The World’s Most Popular MBA Programs
Maria |
July 19, 2023

Discover the most popular MBA programs in the latest episode of Business Casual with the hosts delving deep into the data, exploring applicants, yield rates, and application-to-seat ratios to uncover the most popular schools. You already know Harvard Business School steals the show, but they also give a shout-out to other top picks like Stanford, MIT Sloan, Berkeley, Columbia, and Yale. The hosts emphasize the importance of yield rates, revealing the number of accepted applicants who actually enroll. They dive into what creates that special “halo effect” for certain schools and how factors like location and scholarship aid come into play. And of course, they will share an interesting discussion on the differences between Chicago Booth and Kellogg, with a special focus on Booth’s scholarship game plan.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:07.450] – John

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. Caroline, of course, was the former admissions director at INSEAD and is a co founder of Fortuna Admissions, while Maria is the founder of Applicant Lab. We want to talk about the world’s most popular MBA programs. We did a little exercise here recently at Poets and Quants. We looked at the school’s candidates identify as their target choices for an MBA program in our Handicapping Your MBA odd series. And we looked at this back to 2005. And what’s interesting is obviously there were hundreds and hundreds of these episodes where we literally tried to calculate the odds of a candidate for a given school. And we tried to see which schools are most popular on the list, and we came up with a list of the most popular MBA programs in the world. You can Google that most popular MBA program is at Poets and Quants, and you’ll see but we also did something else. We indicated the number of applications to the seats available in a class, which also is another indication of popularity.

[00:01:34.370] – John

And then we also published the yield numbers for the schools. And yield for those who don’t know is the percentage of admitted applicants who actually enroll in a program, because obviously some people will be accepted into numerous programs and then choose to go with one over another or several, and that impacts the yield data. So number one on our list, and will surprise no one, is the Harvard Business School. Yet. What’s kind of interesting about Harvard is that in terms of applications per seat, it’s not near the top. In fact, Stanford is at the top at 14.5 applicants per classroom seat. MIT Sloan is next with 13.1, and Berkeley is up there at 12.9 applications per seat. And let’s see, Columbia even is slightly ahead of Harvard Business School nine per seat versus 8.9, which is kind of fascinating. And then also Yale, 9.3 applications per seat. Are these really the most popular business schools in the world? Maria, what do you think?

[00:02:47.990] – Maria

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think there’s a ton of different data that you can slice and dice, a ton of different ways that is going to show which schools are the most popular in the world, especially if you look at it from a high level perspective across total applicant numbers worldwide. I think definitely that’s a really great way to slice and dice it. I’ve always thought that of the easily currently publicly available data out there, I’ve always thought that yield is the if I could only choose one metric to follow, it would be yield, because that’s where put your money where your mouth is, okay? You’ve gotten into one or possibly multiple schools. So if you’ve gotten into more than one school, okay, now you have to take out the loan now you have to pay the deposit. Now you have to probably quit your job and move to a new city and do all of that heavy lifting that goes with enrolling in a school. So I’ve always thought that yield is the most promising metric to use, if I could only choose one. And so I don’t think it’s the only metric that one should follow. But I think it’s probably one of the better ones in terms of what’s out there today. So, yeah, I don’t see any huge surprises in the list. It’s all the usual suspects.

[00:03:56.240] – John

Yes, really. After. Harvard, Wharton, Stanford, it’s MIT, Columbia, Kellogg, Chicago, Booth, Yale, Duke, Berkeley, Virginia, Dartmouth, Michigan, London Business School. INSEAD, NYU, Stern, Cornell, UCLA, UT, Austin, McCombs, Georgetown, Oxford, Carnegie, Mellon, UNC Kenan Flagler. Cambridge and Emory. What do you make of this, Caroline?

[00:04:24.370] – Caroline

I think it’s a great list, John. I think it makes, in some ways, much more sense than many of the MBA rankings out there. I think it reflects the reality of the relative prestige of many of the schools and actually what applicants do think about the schools and where they would like to go. If you look at your list, you’ve got the M7 right there at the top right from one to seven. Not necessarily in the order that we would put them, but it’s a good list. And Stanford is there at number three, partly because of the small class size. And so with that small class size, I think some people select out of applying, perhaps, and therefore your handicapping index, it’s lower than Wharton and Harvard Business School. Of course, I would like to see some of the international schools higher up the list. That may also be a function of, to a certain extent, the audience that is at least in the handicapping index. But I definitely agree with Maria that yield is really an interesting metric and says a lot about, actually what candidates really think about a school and where they actually want to go.

