The Businessweek MBA Ranking Controversy
Maria |
October 19, 2021

Ajani Jain, Deputy Dean of Yale School of Management, sparked a controversy with his recent analysis demonstrating how inaccurate and distorted the Bloomberg Businessweek is, in terms of their MBA ranking and methodology, when he attempted to recreate their approach.

In this episode of Business Casual, Maria, John and Caroline discuss the Businessweek MBA rankings and their overall impact. Listen to hear discussion on:

 

  • Why all three of them were already skeptical about the “rankings” (And what exactly John means by that)
  • Why Maria thinks that of all the rankings, Businessweek is always the one with the ‘wild swings’
  • Why Maria praises Jain’s writing on how he approached the matter with Bloomberg in this episode. (It is certainly without a doubt intellectually humorous!)
  • The team debate the question “Do MBA rankings really matter?” Is it more important than a genuine and authentic reputation that data analysis and statistical ranking systems do not obtain?
  • Is ranking manipulation a criminal offense punishable by law?
  • One fact that will enrage the faculty: applicants value rankings three times more than faculty quality when choosing a program. (The statistics gathered from applicants will astound you!)

Episode Transcript

[00:00:07.330] – John

Well, hello, everyone. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. Welcome to Business Casual, our weekly podcast. We’re going to talk about a big controversy that’s in the news right now. We broke the story upon Poets and Quants. It’s an analysis by Anjani Jain, the deputy Dean of Yale School of Management, on the latest Businessweek ranking of MBA programs. He pulled apart all the numbers and put them into an optimization model, and Lo and behold, found that he could not replicate their ranking if he used the exact weights on five indexes that they used to measure the quality of an MBA experience. In fact, if he runs the analysis on the weights that they provide and state in their methodology, 79 of the 84 schools that would be ranked would have a different rank, and some of the schools would have dramatically changed rankings. One glaring example, Wharton, which already was ranked 9th in the Businessweek ranking, would actually fall to 28th if the proper weights were accorded based on this analysis by Anjani Jain. Now I should point out that Businessweek is saying that Anjani’s analysis is incorrect. It’s inaccurate. You can’t possibly attempt to replicate the data without having the raw scores as opposed to the scores that they actually published online and in the magazine.

 

[00:01:50.930] – John

Anjani argues that it doesn’t make any difference if the actual scores published in the magazine and online are truly reflective of the raw scores. It doesn’t matter whether you have the raw scores or not. Caroline, what do you make of this?

 

[00:02:06.100] – Caroline

Yeah, I agree that it looks very dodgy indeed, and that Businessweek has not responded very clearly to the challenges, so definitely looks very suspicious. I think they’re trying to make some excuses now and close the discussion, but it definitely looks like something is a mischief, which is very concerning.

 

[00:02:29.450] – John

Yeah, exactly. And now, Maria, I know. Well, all three of us are skeptical of these rankings to begin with. If you’ve listened to our podcast in the past, you know that. And we had a whole podcast not long ago devoted to the Bloomberg Businessweek ranking, where we kind of tore it apart. But, Maria, what’s your take on all this?

 

[00:02:50.420] – Maria

Yeah, I think of all of the rankings, Bloomberg Businessweek has always been the one that kind of has these wild swings back and forth. And I think it’s because my impression is that it’s a very subjective ranking. And so if you organize a bunch of people together and you say, okay, guys, Businessweek is going to be reaching out to you, and it’s really important that you say that our academic experience was the best thing in the world because that’s how they rank, whether or not it’s a good academic program. I don’t think that you should rank a business school based on a popularity contest solely on people’s opinions. Or what if a bunch of graduates are grumpy in a particular year? And I don’t know, I do think that there should be some emotional component. Right. Are you happy you went to the school? Something like that. But I don’t think that so much of it should be so qualitative. So, yeah, I think there’s just something fundamentally wrong with Businessweek, how they’ve been doing this anyway. And so even if they had like, let’s say, let’s say if what Deputy D and Jain is saying is correct, and they got these weird results, like super weird results.

 

[00:04:00.710] – Maria

And they were like, oh, no, this doesn’t look good. So we need to kind of mix things up a little and change it around. Even if that’s true, the fact that they are getting such weird results, that should be a signal to them as an organization. Like, wait a minute, this is weird. One school in Texas, does it really have the best academic experience? I’m sure it’s a great academic school, but isn’t really the best. Maybe we should look inward and with a bit of maturity and say maybe our own ranking isn’t very our own methodology is not that great. I will say, as a side note.

 

[00:04:35.510] – John

In context of what you just said, Marie, if I may, Marie is referring to the fact that under the Businessweek surveys of students, UT Dallas is number one in terms of their learning category, which seems pretty surprising, right?

