The Supreme Court’s Affirmative Action Decision
Maria |
July 13, 2023

In this episode of Business Casual, our hosts will discuss the recent Supreme Court ruling that struck down affirmative action in higher education admissions. They explore the impact of the ruling on business schools and the challenges they face in maintaining diversity. The hosts highlight the underlying discrimination in the education system and the need for a more equitable approach. They discuss potential alternatives to race-based admissions, such as income-based or first-generation status, while acknowledging the limitations and potential legal challenges. 

Our hosts remain hopeful, urging schools to proactively promote diversity and encouraging minority candidates to persist despite this ruling, underlining the critical importance of equal opportunities for all.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:07.690] – John

Well, hello everyone. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. Welcome to Business Casual, our weekly podcast with my co host Caroline Diarte Edwards and Maria Wich Vila. We are in the aftermath of a very big decision by the Supreme Court which struck down affirmative action in higher education admissions. This is a big ruling with a lot of impact. We’ve written a series of stories on this ruling. I would say that most business schools have come out with statements that basically say they are in favor of diversity and that it’s important to the learning experience in their schools, but have been rather vague as to how they’re going to proceed in the wake of this Supreme Court decision. And some schools have had to deal with this for some time. For example, in California, affirmative action has been banned for a number of years and even an attempt to reverse that by a vote had failed. So Caroline, what’s your immediate reaction?

[00:01:14.290] – Caroline

Well, I understand that the legal arguments are very complex and that there is a good argument to say that it is unconstitutional in that affirmative action is discriminating against some group. So I certainly understand that argument and I understand the frustration of certain groups like Asian Americans who feel frustrated that the bar has been higher for them. On the other hand, I think that there’s a bigger issue here of underlying discrimination that is built into the education system and without some sort of affirmative action at some point or at many points, that will continue to be perpetuated and racial injustice in the US. Will continue to be perpetuated. And as the dissenting justices said, the US. Is not a race blind society. And you can’t pretend that education can’t pretend that we live in a race blind world. And California and Michigan have banned affirmative action. And when that went through, there was a drop in enrollment of underrepresented minorities. And despite tremendous efforts to turn that around right, I think California has spent about $500 million on outreach to underrepresented groups to try to drive enrollment upwards for underrepresented minorities. In the universities of California, the most selective university campuses still remain very unrepresentative of society at large.

[00:03:04.970] – Caroline

It is frustrating because I think it is a worthy goal to try and have a diverse school campus. I think it’s true that everybody benefits, right. One of the things that there’s a couple of things that shocked me as a foreigner moving to the US. Eight years ago, and I now have American nationality, but I came here after living in several different countries and originally from the UK. And a couple of things that relevant to this discussion that really shocked me was how segregated the US. Is still, right? And neighborhoods are very segregated still, and therefore schools are still very segregated, and that’s not the case in other countries that are also ethnically diverse. I think the US. Has done a bad job of integrating its population. And so that does affect the education system and it affects outcomes. And another thing that really shocked me, and I think is quite disgraceful is the huge disparities in the public education system. So because I live in a nice neighborhood where my public schools have really generous funding, my kids basically get pretty much like a private education. But in a public school, they have small class sizes, they have different length foreign languages, they have great arts programs, they have great music.

[00:04:35.110] – Caroline

If I drove an hour down the road, I could find schools where the budget is about a third of what my kids benefit from. Right. And they don’t have any of those things that I’ve just mentioned. I do not understand how that is legal in this country. I don’t understand how that is accepted. And of course, therefore, because of that segregation by neighborhood and the disparities in the public education system, the odds are stacked against kids from a very early age. And so colleges are trying to adjust for that. But it should have been done much earlier on, right?

[00:05:20.070] – Caroline

If we had a level playing field throughout the public education system from K through twelve, then the onus would not be so heavily on colleges to try and try and address the imbalance. But that’s a whole different discussion. Trying to address the inequalities in K through twelve.

[00:05:41.790] – John

Yeah, true. Maria, your thoughts?

[00:05:46.200] – Maria

I mean, I’ve been trying to find some silver linings in all of this. And I think one of the positive things is that once affirmative action is effectively removed, then when people complain, when people who have this sense of privilege, this sense of no less obligation, in the sense of, like, well I’m a white, upper class person, and I didn’t get into the college of my choice. And so I’m going to blame it on some quote unquote, less qualified minority. My hope is that that argument will no longer be as valid because now I do think that schools will be able to take things like adversity and things of that nature into account, but it won’t be as obvious. So I think the one silver lining, because I’m just trying to think of a silver lining, is that at least hopefully it will make it a little bit less acrimonious. There will be less of the sense of, okay, well, you minority person are here. This automatic assumption that you don’t, quote unquote, deserve to be here, which is something I have personally encountered. And this idea of like, yeah, you took a spot from someone else who deserves it more.

[00:06:56.150] – Maria

So I’m hoping that at least if we eliminate the formal affirmative action, then hopefully that’ll start eliminating, hopefully some of these things. Although I’m sure that people will always find reasons to be biased against others. But I think Caroline made a really good point. I mean, the, the higher education system has been trying to for generations now, atone for the sins of the public education system and the K through twelve in the US. Right, which is primarily driven by property taxes. So the reason why the better neighborhoods get the better schools is because they have more property taxes. For the most part. That’s usually how it works. And so it’s really kind of sad that when someone is born, it has nothing to do with their effort or their desire. It’s just if they’re born into a lower income to the lower income family, that means they’re probably living in a lower income community, which means they’re probably going to a school that has less funding. And so how do you even escape the gravitational pull of that stratum that you’re born into? And I do think that the US. As Caroline said, they have done a really bad job of trying to truly remedy that.

