular business groups. And if you think about the first wave, which is sort of think about it as probably the post war era or the early postwar era, business, education or the MBA particularly, was birth in the developed west, and it was largely about creating leaders and managers for the economic growth of the west, the growth of the Western multinational, et cetera. And at that point of time, great schools like Harvard, Lbs in Seattle sort of grew out of that largely with but domestic base, even though there was always some amount of international play. It’s worth noting that the GMAC exam, for example, when it was first delivered, what, 65 years ago, was delivered in a number of places in the US. And two in non us. Cities, London and New Delhi.

[00:03:53.140] – Sangeet

But the flow, student flow, was relatively small. The second way you can really think about the great globalization, the ascension of China to the WTO in 2001, created this tremendous development in other parts of the world, largely Asia or the global east. And what we were really thinking about and seeing at that point of time, was this growth of the middle class, disposable incoming people, a hunger for education, the need also domestically within places like China and India and the Asian Tigers for having trained managerial talent. And the reality was that business schools within those regions, there weren’t enough of them. And the ones that were there weren’t perhaps of the same global caliber. And that was 2.0, if you will, and GREGraduate Management Education 3.0, which I believe we are in right now, is the globalization not of demand, which was in 2.0, but really globalization of supply. We have quality business schools now all over the world. Statistic I like to cite is that in the year 2000, which is not that long ago in terms of higher education, out of the FD top 50 global MBAs, 42 of them were in the US.

[00:05:25.210] – Sangeet

Eight were in Europe, none were in Asia. And last year, the picture has really changed. If you look at the same ranking, 30 are in the US. Eleven, nine Europe, and nine were in Asia. And it’s not because US schools became any worse. It’s just that everybody else has caught up. And what that really means is that demand, which has fueled the growth of management education or graduate management education in the west for the last two decades, is facing competition from business schools within the regions itself, the regions of China, other regions of India, et cetera. And students within those regions now have choices. And that choice basically means that they’re not only looking at, should I go to a highly rated school in the US. And a couple in Europe, they’re actually looking at schools within their own region. So should I if I’m a student in India or a prospective student in India, should I be thinking about US. Schools, should I be thinking about European schools? Why should I be thinking about Asian schools or Indian schools, all of which are globally recognized at this point of time and have excellent outcomes. So it’s creating a whole different competitive environment for schools as they are competing for talent or trying to attract talent to their institutions.

[00:06:51.630] – John

Yeah, very true. And Caroline saw a lot of this, obviously, when she was at INSEAD. She is an INSEAD graduate and directed all of their admissions for many years. What’s your sense of this? Does this resonate with you?

[00:07:09.290] – Caroline

Yes, it does. Something I would add to, and I really like this framework of GM one, GM two, GM . I would say GM one also. I mean, it was not very diverse, right? It was very male dominated. Schools did not have the diversity goals and focus that we have today. So I think that has sort of accompanied this evolution as well. Women are obviously much more clearly represented and reaching equality on many of the programs in a way that just was very far from the case, even sort of 2030 years ago. Schools like INSEAD, I think even from the beginning, the school’s vision was international, so it was not a domestic focus. The school was founded about 70 years ago and was Western European dominated for sure. And given the geography, it’s obviously easier to capture an international population if you’re in France versus if you’re in the US. But that was something that was part of the school’s DNA from the start. And I think it’s interesting to think about, as you said, how we’ve moved towards a multipolar world. And it’s not just local goals that are building an international presence, but it’s also some of those international brands that are expanding.

[00:08:31.950] – Caroline

So INSEAD. Obviously has campuses in Singapore and Abu Dhabi. Some of the US. Schools have developed strong presence in Asia and other locations. So I think we’ll also see that there will be more partnerships. I was talking a couple of days ago with MIT about his partnership with the Asia Business School in Malaysia, and I think we’ll see more schools with those strong brand existing brands that are looking to address that multipolar demand that you’ve been talking about.

[00:09:04.750] – John

Yeah. Another point that Sangeet makes, which I totally agree with, is that there’s so much hand wringing about the maturity of the MBA degree in the US. Its value, and every now and then you get a pronouncement from someone like Elon Musk, who basically says MBAs are worthless. And what I really love is the fact that Sangeet did, in his very first column, points out the high alumni satisfaction of people who gain the advantage of graduate management, education, employer demand across diverse industry sectors and business. Types record high starting salaries for MBAs, the tremendous growth in the quality of business goals all over the world, and the fact that they do continue to grow in popularity with international and domestic students. So, Sangeet, why are people so negative about the MBA, given what you pointed out?