 

[00:04:54.130] – Maria

I’m sure, I’m sure it’s an amazing school. But come on, the number one learning. Come on. Even when they first get that data back, even before they move to analyze it, and before they move to do all these machinations and this sort of Cirque du Soleil twisting themselves into a pretzel to try to get the to try to claim that their methodology works. Like, maybe internally they should be like, maybe our methodology is kind of lousy because this doesn’t really pass the test. Although I will say, just as a side note for all of this, if I were Businessweek, I would sort of snarkily point out that, hey, Jain, when you redo it, it just so happens at your own school, jumps up four points of four places. And it just so happens that Yale is now again in the top ten, especially because we know, I think we might have mentioned at some point before in one of our conversations that I think Yale in particular has been really trying to game the rankings or to increase the ranking these past several years, anecdotally I’ve seen a much bigger emphasis on GMAT scores at Yale, for example, than I did 15 years ago.

 

[00:06:09.550] – Maria

If I were Businessweek, I would sort of reply with that. But regardless of where you stand on this, this is like, get out the popcorn, read this article, go to Poets and Quants. And right now, because it is such great, it’s such compelling reading, although I don’t remember what his E score is to save my life. But the other thing that’s great is that really just like James writing is so awesome. I love my favorite phrase that he uses it’s a deceitful canard. As a society, we don’t use the term canard enough. And I, for one, applaud Deputy Dean Jain for his wonderful writing, which has just been a delight to read, even if I don’t understand the statistics behind it.

 

[00:06:53.890] – John

Yeah. His response to Businessweek is a really wonderful reading. He calls Businessweek statement disingenuous and nonsensical and yes, a canard, among other things. And then there’s all the analysis, which some of it is above my pay grade in my head. And I never had the benefit, like you two, of taking statistical courses. So while you 2 may know everything about this, including the difference between a normalized score and a Z score, I don’t have a clue.

 

[00:07:33.950] – Maria

Don’t look here.

 

[00:07:36.110] – John

Now, again, I need to point out that I’m the culprit who originally created the MBA ranking back in 1988. But I want to add some context here. The ranking has changed dramatically. Back when I did it, it was a simple customer satisfaction survey that measured the satisfaction of the latest graduating class and the employers who hired them. That’s it simple. And it was cleaned in that way and pure because it was so simple. And I had hired a PhD in statistics who ended up becoming the President of Cooney, the College system in New York, to be my consultant to make sure that we were doing the right things. And I think a lot of these ranking organizations put the fear of God in business schools to report correct data and not to interfere with any surveys of student opinions that they may do. It’s also incumbent on them to have transparency, to operate with full integrity, and to provide the data that would actually allow for more rigorous analysis of the results. And, of course, that’s not happening here. The big question is just an interesting, entertaining fight that we can sit by the sidelines with a bag full of popcorn and enjoy.

 

[00:09:03.350] – John

Or does this fight really matter?

 

[00:09:05.430] – Caroline

Caroline, the rankings do carry rates, right? People pay a lot of attention to them, for better or for worse, from prospective students who are thinking about ways to apply to recruiters, to faculty who are looking at which schools they want to work at. It does have a broad impact. And so they have some responsibility here to respond more clearly to the claims, I think.

 

[00:09:35.190] – John

Yeah, that’s really true. It’s worth pointing out that there’s only one of the five major rankings that actually does audits of school provided information, and that’s the Financial Times. And I believe that they audit programs every three years. And I got to tip my hat off to them for actually going to that extra step to ensure more integrity by the schools, because obviously the schools are under significant pressure to push numbers in their favor, no matter what they are. But to your point, rankings are consequential. They do matter. Two years ago, the association of International and Graduate Admissions Consulting, we call that AJAC. And we’re here as a member. They surveyed MBA applicants, and out of nearly 2000 responses, here’s what they found. They found that nothing mattered more in school selection than rankings and reputation, two factors that, let’s face it, that largely become inseparable. So when you ask the applicants what were the top factors influencing specific choice of schools, 63% of them sided rankings with an equal number of sighting reputation. Now, I’m going to state a fact that it’s going to enraise a lot of the faculty who listen to our podcast.

 

[00:11:02.270] – John

That means, according to this survey of applicants, that applicants value rankings three times more in selecting the program than faculty quality. Faculty quality got 21%. The cost of the program got 23%. GMAT or GRE scores attained, meaning it affects where you apply, 27%. Think about that. 63% said ranking, 63% said reputation. They both go hand in hand. It’s kind of remarkable, frankly. And then when GMAT surveys its folks and they did so in 2021, earlier this year, they found that rankings was a key information resource for researching programs. 45% of domestic MBA applicants said it was 49% of international MBA applicants said it was. So it’s clear that these rankings sway people one way or the other because they do affect your impression of brand. And this is particularly true when you get past Harvest Erin Wharton, and then you start getting into the other schools, which, after all, enroll and get applications from far greater numbers of people than the combined numbers at Harvard, Stanford and Wharton, where I think no matter what their rankings are, it really doesn’t matter because people won’t believe that they’re ranked poorly. No one’s going to believe Wharton’s current rank of nine in Bloomberg Businessweek, and no one would believe the reconstituted ranking, which shows Wharton is number 28.