[00:08:10.010] – Maria

And so I do think that schools are going to need to try to find other ways to account for diversity. One thing that I thought was interesting was that when California banned affirmative action, one of the medical schools, I believe, tried to put in place something that I think they called like, the Adversity scale. And so they weren’t allowed to ask you about your race or your ethnicity, but they weren’t allowed to ask you things like what was your parents household income, perhaps, or what was their level of education, or were you working to provide for your family’s income? These sorts of different variables that get at without asking about race overtly that get at. What obstacles have you overcome? And if you have overcome obstacles, then it’s only fair. If you’re working 30 hours a week at the supermarket to try to augment your family’s income, then obviously those are 30 hours a week that you don’t have to take the AP courses or to study for the SATS. So I do think that we definitely need to, regardless of someone’s race, we’d have to look at what obstacles have they faced? And if those obstacles have had a material impact, an undue material impact on their academic performance, then we cannot judge simply on academic performance alone.

[00:09:25.200] – John

Yes. And this is another area that is gathering more and more attention income. So, Scott Galloway, who we know is a fairly provocative professor at NYU, stern noted after the Supreme Court decision that affirmative action is broadly unpopular. It’s highly vulnerable to legal challenges, it disproportionately helps upper middle class students of color, it pits working class people of different races against one another. And his argument is that financial aid and admissions preference should be given based on income, because, after all, poor students do have a more challenging time applying and achieving high test scores that are so instrumental in admissions in higher education. In fact, there was a survey out that found that one in three Americans supports income based admissions to higher education institutions. And then there was another survey that showed those who agree with income based admissions 68% strongly or 37% somewhat agree that colleges should implement a quota system based on accepting a certain percentage of economically disadvantaged applicants each year. And then there are some people who say, well, if you’re a first gen college student, you should be given a preference over others. So both these other measurements, whether you’re first gen or what your income is, could in fact achieve the same diversity goals.

[00:11:09.370] – John

Of course, they could also be subject to legal challenges in the future, because if they’re mere substitutes for race, as I bet you, some people will be able to show, you’ll have yet another legal challenge to this. And it’s worth noting that the legal challenges were largely brought to light by Asian Americans who felt greatly disadvantaged in the admissions race more than any other, and who really challenged it. What do you think of income or first gen status as a piece of the admissions puzzle?

[00:11:50.270] – Caroline

Caroline well, I think it could be a proxy. My concern is that the US. Is still majority white country, I believe, and the majority of poor people are still white. And therefore it’s not going to be a perfect proxy, right? There’s still more poor white people than poor black people in the US. As Pete Johnson, my colleague Pete Johnson wrote in or contributed to your article. John, the UCS have have tried to incorporate diversity using different methods without being able to use the tick box approach right, to encourage diversity. And I don’t think there is any ideal proxy that will generate the same mix. And as you said, I think that there are going to be groups that are hostile to race based admissions that are going to monitor things very carefully, and they’re potentially going to make life very difficult for admissions officers. There’s potentially going to be litigation, right. If they see that the mix doesn’t change, if they see that the diversity that the schools have currently, if that doesn’t change over time as a result of this decision, then they may bring court cases against the admissions office. And so to what extent then, can the admissions office really seek to maintain diversity if that’s they’re facing legal challenges?

[00:13:26.380] – Caroline

I think that the admissions officers are potentially in a very difficult situation.

[00:13:32.790] – John

And even though this decision was widely anticipated, I mean, no one really thought that this conservative court would uphold affirmative action. It it feels like many schools are caught a little bit flat footed only because the responses have been fairly vague and basically exploratory. At the Kellogg School, Francesca Corneli, the dean, said, basically they’re going to be work to determine how we will comply with a decision while continuing our work to advance diversity, equity and inclusion on our campuses. But determining how and figuring out what to do seems difficult, let me put it that way. Right. I understand that Kellogg and other schools are committed to having diverse classes of an important part of what any graduate education is about. Because after all, people are going to be working in diverse cultures with lots of different kinds of people who share different kinds of or don’t share their own cultural values and bring them to work. And they’re very different in learning how to work with people across the variety of these cultures, languages and beliefs is a crucial part of being effective in the world of work. Maria, what do you say? Is there a substitute to race to ensure diversity?

[00:15:11.330] – Maria

I wish there were, because that would certainly make things a lot easier for all parties involved. I think the one thing that becomes a little bit tricky with using only something like income as a substitute is that the reality is, as any statistic about something like, say, police brutality against African Americans shows, that the color of one’s skin does, unfortunately, impact even one’s ability to move freely and walk down the street minding one’s own business. In some cases, sadly enough, and so someone’s income is not going to whether someone is if someone is white, they are not going to face that sort of automatic, visceral discrimination that I think people from different races might face. And so in that case, the income level, while certainly a pretty strong proxy for Adversity, is not the only proxy. And because I think it’s such a shame, right, because the United States has just sort of kicked the can down the road for 200 years now of, okay, what are we going to do? Well, the next generation will figure it out. And so now all of these ghosts of our country’s past are coming home to roost.

[00:16:28.580] – Maria

And because things were not done aggressively to squash some of these things generations ago, now we find ourselves in the situation where we are. So I definitely think that income is a great place to start, right? First gen. Absolutely great place to start. But I don’t think that it captures fully some of the challenges that people from different racial groups face.

[00:16:50.720] – John

Yes. And it should be pointed out that this Supreme Court decision is occurring at a time when overall minority numbers have declined at four of the top ten MBA programs and at 20 of the top 30. We have a story on this as well, which you can look at. So even before the decision, you have minorities deleting US MBA programs falling. In fact, two thirds of the top 30 have reported declines. So it’ll be interesting to see in the data a year or two from now the full impact of the decision. I’m assuming that it will basically accelerate the decline as it has in Michigan and in California, where these bans had been in place for years. Which is sad news, really, because everyone deserves an equal opportunity to get a great education and to move forward. We do think that higher education is an equalizer of sorts and a real great tool to climb the socioeconomic ladder. And being denied the opportunity to go to a great school and get a great education will have a meaningful impact on generations of people, really. So I am also hopeful that schools will figure out a way around this.