[00:05:46.990] – Caroline

And it’s a metric that admissions officers care a huge amount about. Right. They put a lot of effort into yield.

[00:05:55.410] – John

What do you think INSEAD yield is, by the way?

[00:05:58.370] – Caroline

INSEAD has very high yield, I would think.

[00:06:02.050] – Maria

Yeah.

[00:06:02.520] – Caroline

I mean, it’s typically between about 70 and 80%. So having a high yield is a great position for a school to be in because it means that you are playing less of a guessing game about who is actually going to join the program from the candidates that you’ve admitted. And so it gives you much more power over how you craft your class. If you have a yield that is sort of 50% or lower, then I’ve never been in that situation in the admissions office. But I would imagine that that makes it much more difficult to make sure that you’re getting the kind of diversity representation of different backgrounds that you’re looking for and sort of craft that ideal mix because you have no control over who is going to accept and who’s going to turn down your offer. Although I’m sure they have a good sense sometimes of who is less likely to accept their offer and who is more likely. So they’re probably admitting candidates on the basis of an estimation of their chances of accepting as well. But I think that crafting the class gets much more complex for schools that are further down the list in the yield ranking.

[00:07:17.290] – Caroline

And therefore it’s something they care an awful lot about because the more they can do to push that up, the better they look because as we say right, it shows that the school is very desirable and it’s a wonderful metric to perform on from an external perspective. But also it just makes the lives of the admissions office that much easier if they can make sure that the people that they’re making offers to actually attend the program and they’re not having to sort of admit two or three times the number of people that they actually need, because then it gets difficult to craft the class. And also, I think it must get much more difficult to craft the class in terms of the size of the class and trying to figure out exactly who is accepting who is not going to come. And then you have to admit people from the waitlist. You have to keep people on the waitlist to manage the buffer. So it is a pretty complex equation for the admissions team to manage.

[00:08:17.170] – John

One thing you don’t get by looking at yield is how many of those people who decided to go to a given school were scholarship and how scholarship money was used to induce them to go to the school. And obviously, schools that have large amounts of unrestricted giving have a lot more leeway in luring candidates away from other schools that they’ve been accepted into and improving their yield rates. Maria, you were the first one to said yield is all that matters to you. It’s the single most important stat. What’s your take on the yield numbers in the table that we’ve published?

[00:08:57.530] – Maria

Yeah, I mean, they’re not know. So for those folks out there who might not know what yield is, maybe it would be useful if we define it super quickly. So the yield number is the percentage of people who actually enroll in a school after having been given an offer. So if a school offers 100 folks acceptances, if a school has an 85% yield, that means that 85 out of those 100 people chose that school versus another. And one of the things that I think is interesting about the top three schools in particular and their high yield numbers and also, I think INSEAD also with Caroline mentioning its high yield number is that I think it’s a really good sign of just how well respected these programs are. But also it’s interesting because I think when people start this process, when I look at, for example, Harvard has 85 and a half percent and Stanford’s at 80%, I think a lot of people lump those two schools together and they say, I’m applying to Harvard, Stanford. You sort of hear it in the same breath. They concatenate those two words together. It’s harvard, Stanford, HS.

[00:10:05.090] – Maria

And it’s interesting because when you look at the yield numbers, I think anecdotally sometimes you see people when you work in admissions consulting, you see people who are more Stanford than they are HBS-sy, and a lot of people will apply to both programs, but a lot of people will only get into one versus the other. And I do think that some of these programs do a really good job of assessing fit in a way that when people are first starting the process right, and they just lump the programs together, they might not realize some of these nuances. But it’s interesting that there is such a high yield for both Harvard and Stanford insofar as a lot of people tend to apply to both of them. However, it’s clear that when they accept people, they are accepting people who have more of whatever their unique DNA is.

