What’s New In MBA Admissions
Maria |
June 28, 2023

In this episode of Business Casual, our hosts will bring you the insightful highlights from the recent AIGAC conference attended by Maria, with of course a special focus on the MBA admissions industry. Discover the notable shift discussed as Columbia Business School transitions from rolling admissions to a three-round format and valuable insights on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) in admissions.

They also dive into the acceptance of alternate tests like the new GMAT and GRE formats. Explore the rise of older applicants, potentially a result of pandemic-related delays, and the potential for tailored full-time MBA options for individuals at different career stages. Lastly, they touch upon the challenge of “summer melt” and its implications for admissions officers when admitted candidates opt not to enroll after submitting deposits.

Don’t miss out on captivating discussions about MBA admissions, AI in education, GMAT, GRE, and the evolving landscape of business education.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:07.370] – John

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. We want to talk about a couple things today. One is AIGAC. Now, you probably don’t know what AIGAC is, and I hate acronyms, but it stands for the Association of International Graduate Admissions Consultants. And in late May they met. And these are largely MBA admission consultants, not necessarily all graduate schools. And one thing that they do is they talk about the industry, they talk about trends, and they meet with admission directors of various schools who often kind of tell what they expect in the marketplace, as well as how they’re going to maybe change their application requirements or their essays. One of the big changes this year at a major school is Columbia Business School, which for years has had a rolling admissions policy and for the first time in memory, for sure, has gone to a traditional three round format. Maria attended the AIGAC conference and I wonder if you might share some of the highlights.

[00:01:25.620] – Maria

Yeah, absolutely. It was a super packed I mean, these are conferences that go from 08:00 A.m. Until 10:00 p.m. At night, well, including meals. It’s not all conference stuff, but yeah, a few of the takeaways that were really surprising to me that I can share were first of all, we have talked here on this podcast several times about AI and Generative, AI and ChatGPT and what is that going to mean for writing essays, et cetera. And it was interesting. There was sort of a range of opinions from admissions officers. Some of them seemed, on average, a lot less freaked out about it or concerned about it than I expected them to be. For example, one of the officers said something like, well, we can tell if a candidate has written an application for another school, so I feel pretty confident that we’ll be able to tell if a candidate has written one with ChatGPT. Another officer sort of likened it to using Grammarly. Right? It’s sort of the natural evolution. We started with spell check and that little paperclip in Microsoft, probably before a lot of listeners to this podcast were born. You guys, there used to be a little paperclip in Microsoft that would appear and try to help you and it was not helpful.

[00:02:34.270] – Maria

We started with spell check and then we went to grammar check and then it was Grammarly. And so this person just said, well, this is just sort of a natural evolution of that because the ChatGPT cannot invent the content for you, no matter how good it is. But maybe it could be sort of a writing tool to help people become better writers. As a side note, this is not AIGAC related necessarily, but I know an English teacher who’s a high school English teacher in Los Angeles who said that she’s actually starting to incorporate ChatGPT into some of her lessons because she’s like, it’s here to stay. And if it can help my students learn to become better writers themselves, then we just have to embrace it anyway. I was like, oh, I hadn’t thought.

[00:03:10.670] – Maria

Of it being a tool to help people. Like, if you write it your way and then you put it in the ChatGPT and it spits back something that’s a lot better, then maybe it teaches you. I think that’s overly optimistic because I think people may or may not want to put in that level of effort and they’re just tell me, Just do it for me.

[00:03:26.370] – John

Maria I was recently at Cambridge and a professor told me that he wrote an article and then he put it into ChatGPT and he asked the bot to edit the article and it really functioned as an editor as well, and a rewrite person. So there is that.

[00:03:45.190] – Maria

Yeah, hopefully. I think the challenge, though, would be if ChatGPT, it might know how to cut out words, but how do we know that it’s cutting out the best words in terms of what’s relevant for an MBA admissions reader and what isn’t? It might just cut out words willy nilly, but also cut out really good stuff in addition to really irrelevant stuff.

[00:04:04.750] – John

As we know it makes up stuff too.

[00:04:07.550] – Maria

Sometimes it just makes it what was some of the stuff? Yeah. Listeners can find that old podcast episode and the one where it made up some fun facts about John randomly. I think it was your 25.