[00:18:17.220] – John

Right. Caroline?

[00:18:18.850] – Caroline

Something that I think is quite interesting, John, is that when you look at the Supreme Court, three members of the Supreme Court were beneficiaries of affirmative action. Right. And Justice Sotomayor has been very forthright about that in her proclaiming that she was a beneficiary of firmative action and that she got into Princeton despite not having equivalent scores to some of her classmates, and yet she graduated top of her class. Right.

[00:18:50.320] – Caroline

So case in point of somebody who might not have got in otherwise and was clearly in the right place at the end of the day. I also thought it was very interesting that they’ve carved out military schools. Right. So the fact that military schools are not subject to this ruling means that they do recognize that diversity in leadership is critical. Right.

[00:19:19.960] – Caroline

So why is that critical for the military, but it’s not critical for government or for business or for any other institution or function, right. As one of the justices says, well, clearly the court has decided that affirmative action is okay for underrepresented minorities as long as they’re destined for the bunker and not for the boardroom. I found that rather bizarre that they’ve carved that out, because that is clearly a recognition of the importance of diversity in in leadership roles.

[00:20:00.350] – John

Yeah, that’s very true. That’s ironic, in fact.

[00:20:04.510] – Caroline

Yeah, it’s it’s very ironic. So so I hope that schools will find ways to continue to promote diversity. I think that schools will end up having to invest a lot more in their outreach efforts. And as you said, California spent vast sums of money on these outreach efforts to try to generate more applications and bring in candidates from underrepresented groups. And so I think that schools will end up having to do the same.

[00:20:34.880] – Maria

Right.

[00:20:35.070] – Caroline

They’re going to have to put a lot more money into that.

[00:20:39.340] – Maria

I’m so glad that Caroline brought up the example of Sonia Sotomayor, because it got me thinking about my own story. And it was so interesting, because when I was in high school, I thought I had prepped for the SATS. I had maybe looked at a couple of practice questions, and I think relative to perhaps perhaps some of my peers, perhaps I had studied more when I got to Princeton and I met everyone else, and I realized, oh, my gosh, I had been so naive. Right. I had had no idea just how much time and effort and how many resources had gone into preparing everyone else. So what happened was that later, when I applied to business school, now, this time, I entered that process with a lot more sophistication. And this time I actually really studied and I took practice tests and I would quiz myself and take I would do little problems on my morning commute and my evening commute to and from work. And so the result was that when I was applying to college, my SAT scores were below the average, but marginally below the average. Marginally below the average. And yet when I applied to business school, my GMAT scores were notably above the average, at least for the class at the time.

[00:22:03.770] – Maria

And so one of the things about my own personal story here that is so chilling to me, that is so scary to me, is that in both cases, it was the same me, it was the same brain, it was the same raw intellectual horsepower. The only difference was one of savviness and understanding what was required. And so one of the things that I think is kind of chilling about the argument that, well, these admissions should only be based upon test scores is that I personally am an example of the difference that a little bit of, I don’t know sophistication or knowledge of the process can make. And second of all, I think on this podcast we have spoken so many times about how MBA admissions is a holistic process. And there’s a reason for that. It’s not just because it sort of sounds politically correct to do, but because business schools are trying to admit people who are going to go out into the world and do well in some sort of leadership or managerial capacity and the skills that are needed. There might be some overlap, obviously, between being intelligent and being a good leader, but it’s not a completely overlapping circle, right?

[00:23:28.450] – Maria

And so we’ve all met people, I think, who are very good at academic settings or are very skilled at filling out multiple choice scantron forms. They don’t do scantrons anymore, but you know what I mean. And yet these are some people who are geniuses, perhaps by that metric, but then they go out into the business world and they cannot work with others. They are very bad teammates. They argue with everyone and everything around them and so they get fired time and time and time again. I think we’ve all seen examples of that. And so that’s why the business schools have long used a holistic process, because they know this. And perhaps one of the upsides about COVID was that because those initial at home tests were so buggy, it led to perhaps probably, I think for the first time, test scores being either optional or you can get a waiver for the test and sort of making that more of an accepted way to run your admissions office, hopefully in the wake of the Supreme Court decision. That is a trend that will now continue because now there’s been it would not be an experiment to do it that way right now.

[00:24:44.970] – Maria

There’s been at least some sort of precedent where admissions offices have let in people perhaps without a test score or with some other metric submitted in lieu of a test score, and they’ve seen how those people have succeeded in the programs. And so my hope is that that is just a trend instead of just being a temporary thing because of COVID Perhaps that is something that will continue.

[00:25:09.650] – John

Going forward and even beyond the actual effects of the decision. You also wonder, to what extent does a ruling like this discourage minority candidates from even trying to apply to an elite business school or an elite school of any kind? There is this. The psychological impact of it could be as great as the actual impact. If you’re out there and you’re a minority student, don’t be discouraged. If anything, be motivated to go and go for it more than ever before, because that’s really important. You don’t want to see even fewer people in the pool to begin with who can have a great education and really benefit from one.

[00:25:58.150] – Caroline

And we’re already getting those questions from candidates who are from those backgrounds and are asking, is it going to make it hard for me to get in?

[00:26:05.820] – Maria

Right.

[00:26:06.140] – Caroline

So those concerns are already being expressed.

[00:26:10.630] – John

It will discourage a lot of people and persuade them not even to try, which is a shame. Really is a shame. And I’m glad. Of the three justices that you mentioned before who were beneficiaries of affirmative action, you didn’t mention Clarence Thomas. Thank you for not doing that.

[00:26:33.550] – Caroline

Good old Clarence Thomas. He’s not your favorite justice, John.

