The Future Of Business Education
Maria |
October 12, 2021

COVID-19 has turned our lives upside down for the past few months, posing significant challenges to our daily lives, particularly for those who work and study. The MBA was already difficult enough before the pandemic began, but with the disruption on top of it, the impact on business schools is only getting heavier.

In this episode of Poets & Quants’ “Business Casual”, Maria, John, and Caroline collaborate to forecast what other changes will likely occur in the near term, as well as what the coming years of business education will look like.

  • How has the pandemic, on the brighter side, helped business schools prepare for 21st-century technology?
  • How difficult is it for faculty to adapt to the adjustments brought on by the pandemic?
  • What are the benefits and drawbacks of online learning for business schools?
  • What other aspects of business schools might change in the next five to ten years?
  • How important are GMAT and GRE tests? Is it more realistic for business schools to only have optional tests?

Episode Transcript

[00:00:07.090] – John

Hello, everyone. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. Welcome to Business Casual, our weekly podcast. Today we’re going to look at the future of business education. We’re going to peer into our crystal ball, gaze into it, and imagine what business education will look like in the next five to ten years. We’ve certainly seen a lot of disruptive change in the last couple of years the pandemic. So my co host Caroline Diarte Edwards, and Maria Wich Vila will conspire with me to maybe forecast what other likely changes will occur in the near term. So I wanted us to think a little bit about how is business education going to change over the next five to ten years. We’ve been through this period where there were major disruptions, and faculty, many of whom, frankly, didn’t want to have anything to do with online teaching, had no alternative and basically had to start teaching, at least by Zoom. Now, while remote instruction is not the same as designing from scratch an online course, it did familiarize a lot of faculty with current technology. And I think a lot of faculty came away from that experience quite favorably disposed toward teaching online.

 

[00:01:34.320] – John

And so I wonder in this and many other ways, how it’s going to affect the delivery of business education over the next five to ten years. Caroline, you have some thoughts?

 

[00:01:47.030] – Caroline

Yeah, for sure. I think it propels schools into the 21st century of technology. Well, not almost overnight, but certainly very rapidly in a way that would not have otherwise happened had it not been for the pandemic. And as we’ve mentioned before, educational institutions are not always the first to embrace change and innovation. Right. And faculty can sometimes be quite resistant to that. And faculty can be very difficult to manage. And if they don’t want to do something, they’re not going to do it. It sort of compels people to embrace something that they might not otherwise have done. And I’m sure that’s going to continue to be a big part of how business calls operate. So schools have figured out how to do this. Of course, you will not replace the in person interaction, and that’s still going to be critical to the business school experience, because so much of the learning is about getting to know each other and building those relationships and learning from each other. And it’s still hard to achieve that in the same way online as you can in person. But schools have figured out that there is a lot that you can do online very efficiently in terms of some formats and some knowledge transfer that also gives students in different locations or professors in different locations the ability to interact.

 

[00:03:13.080] – Caroline

So it’s a very positive thing that it’s another tool that schools now have at their disposal, a sort of pedagogical tool that will enrich the programs and make them more efficient and effective and give everybody more flexibility in how they engage with their education. So definitely that’s going to be an ongoing element to a different degree. Right. Some schools will put a greater emphasis on this than others. And some schools will really make this a huge part of how they deliver their education and more of it will be online. But I think it’s great that blended learning has really become embedded in education now.

 

[00:03:57.790] – John

Yeah, exactly. And of course, this also affects the growing acceptance of the online MBA. And while we often talk about the Harvard Stanford’s Award and London Business School in our podcast, the truth is that online MBA programs are growing by leaps and bounds and more schools are entering the market. And if you look at one of the most disruptive programs around at the University of Illinois, where you can get an MBA online for $22,500, they started six years, a little more than 100 students in the first cohort. And now they’re up to over 4300 enrolled students in an online MBA. And I have to say, over the years, I probably have interviewed as many as 50 different of those students. And the quality is really surprisingly good. And they come from Fortune 500 companies. They come from obviously, a lot of the tech companies where technology is so on the present that there’s no thought or consideration that you would be getting an inferior education if you got it online. So you’re seeing more people get the online MBA. And I think that the online MBA, more importantly, is becoming more competitive, certainly with part time eating programs, with executive and surprisingly full time MBA programs.