[00:10:02.290] – Sangeet

I think it’s the nature of our time, and media likes a crisis story rather than a success story, if you will. Right. It’s more interesting to write about it. Maybe it just speaks a little bit about human nature, but when you think about it, the various stories that we say upon I mentioned it a little bit in my column about a school that closes down its MBA program in the United States. But that happens and there are winners and losers in any particular industry, but globally that we’ve seen a growth in the MBA and growth in applications in the MBA. And even you talk about Elon Musk saying the MBA is worthless. And I remember back in the early two thousands, maybe the late 90s, during the.com boom, everybody at that point also was talking about management education being irrelevant with the growth of technology and the web, et cetera, et cetera. But remember now, the largest single employer of business education talent in the United States at least two years ago when I looked at that data, was Amazon. So when companies, even when these tech startups grow, they find that they need to deal with the same sort of business leadership challenges that traditional industry where GM or General Electric or IBM used to need.

[00:11:38.990] – Sangeet

So things change, but in some ways they tend to stay the same. The underlying requirements of leading a large organization, of having a multidisciplinary, multifaceted view of the organization, of not being totally too specialized or being able to think strategically, are requirements of any organization in any industry. It may not be the requirement of quintessential tech startup, the two men and the dog in the garage kind of story, but even when the two men and the dog in the garage grows and becomes an Amazon, I think it’s fierce broken. They need management done.

[00:12:24.110] – John

Very true. I was amazed at the stat in your first essay that overall applications to business schools worldwide have been within a 3% ban up or down over the last  years, which is kind of remarkable, but it is true. We’ve had a roller coaster ride. And I want to ask Maria, who has read your essay, what other things may have sprung out at her.

[00:12:50.650] – Maria

Well, I think first of all, we’ve spoken this article was wonderful to read because it really has hit upon things that we have talked about here on this podcast. For example, I remember when Iowa TP had to close down its program. We were talking about it’s such a shame that they given where they are in the country. Why didn’t they double down on something like AG tech and agriculture and how that’s the next revolution of sustainability? And they could have had just by virtue of their location, they could have really had a potential competitive advantage there. I do think that a lot of the schools are missing opportunities to really develop specialties because of the globalization of talent. If right now your school specializes in a particular field, it doesn’t matter if that field is growing quickly in other parts of the world because the students can now come to you. And so I think that that’s a real opportunity. I thought that was a really smart thing that you pointed out. And of course, your comment on the percentage of Hispanic students in business school versus the US population. So Hispanics in business school are roughly around 10% of MBA students, but we are roughly twice that in the overall US population.

[00:14:01.850] – Maria

So that delta that disparity between Hispanics within the broader population versus the ones who are getting graduate management degrees. I completely agree with that and not just because I am Hispanic, but because I do think that it’s a real opportunity for Hispanic population is growing quickly and it’s also one of the younger populations. And so to the extent that the US economy in the longer term will depend upon the success of Hispanic workers, making sure that those workers get a higher level of management education really will benefit everyone in the US.

[00:14:37.450] – Sangeet

The Hispanic pipeline problem is a simple one of mathematics, isn’t it? You mentioned that the Hispanic population, about 20% of the school going population is forecasted to get to about 36 37% by the end of this decay. Because of the changes, the white American population is not growing and the Hispanic American population is growing. So the math just works in that way. And if the fastest growing segment of the US domestic population, paradise consumes management education at a lower rate than the mean, the numbers just work out. It means the addressable pipeline for business schools decline. And at the same time, when we talked about earlier on about GRE3.0, that there’s more competition for international students in their home countries or other regions like Europe, the competition is potentially well, let’s just say it’s not good for US business schools, right? Because your domestic pipeline spray shrinks. You can’t attract international talent at the same rate as you used to. So your targeted market or target table market would shrink if you don’t address participation rates of Hispanic Americans. John, if I may, or Caroline, if I may add one point to Caroline’s comment about diversity.