[00:04:22.710] – John

What’s interesting is OpenAI calls this hallucinations and they basically justify ChatGPT making up stuff when when it can’t find information as exactly what humans would do. They just make up stuff. I find the whole notion of hallucinations fascinating.

[00:04:44.030] – Caroline

That’s like it’s on drugs.

[00:04:47.130] – Maria

From now on, whenever I make any sort of mistake at all, I’m just going to call it a hallucination should be my excuse for Noah. So in general, I was really surprised because I thought there was going to be a lot of hand wringing and gnashing of teeth and stress, but overall it was a pretty much spell check. But on steroids or on LSD as a case. Another thing that was interesting was different opinions about the alternate tests that are coming up. So, in other words, the new GMAT, the new GRE. I think Harvard has said that they will not accept the new GMAT this year just because it’s coming out a little too close to the round one deadline. And then they want our people should they wait, should they not wait? Just like, let’s just not even introduce that variable into the mix. I believe that’s been their position so far. But another school said something like, I’ll take any measure of academic horsepower I can get. And so whether it’s a short GMAT, a long GMAT, a short GRE, I don’t care I just want to know that they can handle the work in my program.

[00:05:56.160] – Maria

So overall, I was also surprised by just there sort of seemed to be kind of a yeah, sure, bring it on attitude about the new test. And then another trend that I had sort of I think some of us who work in this field had noticed anecdotally, but they confirmed it was that there was a larger influx of older candidates in this year’s applicant poll, sort of noticeably so. And I think the theory was that because of the pandemic, perhaps people were either waiting to see what would happen with the pandemic, or perhaps they had to care for elderly parents or for whatever reason, they suspect that. What happened is that there was a build up of people, maybe in their late 20s, early 30s, who were thinking of applying to business school and then did not apply to business school. And now with the Pandemic quote unquote over, they all kind of appeared this year. So the hope is that things will level out a bit more in the next year or two, and that will not continue. Although someone from one of the schools said it seems to him that perhaps the current MBA, as it stands, given that it is targeting people at a certain point in their lives, at a certain point in their careers, maybe some of the schools should start reconsidering what they offer and what is the MBA.

[00:07:09.680] – Maria

And maybe there is a full time MBA option, not just the executive MBA, but maybe a full time MBA option for people who might be a little bit later in their lives versus what we think of as the typical MBA candidate. I don’t think anyone jumped up and said, yes, we’re going to offer that tomorrow. We’re going to restructure everything to cater to this audience. But it was an interesting thought exercise, right? We’ve seen a proliferation of the Master’s programs targeting more early stage people in their career. So it would be interesting to see if that then follows with more full time types of options for people who might be a little bit later. But so those were the three things that I took away.

[00:07:51.540] – John

That’s interesting. Was there any talk about volume of applicants in the current or in the forthcoming application cycle? Do people expect apps to go up, down, stay the same?

[00:08:06.490] – Maria

I think it’s really anyone’s guess. I think that there’s just everyone kind of like, we don’t know what’s going to happen with the upcoming season. We don’t know what’s going to happen. I think right now, honestly, a lot of the admissions officers are just so worried about summer melt. And that is to say, like, the people they give the offers to. Oh, here’s another thing that a couple of them shared, is that they’ve found a lot of people have started putting in multiple deposit goals. In other words, that’s always happened, right? People will always take the bird in the hand or three birds in the hand versus why not put in a bunch of deposits? But one of them noted that that’s happening a lot, and that makes sense from a candidate’s perspective. Right. Why not play the field a little bit longer? But it also makes it very stressful for an admissions officer who doesn’t know just because you have $1,500 in hand from someone, they might still disappear on you. And so I do think that I think the summer is not going to be a fun one for a lot of our colleagues and peers and people that we like who work in admissions, because I think they’re people that they thought were going to apply or sorry, who were going to enroll, just might vanish.

[00:09:21.070] – Maria

And that is very stressful.

[00:09:22.970] – John

Yeah. Caroline, what are your thoughts about Maria’s observations?