[00:10:52.350] – John

Yes, really. Man it makes the admissions job so much easier when you have confidence that more than half of the people that you’re accepting will in fact come, makes the job a lot easier. What about the whole notion of applicant to seat ratio? As I mentioned earlier, Stanford’s at the top 14.5 applications for every available classroom seat. That’s really kind of a remarkable number. At Wharton, for example, it’s 7.1. At Harvard, it’s 8.9 schools like Chicago booth 6.9. It tells you a lot about the appeal of Stanford. And I will say that although Harvard usually tops the yield tables every year for a little while, Stanford actually got ahead of Harvard on yield, and Harvard came back this past year, in fact. But what about application to seat ratio? Is that an important number?

[00:11:57.430] – Caroline

Caroline well, it’s an eyewatering number for some of those calls, right. With 14 candidates for every seat, that’s pretty crazy. But that’s also, as you said, it’s a function, partly it stamps with the small class size. Right. And Maria made the point when we were chatting earlier that there is a lot of overlap in the applicant pool between these. So, you know, many candidates, as she said, will be applying to Harvard, they’ll be applying to Stanford. And so the fact that Stanford has a higher applicant to seat ratio is more a function of the class size, yet having a somewhat similar applicant pool as Harvard, which has Harvard, of course, having a much bigger class size. But those numbers are remarkable because many of the candidates applying, a vast majority are very well qualified. Right? They are very self selecting pools. Many people don’t apply if they think they haven’t got a chance of getting in. And so those schools are in an enviable position, right, because they are getting to cherry pick, really the best of the best.

[00:13:07.960] – John

And as we know, a lot of people obviously most people apply to a number of schools. So many times when you look at, like, a Kellogg or Chicago Booth or know those students are applying the Harvard, Stanford and Wharton MIT. And if they get into Harvard or Stanford, for sure, they’re more likely to go then, you know, naturally a Kellogg or Chicago may lose out to a Harvard or Stanford, but it’s only because that person’s first choice was Harvard or Stanford. And Kellogg or Chicago, looking at that candidate’s profile, sees a very valuable, ambitious, smart person that they would love to have as it’s there is that factor in here because these candidates are applying to numerous schools. So the applicant to seat ratio is affected by that in a meaningful way. But I agree with the two of you. I think this is a pretty darn good list of the schools that are the most popular, not necessarily the best, and not best for you as an individual candidate, because it could be that Emory Goizeta is better for you than Harvard Business School. In some cases, it’s really possible. Or Brigham Young, if you happen to be Mormon, the appeal of that school to Mormons is massive, which reflects that 86.8% yield rate for the Marriott School of Business at Brigham Young.

[00:14:45.450] – John

And it also is not a measurement of the schools that have the highest employment rates, the highest salaries, the most selective admission standards in terms of acceptance rate, or GMATs or Gres, this is simply and merely the most popular schools, which I think it is kind of a cool list to look at. I agree. I don’t see many aberrations here. I’m kind of surprised to see Cambridge and Oxford in the top 25, as opposed to Achesa, Paris, and IESC in Barcelona. But then again, Cambridge and Oxford are considered to be among the five world best universities. So the halo of that overall university does cast an incredible shadow over the MBA program, and that means a lot. Any final words on the data, Maria?

[00:15:46.850] – Maria

I think the usage of the term halo effect is really useful for a lot of these, right? So when you look at, for example, people who apply to Stanford do tend to not always, but they do tend to be very interested in careers in the Bay Area or careers in technology. And so I think HAAS benefits quite a bit. Berkeley, HAAS benefits quite a bit from sort of a geographic halo. And similarly, I think, you know, MIT might benefit more from being in Boston. And so people I started, I think sometimes what happens with people is they say, well, I’m interested in Harvard, so let me look into Harvard. Hey, Boston is actually a really great city. Hey, boston actually has a ton of amazing I should maybe I should prioritize trying to go to school in Boston. I’m not saying that’s obviously not what happens with everyone, but I think I feel like I’ve seen that kind of thought process evolve in that way. So I definitely think that there’s a halo effect. One thing that I liked seeing personally as someone who lives in Los Angeles, was how well UCLA Anderson did. One of my pet peeves with the US.