[00:26:39.230] – John

No, I’ve never met him at one of the elite clubs that he’s a member of.

[00:26:43.250] – Maria

Yeah.

[00:26:43.890] – John

Never really given him any money or allowed him to stay in one of my homes. But hey.

[00:26:51.330] – Maria

I find that when it benefits somebody else, it’s unfair affirmative action. But if you manage to achieve an elite position, it’s because you did it on your own merit.

[00:27:02.670] – John

Hallelujah.

[00:27:05.110] – Maria

Sure is interesting how someone’s judgment and perspective changes as to whether or not it’s benefiting them or someone else.

[00:27:12.360] – John

So true. So there you have it. I think the takeaway here is we’ll see how schools actually deal with this. I do suspect that they’ll put other measurements in place to try to at least maintain or at least diminish the impact of the ruling on their efforts to craft a diverse class of candidates in their programs. And again, I’ll just say it again, if you are in this minority class, do not feel discouraged. Apply. Be motivated to apply. You deserve to apply and to be considered fairly. And you shouldn’t be dissuaded from doing so because a conservative court ruled against affirmative action. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. You’ve been listening to Business Casual, our weekly podcast.

Business School News | General | P&Q Podcast "Business Casual"
The Supreme Court’s Affirmative Action Decision
Maria |
July 13, 2023

[00:00:00] John Byrne: Well hello everyone, this is John Byrne with Poets and Quants, welcome to Business Casual, our weekly podcast with my co-hosts Maria Wich-Vila and Caroline Diarte Edwards. Today we have a special guest, Heidi Hillis from Fortuna Admissions. She is based in Australia, is a senior expert coach for Fortuna, and has three degrees, all from Stanford, a BA in English literature, that’s my degree, an MA in Russian studies, and an MBA from the Graduate School of Business. And we have Heidi here to discuss some really fascinating research. Here’s what Fortuna did. They dug into the last Two class profiles of the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

That’s the class of ‘23 and the class of ‘24. They looked up all these folks on LinkedIn to identify a little bit more about their backgrounds, including their former employers and their places of undergraduate education to come up with an incredible analysis. Heidi, welcome.

[00:00:46] Heidi Hillis: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

[00:00:48] John Byrne: Heidi, what is, what are the big takeaways from your deep dive discovery?

[00:00:54] Heidi Hillis: It’s hard to know even where to start. I think there’s a quite a few interesting kind of trends that we’ve seen that have taken place over the years. We were mentioning before the call that traditionally there hadn’t been, 10 years ago, if you’d looked, you wouldn’t have seen so many tech companies represented, but now there’s a big presence of tech companies who are feeding a lot of these MBA programs in Stanford in particular.

I think that the thing that was really interesting was, looking, not just at where the companies that were feeding the students, the applicants to Stanford. When they were working there, when they were applying, but actually the paths that they took prior to their current job.

So how many people were working, if you look at McKinsey, for example, or Bain and BCG, those are obviously companies that feed a lot of applicants to the program, but we found 20%, which seemed to be normal of, the class came from consulting, but if you actually look into the numbers in their background, You would see that actually 37 percent of these two classes had worked at McKinsey sometime prior, or actually in consulting, so it was, it’s The kind of the patterns that are behind, what you would normally see in terms of what Stanford tells us.

So you get a sense of the paths that people have taken. And so that’s something that was really interesting to see.

[00:02:16] John Byrne: Absolutely. And of course, this is this analysis goes so far beyond what any applicant would learn by simply looking at the class profile that the school up because, this level of detail is never available to people.

[00:02:33] Heidi Hillis: No, and yeah, for example, you could see that, Stanford will say that they have around, each year around 50 percent of applicants are international, which is a great statistic and gives you lots of hope if you are an international student. But when you dig into the numbers, you actually understand that.

75 percent of the people who get into Stanford actually went to a U. S. University. So even if you’re international, it does have does seem to have kind of an advantage of having been educated in the U. S. That seems to be something that they look for. However, I think. The concentration of universities in the U.

S. that are feeding to Stanford is something also that, if you’re looking at it, you might find a little bit dis, disconcerting. There’s a few programs that are really, obviously the top. Programs as you would expect places like Harvard, Stanford, Yale, the Ivies but if you look at the international universities very diverse from all over the world, really lots of people from different places, which is also really interesting.

[00:03:38] John Byrne: Yeah I tell you, one of the things that struck me in the data is how consistent it is. 10 years ago, we did the same exercise at Stanford and a bunch of other. Schools from Harvard and Dartmouth and Columbia and talk and a few others and back 10 years ago, we found that 25. 2 percent of the class of 2013 were from Ivy League colleges.

And the Ivy League 8 schools, not including Stanford. And if you included Stanford, it would have been 32. 6%. So now, let’s move forward to your data. And in 23, 30. 7 percent went to Ivy League schools, even above the 25. 2. And in 24, 27. 9 percent went to Ivy League schools. So it looks like Stanford has gotten even a little bit more elitist than it was.

Yeah,

[00:04:41] Heidi Hillis: It’s, it is it’s what the data says, right? Obviously, this is a sample. We have 80 percent of the two classes. So we don’t know where those other people went. And that might skew the data a little bit in another direction. But it is, if you look at there’s 15 schools, that include the Ivy’s and then you have UC Berkeley and obviously Stanford that really are contributing, 49 percent of the class of 23, 47. 3 percent of the class of 24. So that is a pretty heavy concentration and But, if you actually look into the data, you see a lot of people also, each of these is actually an individual story.

You see a lot of people who come from other schools as well. So it’s not like you have to give up hope if you come from a different school. I see a lot of individual stories that, from the whole range of U. S. schools that really are feeding into Stanford. So I think what the data doesn’t also tell you, unfortunately, is how many of these Of people from these backgrounds are actually applying.

So

[00:05:39] John Byrne: good point.