[00:16:04.210] – Sangeet

Once you were speaking, something struck me that how point was that over this period we’ve seen management education and 1.0 was largely male oriented and we’ve been able to attract a much more diverse population. I think that emacs data shown that something like in the US about 46, 46, 45% of business school classes are female. It’s lower than that in Europe and quite patchy around the world. But there’s another element of diversity too, isn’t there? Back in the times of 1.0, we were largely training people to be managers in large, multi divisional, somewhat global organizations. Also the US multinational, the GM, the GES, the IBM, et cetera, the CPG companies of the world. And it’s become a lot different too. There’s a lot more people trying to work with smaller companies, mission oriented companies. So there’s another nuance that also happened to diversity in diversity of programming also or diversity of England.

[00:17:19.140] – John

That’s very true. And in fact, I mean, this generation seems more interested than any generation in things like social impact, sustainability, racial equality, solving poverty. So in other words, solving society’s big issues, which many business schools are tackling and they’re getting a lot of interest from on these topics by their students. And prospective applicants are looking for schools that kind of have more content on the issues of climate change, the future of health care, and how to help the disadvantage, which is really interesting to me as well. One of the other points you make, and I think this is an interesting one too, is and it’s so true you go to the websites of the different schools and pretty much more or less it’s the same messaging over and over again. And so there’s a surprising lack of differentiation even when schools have programs that could clearly differentiate them. And what I found interesting is your research that really shows that two things matter location and alumni success. And yet schools don’t really leverage those two elements to more effectively recruit applicants. Talk a little bit about that, if you may.

[00:18:48.900] – Sangeet

Yes, I’d be really interested in Caroline and Maria’s viewpoints because they speak to a lot of candidates. But what we sort of found was that candidates are kind of confused, let’s put it, because they want to go to business school, but business schools all speak to them with the same voice. They don’t effectively differentiate themselves. And as a result of that, one of the unintended but powerful consequences is the importance of rankings because students basically say if every school is going to tell me the same thing, then I tend to go to some third party for information because what they are saying isn’t necessarily resonating to my particular interest. And I do mention in the essay a small piece of work that we did where we took the homepages of the top 50 business schools in the US. And put them in the IBM Watson system. Now, IBM Watson in those days it had this cool, what they call the personality monitor. You fed it some amount of text and it tell you what the personality of that text was. And they basically said there was an 80% match, basically 80%. They were saying the same thing.

[00:20:14.070] – Sangeet

And we can see that ourselves. And it’s surprising to meaning that we don’t make enough of an effort as individual schools to differentiate ourselves. And the only reason I can think of is that a lot of what we talk about is about ourselves as a school. We talk about the school or the campus or the new building, faculty awards, which faculty has got, et cetera. But we talk very little about the student, the journey of the student, the success our alumni has had that tends to be buried if it is mentioned at all. And students, as a result said, I don’t get it and I don’t get what you’re going to do for me as an institution, except for if you are a highly ranked institution, when I get it because I just know your brand, right? So we are leaving it to the brand, which really doesn’t work if you’re not in the top 20, 30, 40, or whatever, and everybody else then ends up suffering as a result of that.

[00:21:25.770] – John

Caroline, what do you make of that?

[00:21:27.320] – Caroline

Yeah, so I’m not sure that schools don’t address it was my impression that schools do address and showcase alumni success. My impression was that schools actually talked about that quite a bit and they, you know, there are different components to alumni success, right? There are the career placement statistics for the graduating class. There’s the data on how careers evolve over time. There’s the alumni network and the benefits of having access to that network and that’s sort of part of alumni success as well. So my impression with schools do talk about that, but I certainly agree with your point that there is too much overlap in how schools market themselves. And frankly, that was great point of frustration for me when I was at in that every school says that they’re international, right? And so you sort of spend a lot of time explaining to people how a school like InCIA is a very different international experience versus going to a school where the vast majority of the student population is from that domestic market. And even a lot of the international students would have studied in that particular country or worked in that particular country before attending the MBA program.

[00:22:49.130] – Caroline

So we spend quite a bit of time sort of explaining that. And it’s not always immediately apparent to candidates because they just get the high level message from schools that, oh yes, we’re international, we’re offering a top education. I think there are other things that stand out that you didn’t mention that I think do matter and perhaps increasingly matter students. And one element is cost, right? And the cost of getting a top MBA has increased way beyond inflation over recent years. And so I think it’ll be interesting to see how the market segments in the future and you mentioned in your article online MBAs and how a lot of them are priced at a much lower price point. And it will be interesting to see if over time, that does challenge the model of the especially the traditional top tier two year program that is such an incredible investment. One thing that I would say about the challenge for schools and differentiating themselves, I agree with the point that some schools should focus more on perhaps a specific sector or figure out what their position can be that can really help them to attract that global audience.