 

[00:12:45.070] – John

So it doesn’t matter for those schools, but it matters for everybody else pretty much. And then you have this sense that, look, you know, it matters because people cheat. Next month, the former Dean of Temple University’s business school is actually going on trial in federal court for allegedly cooking the books and providing fraudulent data US news that allowed his online MBA program to be ranked number one for four consecutive years. And this is a criminal indictment. It’s the first time the government has actually gone after a school. And it’s been for alleged fraud, which is pretty darn remarkable. And that trial is going to be getting a Philadelphia courtroom, I believe, in the second week of November. Sorry. But Marie, when you chose the school, you weren’t thinking about rankings, were you, because you went to Harvard?

 

[00:13:50.850] – Maria

No. You know, it’s funny. I basically looked at, like, people I admired and where they had gone to school. And then also I looked at people that I didn’t like so much. And a lot of them all randomly, perhaps coincidentally, had all ended up going to another well known school. And so I was like, well, that helps me narrow it down pretty considerably. And yeah, actually, I believe at the time Wharton I mean, Harvard has always been obviously, because it’s Harvard. But Wharton at the time I was living in Asia, and my boss was like, well, Wharton is a better school. Right? And I was like, I don’t know. Wharton is sort of famous worldwide for being like the business school. And so I don’t even know if I looked at the ranking. We’ve talked in the past about why we chose our respective schools, but the people around me were at least my boss at the time was like, oh, I thought Wharton was the better. I’m surprised that you’re taking Harvard INSEAD, but they were just such different programs that I chose the one that I thought was best for me. So I don’t know.

 

[00:14:53.650] – Maria

It’s a shame because I do think that it’s interesting that the three of us have spent so many years in the space, and we’ve seen not just the fluctuations in the rankings, but we’ve seen clients or people that we’ve interviewed or anyone like that who goes to different programs. And many of them have wonderful career outcomes, really, regardless of whether they go to a school that one year is ranked second and the next year is ranked 7th. And so we can see that the rankings themselves, in terms of outcome for your life, don’t really matter a ton. But every year, people coming fresh into this process, it’s a fresh batch of people every single year. And so it’s brand new to them. And so it’s understandable that the rankings is the first place they would look. And I guess it’s understandable that they would place a lot of weight on it. It’s just sort of a shame that we can’t sort of transmit our collective wisdom into their brains and feel like it’s not nice, but it’s not the be all and end all of the experience.

 

[00:15:53.530] – John

That’s really true. And Caroline, obviously you picked INSEAD because you wanted a far more international global experience, and that’s what you got there.

 

[00:16:02.450] – Caroline

Yeah.

 

[00:16:03.550] – John

INSEAD great school was a terrific MBA program. It has been for a very long time. I’m sure rankings didn’t come into the picture for you either.

 

[00:16:14.240] – Caroline

No, they didn’t. I don’t remember consulting the rankings, but I think people it’s something that’s sort of in the background.

 

[00:16:20.490] 

Right.

 

[00:16:20.750] – Caroline

People are aware of them, and I know that it does create a reaction. So I’ve seen that when I was working at it yet that when the score went up in the rankings, stakeholders get very excited. And when the score went down in the rankings, they’d been knocking on the Dean’s door and wanting explanations. So people do take notice. Right. Even people who know these schools incredibly well. Alumni, donors, et cetera. They do keep an eye on these things and they want to understand what’s going on. So even though you may know it’s all very well and appreciate its value, regardless of what particular publication says, people are aware of the impact of the rankings have on other people. So the influence that that has and they care about the sort of public reputation of the schools. And so I do think the rankings have disproportionate influence, unfortunately.

 

[00:17:29.450] – John

Absolutely. Well, no matter how this plays out, meaning, will Businessweek ultimately concede that it made an error or will it never do that? And the argument will just be out there? I think the one good outcome of all this is that it makes us do exactly what we should be doing treating these lists more skeptically, looking at them probably more for entertainment value than for the reality that this school is number three and that school is number five and the other school is number eight. Again, I’ll always say the benefit of a ranking is generally the underlying data that comes with it. And without rankings, I don’t think we would have had the kind of disclosures that we’ve seen in the last quarter of a century where you know what the average GM out of entering classes, you know the average GPA, the number of years of work experience, you know what the outcomes are going to be in terms of average salary, signing bonus, percentage of people who have a job offer at graduation and three months later. These are all stats that often go into rankings and they are public because the rankings exist.

 

[00:18:48.140] – John

And I think that’s a positive thing for people to help make informed decisions about where to go. Meantime, pop your popcorn set in your sofa and read all the stories and Poets and Quants in the back and forth between Bloomberg this week and Anjani Jain and make up your own mind. That’s all makes sense. All right, Maria Caroline, thank you so much. Watch again for your wisdom and your smarts. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants you’ve been listening to Business Casual.

 

The Businessweek MBA Ranking Controversy
Maria |
October 19, 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!