[00:05:40] Heidi Hillis: It’s it’s hard to know. And sometimes I think people this is. A path that a lot of people who go to these schools plan to take from the very beginning. So I would see, it would be interesting to know that I don’t know that we will ever find that out. But, um, that’s something to keep in mind as well.

[00:05:56] John Byrne: Yeah. And that’s a fair point. Because how reflective are these results of the applicant pool reflective of an elitist attitude probably a combination of if I had to guess, but, it is what it is, and these institutions obviously are great filters, so you come from McKinsey, Bain, BCG, and you go to Harvard or Stanford or Penn, and you pass through a fine filter, and it makes you less of a admissions risk than if you went to, frankly, the University of Kentucky and worked for a company that no one knows of.

That’s just the reality of elite MBA admissions, right?

[00:06:40] Heidi Hillis: Yeah. And so you will see that the people who are not going, you’ll see a lot of the people who you would, the profiles that you would expect, the Harvard undergrad that then goes to Goldman that then was working at a PE firm.

That’s a really typical profile that you’ll see. But you’ll also see some really, unique and interesting ones, which I think, Okay. Helps you understand that if you don’t have that path, you also have a real chance at these schools, and maybe even more of a chance, again, not knowing, how many of those Goldman P.

E. Harvard grads are applying. So I’m thinking of the guy that I saw who he went to UPenn undergrad, studied engineering, started out a kind of pretty typical path working in private equity, but then made a big pivot to work for go to Poland where he was working in a real estate investment firm and the head coach of the Polish lacrosse team.

So you have really interesting profiles like that, that you can see that. aren’t necessarily taking that typical path. And sometimes that really does help you stand out.

[00:07:42] John Byrne: True. Maria, what surprised you most about the data?

[00:07:48] Maria Wich-Vila: Wow. I think we already covered, the, one of the biggest ones was the number, the percentage of people who would had some sort of either their undergraduate or graduate education within the United States.

Intuitively, I had felt that was true. And sometimes when I try to, give some honest, tough love to applicants from certain countries, and they’ll say, oh, but Maria, I think you’re being a little too pessimistic. After all, X percent of the applicants at these schools are international, and Y percent are from a certain geography internationally.

I’ll say yes, but that doesn’t mean that they’re all Solely from that area. A lot of them are, do have significant international educational experiences. I think another, speaking of the international piece the percentage of people who had significant international work experience as well was something else that really jumped out at me.

Because it would signal to me that Stanford really does value this global perspective both within probably its domestic applicants and also its international applicants. So I thought that was also a really interesting piece of data that jumped out at me.

[00:08:52] John Byrne: Now remind me what percentage was that?

[00:08:56] Heidi Hillis: People who are international

[00:08:58] John Byrne: who have had international work experience.

[00:09:01] Heidi Hillis: I think it was 30%.

[00:09:02] Caroline Diarte Edwards: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it’s pretty

[00:09:04] John Byrne: impressive.

[00:09:04] Caroline Diarte Edwards: 30%, which I was thrilled to see. As well as coming from in Seattle and Europe. Obviously the international schools put a heavy emphasis on international experience and I hadn’t fully appreciated that. A school like Stanford would also.

really value that to the same extent. And it’s great to see that candidates are making the effort to get outside of the U. S. and get international experience because I think you gain so much from that exposure. And you bring more to the classroom if you’ve got that experience. I know that both Maria and Heidi.

I’ve worked outside of the home countries as well. Pre MBA and I think that you just have so much more to contribute to the whole experience. And it was great to see that 30%.

[00:09:50] John Byrne: What else struck you, Caroline?

[00:09:53] Caroline Diarte Edwards: We talked about the concentration of academic institutions, and I was also surprised about the concentration in employers.

So while there is a very long list of employers where the students have worked pre MBA when you dig into the career paths that they’ve taken there is some interesting concentration. Heidi had noted that the reports that There are 26 companies that account for nearly one third of the class in terms of where they were working right before Stanford.

But when you look at their whole career history, those same 26 companies represent over 60 percent of the class. So that is, yeah, that’s quite extraordinary that so many of the class have experience of working at quite a short list of companies.

[00:10:46] Heidi Hillis: I think that’s reflective of, if you really think about it, you have a lot of these companies.

You’re talking about the Goldmans and the Morgan Stanley and McKinsey that have really large programs that recruit out of undergrad that are really training grounds for. A lot of people that then on to do, work in industry or go on to work for in finance in particular, a lot of people starting out at some of these bulge bracket banks and then going into.

Private equity or smaller firms. So the diversity within finance in terms of where they were working prior to MBA is quite large compared to consulting because there just aren’t as many consulting firms, but a lot of people in financing, a lot of different firms, but they, a lot of them really do start out in these training programs, these analyst programs that are so big and popular.

[00:11:34] John Byrne: Yeah, true. And looking back, I did this exercise as well. The feeder companies to Stanford 10 years ago in the class of 2023, 22. 8 percent from McKinsey, Bain, BCG, and your data, 22. 5 percent work there. Incredible consistency over a 10 year period. When you look at the top six employers 10 years ago, they were McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Goldman, Morgan Stanley, and JP.

Morgan Chase. They accounted alone for 34 percent of all the students in the class of 20, 2013 at Stanford. In your data for 23 and 24 they account for 29. 8%, just a few percentage points less. So remarkable consistency. And I think you’re right, Heidi, this is a function of the fact that these firms bring in a lot of people who are analysts and actually expect them after 3 to 5 years to go to a top MBA school.

So there’s a good number of them in the applicant pool to choose from and let’s face it, they’re terrific candidates.

[00:12:46] Heidi Hillis: Yeah. I think another pool of really terrific candidates that you see, and I don’t know what the 2013 data was saying, but is the US military, which is really, I think, again, something that I felt having worked with lots of military candidates myself, understand that, Yeah, intuitively, I would have expected, but to see it in the data is actually really interesting.