[00:09:27.490] – Caroline

Yeah, it was very interesting. I was particularly interested to hear what they had to say about AI. I do think that the schools are still trying to figure it out, and that may be why they didn’t have a clear policy. I was checking online what the schools say about their policies on AI, and it’s sort of a moving target at the moment. And I think the schools are sort of struggling how to juggle. There’s a fine line to tread right. For business schools, because on one hand, they need to embrace AI, because their students need to understand how it works and understand how to leverage this technology for their future roles.

[00:10:14.170] – Caroline

Right? That needs to be sort of integrated into the curriculum so that they can really know how to use that strategically in whatever role they’re going into. But at the same time, they’re academic institutions with standards to uphold. And I can imagine that professors are not too keen on students using AI willy-nilly to do all of their assignments. And I would imagine that there would have to be some consistency at some point in policies that they have on the academic side and in admissions.

[00:10:48.590] – Caroline

From what I understand, I think the schools are sort of trying to figure this out. It sort of all happens so quickly, and it’s not easy to figure out what the implications are for admissions and then academically as regards academic policies, and then also as regards helping students learn about it and be able to understand how they can leverage AI in the future. So I think it’s a very complex issue for schools, and I suspect that there are a lot more discussions going on behind closed doors that they’re not necessarily sharing in public yet.

[00:11:27.630] – John

Yeah. Right now, this year’s conference was in New York and Connecticut, which probably means Yale and the New York schools. Did you pick up any intelligence, Maria, as to why Columbia went to a more traditional three round format for their deadlines this year?

[00:11:48.130] – Maria

I don’t want to speak for them on this. I would suspect that just in terms of the complexity involved with having to manage rolling deadlines and the early decision. And if what one of the admissions officers said is true about people putting in multiple deposits, then the early action, the binding early decision of Columbia perhaps was starting to become essentially meaningless, right. As more and more candidates were, I think, applying early to Columbia, getting in and then saying, woohoo, I now have a 6000 for $6,000, I have a call option on an amazing school. Now it’s time to apply to some other schools in round one and see how well I do. I suspect that’s how a lot of people were using early decision recently. And if that started increasing, then it effectively, from a yield management perspective, it makes the early decision not nearly as useful as it is intended to be. But one quick thing. Caroline mentioned a second ago, she made the great point that AI tools are here to stay, as if schools need to be able to train their students to adapt to it. The Dean of Columbia Business School spoke to us and here’s a little plug for Columbia.

[00:12:52.570] – Maria

He pointed out that they are incorporating a ton of AI, a whole bunch of technology and forward facing classes into their curriculum and something like a huge percentage of their electives didn’t even exist five years ago, that they are constantly refreshing. I can’t remember if it was 2030. 40% of their electives are constantly being refreshed. And obviously every school is going to always keep up with the times. But it did seem like an overwhelmingly high number of elective refreshes. And it’s something like they introduced a class on Python programming for MBAs, and again, a huge, I want to say roughly 30% or more perhaps, of MBA students have taken that Python class as sort of a sign that students realizing that these skills are just going to be valuable. And so business schools, I think, are instead of saying like, well, go take Computer Science 101 down at the undergrad campus, I think schools are going to increasingly incorporate that. So we can definitely start seeing more out of that from Columbia’s curriculum. All schools well, but it’s just their.

[00:13:57.070] – John

Top of mind because they hosted us exactly now. And of course, as I mentioned earlier, a lot of schools are now posting their application deadlines for this forthcoming admission cycle. And a number of them, most of them who have posted deadlines have posted their essays. We see any interesting changes on the essay front and what is expected of applicants this forthcoming season. Caroline, do you see anything interesting?

[00:14:29.750] – Caroline

So HAAS has introduced a video question. So I think that’s interesting. And we’ve discussed before that there has been a trend for increasing use of video in applications over the past few years and that with the advent of AI that it makes sense for schools to perhaps rely more heavily. On tools like video because it’s perhaps harder to gain that than it is a written application with AI tools, ChatGPT and so on. So unlike some of the other schools which use the Kira platform to generate questions that you would need to respond to fairly spontaneously in a sort of interview style. So schools like Inclusive, for example, use the Cura platform and they will give you 45 seconds to prepare and then 60 seconds to respond, right? And they would cut you off after that. So it’s more of a sort of spontaneous exercise with this half video. You can prepare it in your own time and record it and I think you can prepare a two minute video to introduce yourself. So it asks you to briefly introduce yourself to the Admissions Committee, explain which leadership principle resonates most with you. So it’s referring back to the Berkeley defining leadership principles and I think you mentioned earlier, Maria, that that was one of their interview questions before so that they’ve brought this forward from interview into the initial application and incorporated that as a video question.