 

[00:05:30.270] – John

I can’t tell you how many people I’ve spoken to that looked at full time MBA programs at NYU Stern,  a Columbia, a Kellogg, or a booth and ended up in an online MBA program just because they might have been a little bit older than the open window for late 20s people. And they didn’t want to extend the kind of money that’s required for an executive MBA. And they didn’t want to go and do the evening grind where you have to go after work to a class once or twice a week. And the flexibility of getting your MBA online is just ideal. And so they went that way and a lot cheaper because obviously there are no opportunity costs involved. So I think we’re going to see over the next five to ten years, too, a shift in the percentage of people who get an MBA and get it online versus in an actual classroom. Now, the other piece of this is the employer acceptance of online education. All employers have largely had to work with their employees remotely. And while a lot of people want to get back to work and actually go to the office and actually be able to socialize with their fellow employees, I think a lot of companies have discovered that, hey, it actually worked.

 

[00:06:51.660] – John

There wasn’t a significant decline in productivity. In some cases, there was an increase in productivity among employees. And while we may have sacrificed some bonding, some culture, it kind of worked out. Maria, do you think that we’re going to see greater acceptance of online education from the employer side?

 

[00:07:11.880] – Speaker 3

I think we will in theory and in execution. It actually puts a lot of pressure on these earlier people who were some of the pioneers to get the online MBAs. Right. Because if they get the online MBAs and they come to the workforce and they don’t really perform that well, that negative. It’s not exactly going to be great for the branding of the quality of those programs. So I think as long as the people who are getting the online MBAs now realize that sort of all eyes are on them, so to speak, and if they go out there but they say kick lots of butt, the proof is going to be in the performance. And if they can perform on par and contribute as much as the standard MBAs, traditional, traditional NBA’s, I think it’s going to be great. I think it’s going to really take off.

 

[00:07:56.070] – John

Yeah, that’s a really good point, because if the early hires from some of these online MBA programs tend to be duds, that’s going to be a significant factor in overall acceptance. And there are firms that, particularly in the accounting area, that have partnered with some of the major online MBA providers online and getting their employees online degrees, which also has obviously increased the acceptance of them. Now the other implication for technology is on something that Dean has been talking about for ages but has never really materialized, and that is this concept of lifetime learning. Now, Caroline, I’m sure in all the years that you’ve been involved in business education, you’ve heard that term lifetime learning, lifelong learning over and over again, but it never really was meaningful in any significant way. Do you think technology is going to change that?

 

[00:09:02.510] – Caroline

Yeah, I think there is a greater expectation now among students and alumni that the school will add value to their career, not just for that year or two years, but throughout their lives. Right. I think the expectation is higher. And of course, there’s an awareness that you need to be constantly keeping your skills up to date and building your knowledge with a rapid pace of change. You need to keep up to date, and the schools have a role to play there. And I’ve observed that as an alarm. I didn’t see it over the past 18 months. But when the pandemic started, the school started doing a lot more webinars for alumni with really interesting classes offered by professors and discussions and panels and so on. And there has been dramatically increased over the past 18 months the availability of those sessions and resources and so on. And it’s a wonderful way for the schools to engage with the alumni as well and maintain that relationship, which is, of course, financially very important for the schools because the alumni is such an important source of donations and financing. So I think it’s a win win situation if the schools can figure out how to do that effectively and not just the delivery of knowledge and enabling alumni to keep their skills up to date.

 

[00:10:25.510] – Caroline

But also I see the schools offering more and more in terms of career support and alumni reaching out more frequently to the schools when they are sort of facing a transition in their careers, which, as we know, is going to be just more frequently the case. Right. People are not going to have one linear career. They’re most likely going to have many jobs and many different careers through their life. And so when those transitions happen, the schools also have an important role to play there in providing support, and they’re gearing up for that as well. I think it’s great for both sides because if the school can figure out a way to do that efficiently, then it creates a lot of goodwill from the alumni, and goodwill can often be translated into donations INSEAD.

 

[00:11:20.190] – John

The other aspect of this is the perishability of knowledge. The world has changed so rapidly, primarily because technology and the advances in technology and artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the greater need for business analytics. Given the massive data sets that are available to businesses today, I think that people are going to need refreshers of one kind or another throughout their career to stay as relevant and to stay on top of things in a way that maybe they couldn’t before. And to the extent that budgets and companies have been greatly diminished for training and development, you have the need for the school to step in and do this. And the other beauty of the technology, and you can do it more cheaply because it is delivered by technology and people don’t have to leave work, go to a College campus for a week, multiple weeks, several days. I miss out on work entirely. So that really adds to the experience and the value of lifetime learning delivered by technology. What other things do you think could change over the next five to ten years?