You just see Stanford in particular, I think, is really looking for leadership potential, and it’s so hard to show that as an analyst, as a consultant, but as in the military, these people have such incredible leadership experience that it really helps them to stand out.

[00:13:23] John Byrne: Yeah. And let’s tell people what the data shows.

How many out of us military academies,

[00:13:28] Heidi Hillis: In all in total, we had, 20 over the two years. So that’s in the two classes that we found. So that’s, a pretty large number. And they come from all the different academies, right? So you’ll find them from different, not academies, in the army, navy and the marines.

So you’ll see that. And you also see quite a few, in the data we’ll, we see a lot from the Israeli military as well, but that’s actually a little bit difficult to because every Israeli does go into the military. So it’s they have that in their background. Any Israeli candidate would have Israeli military background as well, but again, that’s.

Place that people can really highlight their leadership. So you had eight people from who had been, who were Israeli and obviously had military experience where they were able to demonstrate significant impact and leadership prior to MBA.

[00:14:18] John Byrne: Yeah. In fact, 10 years ago, roughly 2%. of the class went to either West Point or the U.

S. Naval Academy. Good number of people actually from the military. Maria, any other observations?

[00:14:34] Maria Wich-Vila: Yeah, I was also surprised at the fact that within those top employers And when we look at the tech companies, it was Google and Facebook and Meta with a pretty large showing. Google was actually the fourth largest employer after the MBBs and, but then, I was expecting there to be an equal distribution amongst those famous large cap technology companies.

So I, I would have expected even representation amongst Google, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Amazon, et cetera. And yet. Apple and Amazon only had one or two people each versus Google at 25. So I thought that was really fascinating and it makes me wonder if perhaps it’s a function of maybe Google and Meta might give their younger talent more opportunities to lead impactful projects, perhaps.

I’m just guessing here, but maybe Apple and Amazon perhaps are more hierarchical. And maybe don’t give their younger talent so many opportunities, but I was really surprised by that. I would have expected a much more even distribution amongst the those famous those famous tech companies.

[00:15:40] John Byrne: Yeah. You’re right. And I crunched the numbers on the percentages and Google took three and a half percent of the two classes and that’s better than Goldman, Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan Chase. Facebook had 2. 7 percent and Microsoft at 1. 5, and I was shocked at Amazon because, Amazon is widely known as the largest single recruiter of MBAs in the past five years.

At one point, they were recruiting a thousand MBAs a year, but in, in one sense, maybe Amazon quite doesn’t really have the prestige. For Stanford MBAs who might rather work elsewhere, I think that might be is, you look at the employment reports at a lot of the other schools and Amazon is number one at a number of schools and very low percentage of people from Amazon going to Stanford.

We don’t know, of course, how many. Leaving Stanford and going back to Amazon, but it can’t be that many.

[00:16:41] Heidi Hillis: I wonder if there’s something about just a proximity effect here. You have the plate, like the meta and Google just being so close to Stanford, maybe it just, attracts more people applying because they.

They’re almost on campus and maybe, just being Amazon all over the world and different places could be not attracting as many. I don’t know.

[00:17:03] John Byrne: Yeah, true. The other thing, the analysis shows, and this is what you also gather from the more public class profile is really the remarkable diversity of talent that a school like Stanford can attract year after year.

It is, it blows you away, really. The quality and the diversity of people despite the concentration of undergraduate degree holders or company employers, it’s it’s really mind boggling, isn’t it?

[00:17:33] Heidi Hillis: Yeah, they come from everywhere and really interesting paths and even the people I think that, have those kind of typical paths, you see a lot of diversity within them as well.

So I think, even if you’re coming from a Goldman or a McKinsey having lived in another country or gone to done a fellowship abroad or running a non profit on the side. These things are actually what helped them to stand out. But you do see some really interesting, I think, profiles, too, of people who’ve just done, you get a sense of what it would be like to be in the Stanford classroom.

People from really unique and different backgrounds. People who come from all different countries and lawyers, doctors people who have run, nonprofits in developing countries people running large programs for places like Heineken or Amazon too. But, it’s a real diversity of backgrounds.

[00:18:27] John Byrne: Now, Heidi, I wonder if one is an applicant. Is this discouraging to read and here’s why if I’m not from Harvard, Stanford, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Cornell, Dartmouth, and if I didn’t work for McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Goldman, Google am I at a disadvantage and should I even try? Some people look at the data and come away with that conclusion.

[00:18:52] Heidi Hillis: I think it’s a reality check for a lot of people. I think it’s just, it’s really, it just helps people understand, what it, the difficulty of this, why it’s so competitive, but I think that there is, again, behind the kind of the percentages, you do look at these individual profiles and I would get, I would actually take a lot of hope from it if I were looking, as an applicant, because especially if you are.

Maybe a little bit more of a big fish or small fish in a bigger pond or big fish in a smaller pond you go to Rice or you go to Purdue or, and you do really well, those are the people who, they’re definitely looking for that diversity of background as well as the international.

I think that’s really neat. think that, instead of looking at the data and saying, why not, why I shouldn’t even apply, it’s why not me look at these other profiles of people who have taken really unique paths that that do get in. So I think it is actually a Kind of a mix of both, it is a reality check for a lot of people, but it’s actually, there is so much diversity in the data as well.

I think also one thing that we haven’t really covered is about is just the prevalence of social impact in, that’s really taken hold of the class. I don’t, again, going back to your 2013 analysis, I’m not sure how easy it was to tell that, but a lot of you can see reflected in the both the types of organizations people are working for, but also their titles and the kinds of work that they’re doing that that there’s a huge 40 percent of the class of the two classes had some kind of social impact in their background.

