Stanford GSB’s Class Of 2023
Maria |
October 11, 2021

The Stanford Graduate School of Business is one of the most prestigious MBA programs in the world. In this episode of Business Casual, Maria, John, and Caroline dig into the recently released stats for Stanford GSB’s Class of 2023 and use the data points to speculate on how the MBA landscape in the landscape for all business schools is likely to change.

Discussion items:

  • Stanford GBS’s record high average GMAT score (738) and what that means for prospective applicants. Does the team think this discourages some potential applicants? Should it? 
  • How application volumes have trended recently and what makes Stanford different 
  • The hunt for “gender parity” in MBA admissions and how AdCom’s balance that objective with other diversity goals
  • Why having “above average stats” (even with GBS’s high average) doesn’t guarantee you acceptance (and why the focus on stats is a double-edged sword)

Episode Transcript

[00:00:07.270] – John

Hello, everyone. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. We’re going to take a look at the latest class profile from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and talk about how it compares with Harvard and Wharton with My co hosts Caroline Diarte Edwards and Maria Wich Vila. Maria is the founder of Applicant Lab. Caroline, of course, is the cofounder of Fortuna Admissions and the former director of admissions at INSEAD. So we are going to talk a little bit about the new class profile at Stanford Graduate School of Business. There are some surprises in the numbers. If you’ve been reading quotes and quotes, you will know what those surprises are. But we’re going to put them into some context with Maria and Caroline. And then we’re also going to do a little bit of crystal ball gazing. We’re going to look five years, maybe even ten years ahead, and speculate on how the MBA landscape in the landscape for all business schools is likely to change. We’ve been through an incredibly disruptive time with the pandemic and the increase in the use of technology to deliver education. And so we want to just set aside a little bit of time to talk about okay, what are the long term trends here?

 

[00:01:19.120] – John

What does this look like over the next five to ten years? What are we going to see that’s different from today? First off, let’s talk about Stanford. So one surprise in the numbers at Stanford was the application volume. We also reported earlier, of course, that Harvard was up 5% in applications. Wharton was up two and a half. They tended to be on the low end of the schools that are reporting application increases. Michigan was up 50 plus percent, Indiana Kelly up 60 plus percent. You’ll note that there were 12% increases at Cornell at Yale, at Duke, at MIT, 11% at Dartmouth Tuck, and 10% at Georgetown McDonough. So Stanford is up less than 1%, which is something of a surprise. It’s actually 0.6%. And I think that’s an interesting number. And we’ll talk a little bit about why we think that maybe so. More importantly, perhaps, Stanford established a new class average GMAT record for any business school outside of a few schools in India where the GMAT’s are ridiculously high. They hit a 738, which is five points higher than the previous year when they hit a 733. The new score puts the class that just entered in the 97th percentile, the top 3% of all GMAT test takers in the world, which is really intriguing.

 

[00:02:56.520] – John

Now, Caroline, what do you make of this? I’m sure it’s not intentional.

 

[00:03:03.570] – Caroline

No. I mean, a higher GMAT score is average is a double edged sword, because the issue for schools is that whilst on one hand, it can be seen as a signal of quality, and no doubt it does speak to the incredibly qualified pool that Stanford enjoys every year and the competition amongst those candidates and how hard they’re working to prepare themselves for those tests would be quite incredible. But on the other hand, the schools are aware that that is also a deterrent, and it functions as a deterrent to some candidates from applying and some candidates who they would love to see in their pool. Right. You don’t have to have a GMAT of 730 or 740 to get into Stanford. And Stanford’s Admissions does not want you to have that perception. And I know that they’re concerned that sometimes they miss out on some great candidates because people self select out because they assume if they haven’t got a 737 40, then they’re just not in the game. So it is a signal of quality, of one aspect, of one limited aspect of quality. But it also does have some negative consequences for the schools.

 

[00:04:15.940] – Caroline

And it is interesting that has gone up at the same time as really stable application volume, really no significant change there. And I think that shows that those top schools just have an incredibly consistent pool of strong applications coming through year after year. And when there is, as we’ve discussed before, when there is variation, application volume, and suddenly people applying because there’s a change in circumstances, in this case, it’s a pandemic. In previous cycles, it’s just been a normal recession, economic downturn. More people throw their hat into the ring and those are not always the best qualified candidates or the very best quality candidates. So I think there has been a case here that the top schools have seen pretty steady volume and the schools that are still great schools, but not the M7 necessarily. The M7 schools have seen increased volume because of that sort of variable quality in that increased volume of applications that are coming through.