 

[00:12:34.070] – Speaker 3

Maria, sort of building on off the last thing, one thing that I was trying to think of. Okay, what has changed over the past ten years and what therefore what I think will continue to change? And this is sort of go on the topic of the perishability of knowledge. I think the role of data analytics. I think the amount of data that we have now on consumers and purchasing intent and everything. I mean, the data, even in fields that 1015 20 years ago were not data driven fields like maybe HR or marketing or branding. We’re living in an age now where there is just so much data available that can be cheaply collected. Right. A long time ago, if you wanted to do a market research study where you were looking at $20,000 to recruit the participants and have the focus group moderator sit in on. And now you just do like a ten cent quick online survey and you can start collecting tons of data. So I don’t think the specific tools I don’t think it’s really worth it necessarily for a school to devote a lot of energy teaching one specific data analytics tool over another.

 

[00:13:34.100] – Speaker 3

But I do think that now since data is so and it’s just going to keep growing in terms of availability, it’s so available and it will continue to grow in availability. I think teaching those fundamental concepts of what do you do with huge data sets, and how do you find the signal within the noise and all that stuff? I think that’s something that perhaps at least it certainly was not a focus when I was getting my MBA, and I think it’s just going to keep getting more and more important.

 

[00:13:58.010] – John

Yeah, that’s really true. I wonder if the new emphasis on recruiting diversity candidates is going to coincide with this test optional movement to lead to not the total demise of GMAT and GRE and Admissions, but more schools recognizing that. Look, if you’re sitting there at Harvard, Stanford, Ncata, London Business School, and you have a candidate who has an undergraduate engineering degree from Cal Poly, from Imperial, from MIT, from Georgia Tech, do you really have any doubts about that person’s quantitative abilities? Or if you have a person who is a CPA or Chartered Financial Accountant or other equivalent criteria that clearly demonstrates a person is not going to have a problem with the relatively simple quant in an MBA program? Do you really have to still require a GMAT or GRE? I’ve always said that if US news simply dropped that metric from their ranking, almost all schools would go test optional overnight. Now there is value in a GMAT or GRE for someone who maybe doesn’t have a great undergraduate GPA for whatever reason. It’s a way for them to demonstrate that they can do rigorous academics an MBA program, but by and large, it shouldn’t be one shoe fits all, because different candidates come with dramatically different backgrounds, many of which clearly demonstrate that they have the ability to do the client in a core curriculum.

 

[00:15:48.630] – John

What do you make of that, Maria? Do you think more school is going to get a test option on me right now? You have Michigan, you have MIT, you have Indiana, you have UVA, Darden, and you have Duke this year, among many others. But those are among more prominent schools that are test optional.

 

[00:16:08.400] – Speaker 3

Yeah, I would love to see more test optional just everywhere. Right. I think the tests, as we’ve talked about, can be really valuable for certain students, but there’s also no doubt that the more resources you have, the better you’re going to do. I’m not saying you have to have lots of resources to do well. But if you have more resources, you’ll probably do better than you would have otherwise done. And by resources, I mean the time to study a lot, the money to pay a tutor or to take an online course, that sort of thing. I think someone who has more resources is going to do better than if they didn’t. And so that, to me, is problematic. But then we also can’t go completely. We’re not even going to look at the test because you do need to be confident that when you put someone in your classroom or if you put someone in front of a recruiter that they’re not going to flail or embarrass themselves or the school in the process. I wish that there was a way to do, like, sort of an on the spot. This is why I’m such a huge fan of the Kia Talent interviews.

 

[00:17:10.570] – Speaker 3

Right. These are the quick. You don’t necessarily know. I think it defeats the purpose. Some of the schools tell you in advance what the question is, which is silly in my opinion. Like, what’s the point of the whole it’s a surprise party, but we’ve told you that it’s happening and where and when surprise look surprised. I know surprise. I’ve known about it for five months. But I think that when the schools use the Kira Talent platform well, and for people who may not be familiar with it, it’s a platform where as part of the application process, you log into a portal and it gives you say, three random questions and you get something like 30 seconds to think and 60 seconds to respond. Something like that where you’re getting a sense of who is this person on their feet, in the sense where because some people might study for the GMAT for three years and some people might study for three weeks, but on something like the Kira Talent platform, which would ostensibly make things a little bit more of an even playing field. So I would love for there to be more, like, spontaneous, and I don’t have the answer for what that is, but I would love for there to be some sort of more spontaneous, equal playing field types of assessments.