Whether that’s, running their own nonprofit on the side or volunteering or. Running trans transformational kind of programs within companies that are, either in finance or consulting or in industry. That’s a big trend. I think that people can take heart from as well.

So if you’re working if you feel like you’re in an organization where you’re not getting the leadership that you. can use to highlight your potential for Stanford, that’s definitely a place you can go is working for in volunteer capacity for a non profit or on the board of a of some kind of foundation.

Those are the kinds of places that you can highlight your potential

[00:21:00] John Byrne: true. And I know we have a overrepresented part of every applicant pool at an elite business school are software engineers from India. And I wonder in your analysis, how many of them did you find from like the IITs?

[00:21:18] Heidi Hillis: That’s a good question. The IITs, it was again, it was one of these you have about 50 percent of classes internet, so 25 percent of the class. was educated outside of the US. The IITs are going to be up there. Let’s see from India, 2. 1 percent of the class came from India. So probably, I don’t know offhand exactly how many of those were IITs, but

[00:21:43] John Byrne: I’ve had a lot of them.

[00:21:45] Heidi Hillis: Yeah, probably a lot of them. Although I think, that’s the other thing is that people who come, to work with me from India, they feel like if they haven’t gone to IIT, then that’s going to be a disadvantage. But I think, you’ll find that there are, there’s representation of other universities as well.

Definitely.

[00:22:00] Caroline Diarte Edwards: Yeah, I was just looking at the list of undergrad institutions. And for example, you’ve got Osmania University from Hyderabad. So it is not, it’s not all IIT. Okay.

[00:22:12] John Byrne: Yeah, exactly. And Caroline, 1 of the things about the institutions that are really represented here and that I don’t really see unless I missed it.

I didn’t see a Cambridge or an Oxford. Two of the best five universities in the world. And I wonder if that’s just a function of fewer people in the applicant pool or what? What do you think that could be about?

[00:22:36] Caroline Diarte Edwards: I had a look through the uk Institutions and you have got cambridge in there.

I think I also noticed. Bristol university there are a few different universities. So i’m aston university, which is not it’s not on a par with Oxford or Cambridge. So I think that speaks to the point that Heidi made that you don’t have to have been to an elite school to get into Stanford.

Aston is a good solid university, nothing wrong with Aston, but it’s not it’s not one of the top UK universities. So there’s definitely some interesting variety in the educational backgrounds of the students going to Stanford. And

[00:23:16] John Byrne: then, yeah, it is if you’re a big fish in a small pond, like Afton, you’ll you could still stand out in the pool.

[00:23:26] Heidi Hillis: Absolutely. There’s a lot of really interesting background, you have look hard on blue and you have Miami University and some really smaller universities abroad. I think. Again, it’s really, if you look at that, it does give you hope because it’s really what you do afterwards and if you, obviously, if you come from one of these schools, you probably want to be in the top, 5 percent of the graduating class, you want to show that you have the GPA that can support an academic background that they feel comfortable that you’ll be able to compete academically, but, and maybe that’s what you’re Offset by the, the GMA or the scores, you don’t know, we don’t have those on here.

But, um, the path post university really becomes much more important in those cases. What you’ve done since then where you’ve, how you’ve risen from starting at a entry level position to, running a division or heading a country group or something like that.

[00:24:21] John Byrne: And as far as Cordon Bleu goes, every good business program needs a Cordon Bleu, for God’s sake, right?

You want to eat well at those NBA parties, don’t you?

[00:24:32] Heidi Hillis: Absolutely.

[00:24:35] John Byrne: Maria, I’m sure that was true at Harvard.

[00:24:38] Maria Wich-Vila: I wasn’t the one doing the cooking but I certainly, I was certainly a member of the wine and cuisine society where I happily participated in the eating and consuming a part of that.

But to, to the point that we were just recently talking about. regarding being a big fish in a small pond. Not only have I seen it personally with applicants that I’ve worked with who did not attend these elite universities, but even many years ago, I attended a, an admissions conference where Kirsten Moss, who was the former head of admissions at Stanford, she actually told stories about how they’ve accepted people who even attended community college.

But within the context of that community college, they had really moved mountains. And she said that one of the things that they look for is, Within the context and the opportunities that you’ve been given, how much impact have you had? So maybe you don’t have an opportunity to go to Yale or MIT or IIT for your undergraduate, but whatever opportunity you have been given, have you grabbed that opportunity and really made the most of it and really driven change?

So she specifically called out, I believe, I believe there were two students that year at the GSB who had both started their educations, their higher educations at community college. Anything is possible. It really is about finding the people who, wherever they go, they jump in and make an impact.

[00:25:55] Heidi Hillis: Yeah, I think that to that point, I think it can almost be a more difficult if you’ve gone to Harvard and then worked at one of these, gone on one of these paths because we know that there’s, that’s an overrepresented pool in the applicant pool to stand out among those to have had that, that pedigree sometimes can be a disadvantage, right?

If you haven’t done as much as you should have with that, or if you started at that high level to show that level of progress over the course of your career is actually a little bit more difficult. Okay. And coming from a community college and rising to, a country level manager in some places is actually puts you at a significant advantage, I would say.

[00:26:31] Maria Wich-Vila: Because it’s hard for those people, it’s hard for those people to stand out, but also I think some of them go on autopilot, right? I think some people are on this kind of achievement, elite achievement treadmill, where they’re not even really thinking about what do I want to do with my life?

They’re always reaching for whatever that next, what’s the best college to go to? It’s Harvard Princeton. Yeah. Okay. Now that I’m here, what’s the best employer to work for? It’s McKinsey, Bain, BCG and without actually perhaps stopping to think about what is my passion? What impact do I want to make in the world?

And so I feel sometimes those autopilot candidates, I feel a little bit bad for them because they’re doing everything quote unquote and yet sometimes when you speak with them, that passion just isn’t there. And I do think that may ultimately harm them in the very, very elite business school.