 

[00:05:23.650] – John

Yeah. In Caroline, it was only a few years ago that Kirsten Moss publicly said that she was worried that historically the highest in the world for an MBA program of any prestige. What was in fact discouraging people. They were at 737 for the entering classes in 2016 and 2017, and it dropped to 732 in 2018. And it was widely interpreted as Kirsten actually dropping the GMAT because of the comments that she made publicly that she felt it was discouraging many really good applicants from applying that year. In 2018, entering class, Wharton managed to tie Stanford for the average at 732. Since then, Wharton has fallen behind. And even though Wharton’s average went up by eleven points this year, which would have equaled last year’s GMAT average at Stanford, Stanford managed to increase by five. So they stay ahead. It’s also noteworthy that on every other level, GRE scores as well as GPA, Stanford is number one in the world. Their GPA this year is 3.78. The GRE is even up a point. On the quant side, these numbers tend to matter if you care about rankings. I don’t think Stanford cares all that much because rankings really don’t determine application volume or interest at Stanford.

 

[00:07:00.190] – John

But Wharton certainly seems to be very conscious of that. Maria, do you think a 738 might discourage applicants?

 

[00:07:09.300] – Maria

I agree with Caroline that I think it discourages certain applicants, but I also think it has the opposite effect where sometimes when we emphasize so much these quantitative data points, someone who has like a 740 but is otherwise completely unremarkable will say, I’m above the average of Stanford here I come.

 

[00:07:29.270] – John

Right?

 

[00:07:29.860] – Maria

Then it becomes like this huge disappointment for them. So it’s great that the school it’s funny because they’re all like, well, it’s a holistic process. If it’s such a holistic process, then why is it that you happen to have the highest GMAT score every year? That’s weird. You would think that it would fluctuate and it would be a lot more ups and downs between that. I wish that for all the emphasis on the GMAT, that they would also publish other data. I don’t know, like how many people in our class were promoted early by their firms, how many people in our class had PNL experience? How many people in our class, if they came from an analyst, like a ranked analyst program, how many people were in the top 1% of analysts in their analyst class or whatever? I wish they would also provide other metrics in terms of the quality of the candidates, because a 740 GMAT is not going to get you into Stanford. A 680 might get you in if you were helping a company launch its operations in Italy. And you know what I mean, you’ve knocked it out of the park.

 

[00:08:32.450] – Maria

So it’s just I wish that they would either not focus on this stuff at all or if that’s unavoidable because of the rankings dog and pony show, then at least provide other data a little bit more like, hey, yeah, 740 is great. But also it would be really cool if you were a top performer and if you had convinced a company to change direction or if you had convinced a local government to implement a new service that supports women entrepreneurs or a little bit more data like that. Because I think when you report simplistic data, you get simplistic judgments from applicants that sometimes are not beneficial.

 

[00:09:11.910] – John

Yeah, that’s really a good point, because those other data points that you suggested reporting would really help a lot of people, frankly, and would certainly confirm the quality overall of the entering classes at some of the top schools. And Stanford does report, for example, first generation College students. They’re saying, for example, that the students who were the first in their family to graduate from four year College or University this year went up by a third to 12% of the class, up from 9% a year earlier. And what’s interesting to me about that stat, and I think you’ve mentioned this in earlier podcast, Maria, sometimes if you admit, let’s say, white students from socioeconomic backgrounds that weren’t privileged. You kind of don’t get credit for that. And you probably should in diversity terms, because the school also reported increased black American students by 43% this year to 10%, up from seven. Asian-Americans were increased by 30% to almost a third of the class, and Hispanics rose about 9% to compose 12% of the incoming students. So there’s a lot of attention being paid, obviously, to the racial and ethnic diversity of the class. That is true at all business schools today in the US, where this has become a really hot issue.

 

[00:10:41.510] – John

The other interesting thing is that while Harvard and Wharton considered the peer schools to Stanford for sure, hit record levels of women in the class, Stanford was down on women, 44% of the incoming students are female, down for 47% a year earlier. And that’s when Wharton, you’ll recall, exceeded gender parity with record 52%, and Harvard achieved a record of 46%. Now there is a whole lot of difference from Harvard at 46 and Stanford at 44, even though it’s a three percentage point decline for Stanford from the year earlier. What do you make of that, Maria? Why do you think? Because you got to know they were aiming to get closer to the gender parity, having been only three percentage points below it last year.