 

[00:18:12.910] – John

Yeah. And if you look at what’s happened to undergraduate education, the entire Ivy League now has made the Sat and the act test optional. In the vast majority of US schools, private and public, have made it test optional. And a lot of the argument here is socioeconomic arguments where if you come from a disadvantaged background, you’re less likely to score well on the test if you’re female, even though you get higher grades at College, both at the undergraduate and graduate level, you tend to score lower on these standardized tests. And unfortunately, because of rankings, they still tend to be over indexed in admission decisions. But to the extent that the undergraduate institutions have really taken a big lead on this, you got to think that it’s going to have an incredible impact on graduate admissions over the near term, next five to ten years, because you can’t achieve significant breakthroughs on the diversity side if you’re still over indexing GMAT and GRE scores. Caroline, I’m sure there’s a European perspective on this.

 

[00:19:27.390] – Caroline

I definitely think there is a role for test optionality, if that’s the right word. But I also think that sometimes the wrong candidates choose to go that route. Right. So sometimes people think that it’s a backdoor to get into the school, and I don’t have to show that I’ve got good academic credentials now to get into MIT, and that’s not the case. I definitely think there’s a role for that, and I welcome flexibility in the process. But unfortunately, what I sometimes see is that candidates think that there’s an easier way now to get into business school. And even though they could put the effort into getting a GMAT, now, they’re not going to do it and doesn’t necessarily help them. Right. So in some cases, candidates would just be better off putting that effort into taking the test and enhancing their profile, especially if the undergraduate track record isn’t set up. Right. Having a strong GMAT or good GRE can really help their case. And it hasn’t got easier to get into business school. Right. Because just because Garden or MIT or Duke offering some waivers, it doesn’t mean that it’s got easier to get in.

 

[00:20:52.290] – Caroline

And so I think sometimes candidates sort of misread that situation.

 

[00:20:58.770] – John

Yes, that is true, because if a school makes a standardized test optional, it does not mean that they are diminishing their admission standards. It means that you have to prove in some other way that you can handle the quantum work in the core curriculum. You’re not just going to get a pass on the test, period. They’re looking for other evidence, and otherwise you won’t get a waiver. So it’s as simple as that. Any other ways in which we think business education is going to change, I wonder if the international schools are going to take an ever increasing part of the best applicants in the worldwide pool, or has that peaked? What’s your take on that, Caroline?

 

[00:21:45.280] – Caroline

Yeah, I think that it will become more of a global marketplace, talent in education. The Trump years were not favorable to that, as we know. Right. And so now there has been an increase in interest from international candidates, and so I think that will continue to be there will be more mobility at all levels in education at undergraduate and at graduate level. And so that’s great for the schools that get access to this wonderful diverse Atkin pool. And I think something else that we’re seeing is that more people want to secure their place at graduate business school earlier rather than later. And so I think there will be a growth of the two plus two programs where people can apply whilst they’re still in College, in their undergraduate programs and secure their place at a top school. And I think the specialized Masters will also grow because those are often programs that people can pursue straight out of undergrad. And I think that can be some serious competition for the MBA program that young people don’t necessarily want the uncertainty of going into the workforce with the hope of getting into a top school at a later date.

 

[00:23:02.990] – Caroline

If they can secure a place at a great school for an excellent program straight out of College, they may choose to do that and they may forego the MBA. We discussed recently how the Harvard Law School is doing so well and increased application has a higher application volume now than the business school. And I think that may be part of that trend that people are keen on securing their spot at business school as soon as possible. Right. And so if they’re not going straight into business school, then maybe they’re going straight into another school or another program.

 

[00:23:40.050] – John

Do you think we’re going to see more schools reach gender parity?

 

[00:23:43.890] – Caroline

I’m sure we will. I mean, we’re certainly heading in that direction and the schools have been striving for that for many years. So yeah, I’m sure we will. Wharton has obviously done very well there and I think the other schools will follow.

 

[00:23:59.730] – John

Yes, Maria, any thoughts on that?

 

[00:24:02.490] – Speaker 3

No, I think where the schools are more committed to reflecting not only what management ranks should ideally look like, but also acknowledging the fact that consumers and people with actual purchasing power, the faces of what those people are like is changing. And so it’s not just good from a social justice perspective, but it’s good. It just makes good business sense as well. So yeah, I expect it to continue as well.

 

[00:24:27.220] – John

All right. So as always, expect more change. You may not like it. I know many of us are creatures of habit and change is disturbing and disruptive, but it is a part of life and it will be a part of business education over the next five to ten years. So hey, Maria and Caroline, thank you so much again for your smart and intelligent perspectives and for all of you out there listening. Thanks for tuning in. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. You’ve been listening to Business Casual, our weekly podcast. 

 

The Future Of Business Education
Maria |
October 12, 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!