[00:24:08.350] – Caroline

But you also mentioned how it’s important for students to get that breadth of education, right? And so it could be off putting for some students to think, okay, well, this school is all about finance, or this school is all about tech, or this school is all about agriculture. And okay, that may be relevant for me now, but we know that so many of the people who are coming out of business school are going to go through so many changes in their career. Right. And that’s always been the case that MBA graduates have had often several careers over a lifetime. Right. Because they switch industries, they switch functions, they switch countries, and that pace of change will only increase. So it’s very hard for someone who’s sort of 25, 26 to anticipate, okay, well, I think this is the thing that I should really focus on, because who knows what skills or what sector will be relevant to them in 10, 20, 30 years? So I think that’s part of the challenge for business schools when it’s risky to focus on a specific area because you could be alienating a population. And is that the right thing to offer?

[00:25:22.120] – Caroline

Is that the right positioning, is that the right value proposition for students who will be facing so much change in their careers in the future?

[00:25:32.570] – John

Yeah. The other thing I will point out is that we tend to deal with those highly ranked, highly selective schools that get a retention. If you’re going to hire an admissions consultant, for example, you’re not going to do that at a school that accepts a higher percentage of graduates. So we see the top of the market, and we don’t see the entire market the way San Geek was able to, because all of these different schools were in his portfolio, all of them partners in GMAC. There’s a fuller view of even the MBA market than we even perhaps have, given the fact that we tend not to focus very much attention on the second or third tier. Maria, any thoughts about this?

[00:26:22.250] – Maria

I mean, I can do you this is not as scientific as putting the top 50 websites into into IBM. Watson but I have been in situations where I have actually heard admissions officers from, I think, six or seven different schools tell almost the exact same story in an information session about how collaborative their students are. And the story goes something like this. People were interviewing for a management, consulting or investment banking gig. And the first person went in and they were asked a really hard case question. And they came out into the waiting room and they helped all of their friends who were in the waiting room thus perhaps helping their friends get the job even though it damaged it. I think I’ve heard oh, my God.

[00:26:59.690] – John

I’ve heard that story, too.

[00:27:01.180] – Maria

Oh, my gosh. Every school has the same story about how great our students are. So I think Caroline touched upon this. The challenge is that the good news about a general management education is that it is good in a general setting in a variety of settings, which is what makes the degree so powerful and so useful. The problem is, though, that then, if you’re trying to attract every single potential type of person then the message gets muddied. And that’s when you end up with websites that just talk about leadership potential and these sort of vague platitudes. So I think that if a school is going to focus, that can be like sort of like the gateway drug that then brings the person in to the broader management education, and then later they’re like, oh, it turns out that AG tech isn’t what I wanted to do at all. But the good news is I’ve gotten this great fundamental education. It’s a marketing problem. It’s so interesting to me and even the schools that do have specializations, how they’re not doing a great job of marketing them. Sloan, MIT, sloan is amazing at sustainability. And I was talking to someone the other day who wants to do agriculture technology.

[00:28:11.420] – Maria

They’re from a developing market. They have worked in like an organic fertilizer type of thing. And I was like, what about Sloan? And they’re like, no, no, I don’t want to do I’m not a digital person, Maria. I want to do agriculture. And I literally sent them like ten articles. I was like, Boom, boom, boom, boom. So it’s interesting, I think you pointed out in your article that the MBA programs themselves don’t seem to have their own marketing professors looking at their own materials because it’s what a wasted opportunity. I mean, thankfully, I think I was able to convince this person to apply to MIT, but what a shame that would have been if they would have just been like, oh, MIT is about digital online stuff, and that’s not me.

[00:28:55.690] – Sangeet

Sometimes if you look at the history of other industries, it’s informative, right? If you look at the automotive industry, started with Henry Ford and the Model T, and that’s the only model you can get, and you can get it in black. And look at the amount of that strategy wouldn’t work any longer. In today’s market, all cars get you from point A to point B. That’s a given now. So to some extent, all business programs get you to point A to point B. The question is, how do you navigate the different segments of needs, desires, aspirations? And strategic marketing is all about speaking to people in some kind of manner that attracts it, particularly in a competitive environment. I mean, even no competition doesn’t make too much of a difference. But now if somebody is looking at, I don’t know, but Georgetown and RSM in Rotterdam and ISB in India and NUS and Singapore as a set of choices, how do you make the difference? Location, outcome, something or the other is going to have to make a difference. Cost, certainly.