 

[00:11:34.310] – Maria

Caroline could probably talk to this infinitely more than I can. I mean, it’s an imperfect thing. They might have given offers to 50% of women, 50% women, 50% men offers, but maybe for whatever reason, women chose to go someplace else. So you can try as hard as you want to kind of engineer some of these things. But I also think at the end of the day, and especially if we’re talking about Stanford, which has a relatively small class, I haven’t done the math. I do not have my Excel spreadsheet open right now. But if we’re talking a 3% difference, we’re probably not talking less than 1012. I don’t know. Gosh, I should have opened the Excel spreadsheet before I started talking at this point. But the point is we’re not talking about like it’s not like 100 women these fluctuations. It’s silly.

 

[00:12:25.650] – John

Yes, because there are only what is it, 436 students? Something like that in Stanford’s class. I think that’s what the number is exactly.

 

[00:12:38.710] – Maria

Yeah, we’re talking about 13 students would be a 3% class of 13 students.

 

[00:12:46.170] – John

To me, in a way, it does speak to you. You put your finger on one lever and it affects other levers. So if you want more black American students, more Hispanics, more Asian Americans, you want more internationals, because of course they increase. You want more first generation College students. Maybe something else is going to just go off kilter. I can imagine that, Caroline, when you were managing the numbers at INSEAD, this kind of thing happened where you try to increase something and then obviously something else falls.

 

[00:13:19.920] – Caroline

Yeah, there’s a lot of variables to manage at the same time. And yeah, it’s definitely the case that yield is typically lower on women admits versus male admits because there’s just more competition amongst the top schools for those fantastic women candidates. So I’m sure that’s the case that they had made an equivalent number of offers to female candidates as the men, but their yield would have been lower. Yes.

 

[00:13:47.890] – John

The other thing we don’t know is the financial incentives. Right. Because if you increase racial and ethnic diversity in the school, when you don’t increase gender diversity, you might presume that more of the financial rewards are going to the diverse candidates to get them to come because they’re less likely to have savings and money or want to take out big loans. To the extent that you only have available pool of scholarship money and then you shovel more to get the racial and ethnic diversity, you might hurt the gender diversity.

 

[00:14:20.610] – Caroline

Yeah, that’s true. Although I think the top schools don’t have too much of an issue with the depth of their pockets. But I do think that sometimes female candidates are more sued by scholarship offers than male candidates. I have seen that in my clients that sometimes men are more willing to walk away from a great scholarship offer from one school because they just really want to go to the other school. I have with my husband, he had a scholarship offer from HBS and didn’t get any scholarship money at all from GSB. And what do you do? Right. But he just really wants to go to the GSB. And I think men sometimes are more likely to make that decision than women are because sometimes women can be a bit more risk averse, practical. That’s true. That’s right. We’re not as crazy.

 

[00:15:16.790] – John

Calculated risk as opposed to reckless risk.

 

[00:15:20.630] – Caroline

Yes. And overconfidence in one’s ability to.

 

[00:15:28.890] – Maria

Be my mouth up. And I’m like, I think it’s more a little this expectation that men like women are like, okay, well, I don’t know. I’ll probably make more money if I get an MBA, but who knows? What if I have kids and what if I need to stay home? And I think men are like, whatever. If I get into a school, I’m going to be the CEO of Apple tomorrow. Look out.

 

[00:15:47.120] – Caroline

That’s right.

 

[00:15:50.130] – John

Tim Cook. Watch out.

 

[00:15:52.350] – Maria

Oh, boy. He’s shaking at his boots.

 

[00:15:56.070] – John

Yeah. And the bottom line, of course, with this and every of the class profiles at these grade schools, again, it’s a testament to the incredible quality, the diversity, the richness of the candidate pool and the enrolled student body for each of these schools. These are just exceptional people on every level. To think that they’re in the top 3% of all GMAT test takers have the highest average GPA, the highest Gres diversity, while some people, I’m sure would take issue with some of the numbers is fantastic, really. And that doesn’t even include the work backgrounds. The international student body went up significantly as it has at all the schools because the year earlier comparison was affected by the pandemic travel restrictions visa difficulties. So in fact the international MBA students is up to 47% at Stanford which is more than a third increase from the previous year when it was down due to the pandemic. So all in all great class and while Stanford won’t tell you what it rate is, we’re estimating it’s about 8.7% which is also the lowest of any prestige and be a program in the world that has historically been true at Stanford, Harvard is close or so and wardens slightly above 20 but there you have it.

Business School News | General | P&Q Podcast "Business Casual"
Stanford GSB’s Class Of 2023
Maria |
October 11, 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!