Why INSEAD Is Welcoming Lower GMAT Scores
Maria |
February 8, 2022

One of the benchmarks that most MBA applicants struggle to meet is the GMAT score. INSEAD, which is known for having one of the most elite business schools in the industry and is notoriously stringent when it comes to GMAT scores, has opened its doors to accept and admit students with GMAT scores lower than they have previously accepted. 

For MBA aspirants, this is definitely a big and head-turning opportunity that Caroline (whose alma mater is INSEAD), Maria, and John tackle in today’s podcast. Listen to hear why they think the decision to accept candidates with lower GMAT scores is a win-win situation for both the school and potential MBA students.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:07.570] – John

Well, hello, everyone. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. Welcome to Business Casual, our weekly podcast with my co host Maria Wich Villa and Caroline Diarte Edwards. You know them well by now. Caroline, of course, is former admissions head at INSEAD and the co founder of Fortuna Admissions. And Maria is the founder of Applicant Lab. And I just have to tell you that in the past day or two, Caroline broke a big story for us. We put it up on the site in less than 24 hours. It achieved over 30,000 page views, which is pretty darn good. And I will tell you why. It’s because Caroline found out that INSEAD is looking at GMAT scores a bit differently these days and in fact, is open the door to receive and admit students with GMAT scores that are lower than they have been in the past. Caroline, why don’t you tell us how you followed this and got onto it?

 

[00:01:16.090] – Caroline

Yeah, I know visionary Fuji very well. He’s head of admissions at INSEAD, so we worked together for many years. Visually, absolutely wonderful. And we keep in touch regularly. So I was chatting with her recently. A client had mentioned that she had said on a recent admissions webinar when they were discussing a particular case that someone with quite a low quantitative percentile on the GMAT actually didn’t need to reapply. So I was curious about that because traditionally, INSEAD has been incredibly strict on the GMAT. So for many years, the policy has been candidates need to get 70 or 75% on the quant and the verbal, and they really look at that breakdown much more than total score in order to be credible candidates. And that has been the case for many years. And it was sometimes frustrating for me when I was at in Seattle when we would turn away potentially fantastic students who hadn’t quite made that score. Now, sometimes in the past, for sure, there were exceptions to that rule, but it was very much the exception rather than the rule that people below that level would get in. So now, finally, the admissions committee has agreed that candidates who have not achieved that threshold if they have otherwise strong academic credentials.

 

[00:02:42.950] – Caroline

And it’s important to emphasize this, if they have strong undergrad and clear evidence that they have what it takes academically to succeed on the program, then the school will consider them much more seriously than they might have in the past. And now it’s important to emphasize that you still have to have those strong academic credentials and be able to demonstrate that you’ll do well on the program. And that’s partly because it’s a one year program. So the pace is fast. Right. And that’s why INSEAD has traditionally been much less flexible on the GMAT than some other schools. Even I’ve had clients get into schools like Harvard and Stanford who would not get into Insecure because of their GMAT. Right. And because it’s that one year format. The pace is fast. I sometimes joke, it’s like drinking from a fire hose. You have exams every eight weeks. There’s no time to sort of gradually get up to speed and brush up your core skills. When you start the program, you need to hit the ground running academically. So they do need that reassurance. And they’ll look at not just your undergrad, not just your GMAT, but they will also look at your work experience.

 

[00:03:57.510] – Caroline

Some people are using a lot of advanced quantitative and analytical skills in their work, and they will give credence to that as well as demonstration of quantitative ability.

 

[00:04:08.760] – John

Yeah. Now I often wondered if one of the reasons why INSEAD was a bit tougher on the GMAT was because professors are on the admissions committee and have a role in admitting students. And I wondered if professors may think that the GMAT is more important than it probably is. What do you think of that?

 

[00:04:31.390] – Maria

That’s for sure.

 

[00:04:32.190] – Caroline

So at INSEAD, the admissions committee is composed of half faculty and half alumni.

 

[00:04:38.280] – Maria

Right.

 

[00:04:38.600] – Caroline

And so I think it works very well because they bring different perspectives to the decision making process. So whilst all of these people understand the whole picture, the holistic process and the different criteria that INSEAD are looking at, the self interest of the alumni is that they want to recruit students who are going to be incredible professionals, super successful, wonderful ambassadors for the school, and great people to have in their future network. And so are more interested sometimes in the professional track record than the academic side, whereas the faculty wants to have the smarter students in their classroom. Right. So they may give a bit more weight to the academic profile. And overall, it works out very well. They balance each other out. It makes for some very good discussions. Right. Where people are challenging each other, and it’s not this sort of group think where they immediately jump to a conclusion about a candidate, but there is genuine discussion and debate, and it sometimes gets pretty heated. So I think that’s very healthy to have that balance. But it does mean that sometimes the faculty can be very persuasive and sometimes can really lobby against submitting candidate where they don’t feel confident about the academic credentials.

 

[00:06:01.180] – Caroline

So clearly this has been a policy that they have thought through very carefully, and they will have agreed this with the admissions committee. Right. It’s not just visiony who’s decided this and imposed this on the admissions committee. It would have been very much a sort of strategic decision that’s been taken after a great deal of thought and discussion by the committee.