[00:16:47.330] – Maria

News and World Report rankings is how they essentially interchange USC and UCLA, which is an understandable conclusion to jump to if you’re not really living in the city and interacting with graduates of those two different programs. But I do feel that strongly that UCLA is a notably stronger program and attracts notably stronger students. And so I was happy to see that, and I was happy to see Duke Fuqua in the top ten. Their yield rate of almost 55% is, I think, a real testament to how well they select for culture. They do a really good job in their application. They have a pretty unique application, right. For folks who might not know they have one of their famous questions is, give us 25 random facts about you. And it’s a little bit quirky and a little bit different. But I love that question, and I think they attract a certain type of person with that question. And so then I think when they accept folks, I think that there’s a good cultural fit, which is in fact, reflected in a higher than expected yield.

[00:17:48.470] – John

Yes. And we should point out on the list, UCLA is 18th. USC is not in the top 25 at all. It is in the next group, but nowhere near UCLA in terms of popularity, which is telling given some of the latest rankings from US. News, which has placed USC above UCLA. And that’s a head scratcher for sure.

[00:18:13.550] – Maria

Indeed.

[00:18:16.430] – John

Caroline, any last words or thoughts?

[00:18:18.770] – Caroline

Yeah, well, as we’re talking about the halo effect and the benefits for some schools of being in a certain geography, I think that also applies to Oxford and Cambridge, because I think for some applicants and I see that, for example, for candidates from the US. They are more inclined to apply to Oxford and Cambridge because they know the school name and they feel comfortable being in the UK as another English speaking country versus perhaps applying to some of the other schools that you mentioned, john So Ashesay in Paris or ESA in Barcelona. They may feel a little bit more nervous about going to a country where they do not speak the language. And so I think that Oxford and Cambridge benefit from that draw for native English speakers around the world who are interested in studying in the UK. And of course, as you say, they are globally renowned institutions, so I am not so surprised that they’re on the top 25.

[00:19:16.690] – John

Very true.

[00:19:17.910] – Caroline

What do you guys make of the difference there between Chicago Booth and Kellogg? There’s quite a big gap there, isn’t there, in the yield?

[00:19:26.010] – John

Yeah, there is. I think it’s scholarship aid. I think Chicago Booth is so much more aggressive because years ago, they got the largest single gift ever given to a business school, $350,000,000. And that was unrestricted. And the 350 doesn’t even account for the dividend stream that came from the gift, which has brought that gift to a value over 550,000,000. And Chicago is literally buying students with that.

[00:19:54.000] – Caroline

Right, okay. Yeah. Because I was surprised to see that it would be so much more popular in terms of yield than Kellogg, but that would make sense.

[00:20:02.040] – John

Yeah. And yet Kellogg gets more applicants per seat than Chicago Booth.

[00:20:07.590] – Caroline

Interesting. Yes.

[00:20:10.690] – Maria

And I think Booth has been buying good applicants or good students, and I think that that’s helping to bump them up in the rankings. And so it’s become like this kind of positive upward cycle where higher they go in the rankings, the better people they attract. But I’ve seen people get into another top five or an M7, and then Booth just doubles the scholarship money and wow, things like that, where it’s been pretty stunning. Yeah. I was surprised to see that Kellogg’s yield is as low as it is also because I have seen, of all the top programs unofficially unscientifically, I’ve seen Kellogg play the most number of games with waitlists in terms of, like, they will call people up and be like, hey, you’re on the waitlist. Let’s chat with an admissions officer about you being on the waitlist. And then on that call, they’ll say something like, okay, if we give you the seat, will you take it? So basically, I have heard that they do this. I think all schools probably do this to some extent, but I’ve heard that Kellogg in particular does it. So I almost wonder in some ways if they use the waitlist in that way as a yield management tool.

[00:21:17.150] – Caroline

Yeah, it sounds like they probably do. They’re probably really struggling with that 38% there. That’s probably a massive target for them to get that up. And they’re probably, as you say, with people applying often to schools that are in geographic proximity. They’re probably losing out a lot to Booth.

[00:21:37.390] – John

Yeah.

[00:21:38.050] – Caroline

Even though they are quite different programs.

[00:21:41.330] – John

So check it out yourself. The world’s most popular MBA programs. Look it up at Poets and Quants. Really some fascinating data on all the top schools that clearly are among the most popular schools in the world. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. You’ve been listening to Business Casual, our weekly podcast.

The World’s Most Popular MBA Programs
Maria |
July 19, 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 โ€˜23 and the class of โ€˜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

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