[00:30:14.930] – John

Yeah, that’s really true. And I’ve always said, frankly, that geography is destiny when it comes to the MBA. Even when you go to a school with a global reputation, there’s going to be a concentration of alumni and the strongest part of the network is going to tend to be you know, within a certain mile radius of the school. I mean, you look at a school like Stanford, and frankly, their big problem is people go to California, they get their MBA, and they never want to leave California. So at one point, Stanford actually started offering full ride scholarships to people in the Midwest who would go back to the Midwest just to get a greater alumni distribution throughout the country. And that’s often true. There’s no changing or denying that. And I think your research showed the importance of location. And yes, there are a number of schools that can transcend that issue, and they tend to be at the high point in the rankings. But by and large, it is a location geography game for many schools and many students who want to remain close to home, including Hispanics. I think you make a really interesting point about schools in the Southwest who should really be focusing a lot of efforts on the recruitment of Hispanics because they do want to stay locally.

[00:31:40.180] – John

They’re much more family and community oriented. That’s part of the culture, and they prefer not to go way to school. And they are really much the future of America given the size of that demographic and how quickly it’s growing in the United States. Senge, what do you think of rankings? You can’t like them. Say what you will, but we are real critics of rankings. And it may seem odd because, of course, I am responsible for creating the first MBA ranking at Business Week back in 1988, but I’m a real skeptic and if not cynic about them, and I’m quite a critic whenever they come out. But I also know how obsessive people are with rankings. What’s your sense of it? Is it just something that the industry has to live with and deal with, or is there something else that can happen here in the way that law schools got together? Quit the US. News ranking, major law schools, and now US. News is changing this methodology to address their concerns.

[00:32:51.590] – Sangeet

Rankings are far from perfect right instruments, sometimes they’re questionable methodologies. But another question we should ask of them, of ourselves, is why do rankings exist? And why do students go out from ranking use rankings so much? So they must be fulfilling a need, if you take that. So what is the need that they are fulfilling? And one can argue that the need that they are fulfilling is actually going back to our earlier conversation is when is a lack of information and knowledge that is coming out? An example I sometimes use is I live in the Washington, DC. Area. If I’m going out for dinner with friends, I tend to, by and large, know where I want to go, which restaurant want to go. But if I’m in Chicago or someplace, I don’t know, and I go to Yelp or Open Table or someplace to give me information, and I look at reviews. And stars and some form of proxy rankings. So the less I know about something, the more likely I am to use an external source of information. The more I know about what I want to do or what I want to consume, the less I tend to use external products.

[00:34:17.380] – Sangeet

So it sort of comes back to how much did we create rankings ourselves as an industry now? However good we become, I personally think it’s something that we’re going to have to learn to live with, and there may be an opportunity to make them better. Clearly, what the law schools have done has been very interesting, but nor should we try to overconstrain the process. Right. Because then rankings, unfortunately, are one person’s good ranking means somebody else isn’t getting the same sort of ranking. So any methodology will come in for some form of criticism as long as they exist.

[00:35:05.570] – John

Yeah. So true. Well, Sangeet, thank you for joining us today. Really appreciate it. And for all of you out there, I want to invite you to read Sangeet’s first column in Poets and Quants. It’s called a decade of graduate management education. I love you. You’re perfect. Now change. Some of you out there will recognize that it’s from an old 90s musical, and I think it’s an incredibly intriguing read. If you are in leadership in our business, this is a must read if you’re a prospective student or a current student or an alum. It’s a fascinating read and really a good overview look at where the business of business education is right now. So thank you for joining us, Sangeet.

[00:35:56.680] – Sangeet

Thank you for having me, John. And interesting chat. Really nice talking to you Caroline and Maria too.

[00:36:02.770] – John

Indeed. All right, for all of you out there, good luck on your MBA journey or your graduate management education journey, because there are plenty of specialty master’s degrees in every possible field. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. You’ve been listening to Business Casual, our weekly podcast.

Business School News | General | P&Q Podcast "Business Casual"
Ruminations On Business Education
Maria |
January 18, 2023

[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!