[00:16:11.370] – Caroline

So I think those video questions are very useful. And of course, as an Admissions Committee member or as a file reader, you often don’t get to meet a candidate in person because it’ll often be other people who will be conducting the interviews, given the volume of interviews that are being done. So videos can be a really nice way to get a glimpse of the candidates, right? So that two minute glimpse can be a very useful way to sort of cross check things like communication skills. How does the person get their story across? And is there some coherence between how they present themselves in video and how they present themselves in the written application? How they present themselves and how the recommender presents themselves? So it’s a very interesting addition to the overall puzzle that comes together to build a picture of the candidate. I have to say that I’m not a huge fan of those pre recorded videos that candidates put together. I personally prefer the Kira format where it’s more of a sort of spontaneous exercise which although that can be quite stressful for candidates, right? It’s not easy to have to respond to those spontaneous questions where you have just a few seconds to prepare and then you have to deliver your response, then you’ve got 60 seconds and it cuts you off.

[00:17:35.750] – Caroline

It’s not an easy exercise, but I do feel that sometimes candidates tie themselves up in knots in thinking this has to be beautifully produced, it has to be professionally produced and they do like 1000 different cuts of their video and that is not necessary. But I think they feel pressure to look like a movie star in their video, right? And maybe if you’re Maria and you live in Hollywood then that’s very doable. But to the average candidate then that’s quite an intimidating exercise, I think. So I prefer the more spontaneous type of videos, where I think that also the schools get a better sense for how the candidate communicates in a more spontaneous format, rather than something where they’ve perhaps just learned a script and they are delivering a script that they’ve pre prepared.

[00:18:35.510] – John

Right. That’s interesting. Any other new things that you’ve noticed, Maria?

[00:18:41.970] – Maria

Well, at Poets and Quants, you guys already ran a great article about the changes to Columbia’s application. So getting rid of early decision, moving to rounds. I also think they got rid of their question on what’s your favorite movie, song or book and why, which was sort of a chance for a bit of creative expression in the past. And now they’ve replaced it with a question around diversity, equity and inclusion, which actually was a question they had a few years ago. They’ve resurrected it, and I was actually analyzing it a couple of days ago. And if you look more closely at the wording, the bar, I think has raised. So when they introduced that question, I believe in either 2020 or 2021, it was more around when have you been challenged around diversity, equity, inclusion? They list out these sorts of kind of four or five different things that they look for, like advocating for others or trying to end systemic prejudice or things along those lines. And then the question used to say, talk about a time you were challenged around one of these, and now the wording is much more around, tell us what actions you took.

[00:19:49.050] – Maria

So I thought that was really interesting. Right. Because I think the school is indirectly saying, like, look, it’s one thing if two years ago you had no idea systemic racism, it was all news to you, but we’re now in 2023, and hopefully you’re trying to lose others more in things like conversations. You don’t all have to save the world. Like I tell people, this is not a Nobel Prize Prize competition, this is a business school competition, but hopefully you’re at least trying to become somewhat more inclusive, even if you broadly define that inclusivity. So I did think that that was an interesting change as well.

[00:20:26.250] – John

Yes. So for all of you out there who are tracking this and intend to apply either round One, round Two, round Three in the forthcoming admission season, you can check out Story. It’s called MBA application deadlines for the 2023-2024 admission cycle. Harvard, Stanford and Wharton are already done with their deadlines, and so is Yale and Duke and UVA. Darden in Michigan and new other schools are posting them. As we move forward and closer to those round One deadlines, we update the story every single day when a new deadline comes out or when new essays come out. So it’s a good place to just see put in your calendar those dates when you’re going to have to meet these deadlines and get your application underway.

[00:21:22.890] – John

Otherwise, thank you for listening. And Maria, and Caroline, a joy as always. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. You’ve been listening to Business Casual, our  weekly podcast. See you next week.

What’s New In MBA Admissions
Maria |
June 28, 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!