Admissions because business schools want people who are passionate because at the end of the day, in order to do hard things, you’re going to need passion at some point to get you through those low periods. And so I think that’s something business schools look for. And I do think that sometimes these.

These kind of autopilot candidates might sometimes be at a disadvantage.

[00:27:29] Heidi Hillis: Yeah, I think that, to that point look in the data, when you look at it, you see so many people who’ve gone to McKinsey, Bain, Weasley, or Goldman, but then there’s a, you see a lot of success for people who’ve actually pivoted.

So those pivots that are post The second or third job really do show you that, if you’re if you get a candidate who’s coming from, still at McKinsey, okay, that’s fine. They have to be the top 5 percent of McKinsey, like they have to be going to get so many McKinsey applicants that the only the, you can look at the data in a couple ways.

One is, oh, my God, they took 12 people from McKinsey and the others. Oh, my God, they only took 12 people from McKinsey, right? That’s So if you want to be one of those 12, you have to be the top 12 in the world, right? Whereas if you’ve gone to McKinsey and then done an externship at a health care startup and then moved on to be a product manager at for health at Google, that kind of a path is definitely showing a little bit more, maybe risk taking, maybe ability to follow your passions.

So I think that. When I see candidates who come to me, for example, and they’re like, not thinking about applying now, but maybe in a year or two, I say, look for an externship, maybe think about pivoting out of one of these places and looking for some operational experience.

And because you see in the data that works.

[00:28:42] Maria Wich-Vila: And they’re doing themselves a service not only in terms of enhancing their admissions chances, but even just in terms of determining, what do I want to do with my career? If I do eventually want to go into industry, what functional role do I want to have?

What industry do I want to work in? So it’s, it actually benefits them in the long term to do that as well, even if they don’t go to business school. I think those secondments and externships and second job, post consulting jobs are extremely valuable. Totally agree with you.

[00:29:06] Caroline Diarte Edwards: And I’m sure they also bring more to the classroom as well.

I would think that’s also why Stanford is selecting some of those candidates, because not only have they worked at McKinsey, but they’ve also led a non profit in Africa or worked in private equity or whatever it is. So they have much more breadth that they can bring to the classroom. And I think that It’s seen as a very valuable contribution

[00:29:29] John Byrne: in Heidi.

Did you see that? The majority of the candidates to examined actually did work in more than one place, right?

[00:29:37] Heidi Hillis: Yes, most of them did. There were very few that, you see working at one place. And I would say that those are people that would have really risen through the ranks.

Someone who’s worked at Walmart and become, started in, I don’t know, in one state, but then to become a regional manager and things like that really are going to onto a global role. The people who have stayed at one place really have shown significant career progression within that.

And then the other people I think you do see a lot of movement. The big. The most typical would be from investment banking to private equity and then you do find in finance, there’s a little bit less kind of movement into other industries. You see a lot of people staying within finance, but within finance.

Yeah. Yeah. The other industries, especially consulting or other, tech, people are really moving into other places and it’s becoming, it is a little bit difficult. We have these categories that we’ve talked about, for example, healthcare, but it’s hard to categorize some of these companies.

Are they healthcare? Are they tech? There’s a lot of overlap. And so everything’s a little bit of tech in something nowadays. So whether it’s finance and fintech or education and ed tech or health care and health tech, these are all merging and combining. It’s hard to categorize them.

[00:30:53] John Byrne: So looking at the data here I wonder if you’ve seen your old classmates in the sense that these new people are very much like the people you went to school with at Stanford. I

[00:31:05] Heidi Hillis: put this out and it’s really interesting to a lot of my classmates downloaded the report and read it. And a lot of them came back and said, oh, boy, I would never get in now.

It’s these people are super impressive. I think that you see a lot of. It’s just become more and more competitive. And I think that with more information and more people every year applying, it is becoming really difficult. I think that you do see a lot of, I am encouraged by the diversity part of it that you see still Stanford.

I feel like they do take risks on some really interesting profiles and candidates that maybe some other schools are less likely to do. And so that’s what does give me. A lot of hope when I get some kind of really nontraditional candidate who wants to, their dream school is Stanford. I feel like, I say all the time, there’s a 6 percent chance.

You’re going to get in, but there’s 100 percent chance. You won’t get in if you don’t apply. So you’ve got to, you got to give it a go. And that’s, the attitude that we take to it.

[00:32:04] John Byrne: Indeed. So for all of you out there read Heidi’s article on our site, it’s called who gets in and why exclusive research.

Into Stanford GSB and I’ll tell you one conclusion I have about this is that, man, if you really want to get into Stanford, you need a Sherpa, and and Heidi would be a great Sherpa for you because the, just the profiles of these folks, where they’ve been, what they’ve done, what they’ve accomplished in their early lives is so remarkable that To compete against, in this pool for a spot in the class you need every possible advantage you can get.

And and having an expert guide you through this trip probably would be a really big advantage. So Heidi, thank you for sharing your insights with us and the research, the very cool research.

[00:33:01] Heidi Hillis: Thank you

[00:33:03] John Byrne: and for all of you out there. Good luck. And if you want to go to Stanford, you got to check out this report.

Okay. It will inspire you to up your game, even if you are from Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, or wherever McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Goldman, Google, you want to look at this report and you want to really think about. What it will really take to get in. I think it will inspire you, motivate you to really put your best foot forward.

Thanks for listening. This is John Byrne with Poets& Quants.

Maria

New around here? I’m an HBS graduate and a proud member (and former Board Member) of AIGAC. I considered opening a high-end boutique admissions consulting firm, but I wanted to make high-quality admissions advice accessible to all, so I “scaled myself” by creating ApplicantLab. ApplicantLab provides the SAME advice as high-end consultants at a much more affordable price. Read our rave reviews on GMATClub, and check out our free trial (no credit card required) today!