 

[00:06:23.170] – John

Yeah. One consequence of this, which is a positive consequence, is that people who otherwise might have been discouraged from applying might more readily apply as a result of this policy change. This has been the difficulty for Stanford for years. The school with the highest average GMAT score for its incoming cohorts always worries that it’s losing a lot of fantastic candidates merely because that number is so high and it turns a lot of people off. You think you don’t even have a chance to get in? Marie, I’m sure you’ve seen this with some of your clients over the years where they look at those scores and they just say, hey, I can’t get that. I can’t get that score. So I don’t have a chance. Even though when a school publishes a median, obviously half of all the people who get admitted are under the median, and roughly the same is true for an average. But people do talk themselves out of the way, right?

 

[00:07:24.390] – Maria

Yeah, absolutely. And it really is a shame because, as Caroline said, it is a holistic process if one of the things that the school is looking for is ultimately to identify people who will in the future be very successful alumni who will be on the cover of whatever magazine and will make the school proud. Oftentimes those people may not necessarily be the best standardized test takers. And so I do think that sometimes I will say that I have worked with people who did not do very well as well on the GMAT, and I urged them to take the GRE, and then they were accepted with the GRE. So going back to last week’s discussion, I do think that there’s a little more forgiveness and wiggle room if somebody submits with the GRE score. But, yeah, what’s remarkable about what Caroline has uncovered is that every school or most other schools have always said, oh, it’s a range. Just submit. It doesn’t matter if you think you’re a strong candidate, but insane. It was rare in that it actually officially published. If you don’t have at least 70, 75%, whatever, you can apply.

 

[00:08:29.830] – John

That is really unusual.

 

[00:08:31.280] – Maria

Yeah, they were pretty overt about it. And so I wonder if maybe they started letting in a couple of people where if it is really half professors and half alumni, there may have been some people where the alumni were banging on the table and saying, no, we have to let this person in, and then maybe they got in and they did perfectly well in the classroom, and maybe that got the professors to loosen a little bit. I did have a candidate once from Africa who had a mid 600 GMAT who did get into INSEAD. But again, this was a case of someone whose international experience was out of this world. It was one of those things where I’m glad that they had a letter of recommendation because I would almost think it was embellished or exaggerated. But no, it wasn’t like this person had literally been their company moved them to Brazil and they had to teach themselves Portuguese and negotiate with a village. No, they had to learn Portuguese and negotiate with a village because it was a multinational Corporation that was going to do something in this village. And the villagers were rioting against this company, and they had sent other Brazilian people who weren’t able to quell the villagers.

 

[00:09:35.890] – Maria

And she was able to go learn Portuguese and negotiate with the villagers for a happy outcome. And I’m like, oh, my God, you are amazing. And so in that one of the amazing things she did. So I was like, okay, in this case, your story is just so good. Let’s just give it a shot with it, Zeyad, because, wow, talk about international diversity of experience. So anyway, maybe I suspect someone like this amazing young woman got into INSEAD with a lower score, probably kicked some pretty serious butt in the classroom. And maybe those little data points start showing the professors that, yeah, you don’t have to be so stringent on the standardized test.

 

[00:10:18.970] – Caroline

That’s a good point. I think, Maria, that it’s definitely going to be more the case for candidates who bring that sort of diverse perspective. So if you have that type of profile that’s somewhat unusual in the pool, then you’re going to have a higher chance of doing well. Then if you have a very common profile.

 

[00:10:43.350] – Maria

Right.

 

[00:10:43.660] – Caroline

And you’re up against very stiff competition from a lot of other candidates who have similar profile to you, but they’ve aced the GMAT. So that’s also something to keep in mind that the GMAT I don’t think the average GMAT is going to go down dramatically anytime soon. Right. So they’re still going to be admitting most of the students who have a very strong showing on the GMAT. So it’s going to be more the candidates who bring that additional dimension of diversity and just have those fascinating profiles like you described that are going to get more serious consideration with the lower G match.

 

[00:11:28.340] – John

I wonder if some of this is related to the school’s goals to increase gender equality, to increase diversity overall in its program. INSEAD had 33% women in its MBA program in 2018, was 37% in 2021. It has a goal of reaching 40% in the 24 25 academic year. This is according to the Dean. We also happened to have an interview with them online. He stopped by the office in San Francisco, and our managing editor interviewed him. And they’re getting a lot of applications from Africa now. In fact, in the last cycle, he said applications from Africa doubled. And what we know and this is another thing on the test as far as I’m concerned, women tend to score less than men, even though their GPAs tend to be higher and they do better in the classroom than men. Africans score less. In fact, when you look at GMAT scores by country, the African countries have among some of the lower GMAT scores. So when you get applicants from Africa and you want greater representation from Africa, the standout candidates don’t have as high GMAT’s as they might in India, China, or some parts of Europe.

 

[00:12:54.920] – John

And then the problem is that in Europe there are very few female applicants, according to the Dean Dentiate. So if you want to reach these diversity goals, you’re going to have to be a little more flexible on a standardized test. That is, after all, only one element of many in the assessment of a person’s ability to come and do well in an MBA program. Do you think there’s some of this in the background?

 

[00:13:20.890] – Caroline

Yes, absolutely. And that’s what they’re targeting. As Visually said, they’re concerned that candidates who would be fabulous students at INSEAD might be self selecting out of the pool and not applying because they haven’t got that 70 75th percentile. And they see that and they’re put off and they go to other great schools. And so this is specifically designed to broaden the pool and make it easier for some candidates to apply who might otherwise have gone elsewhere. And it doesn’t mean also I mean, as she said, it doesn’t mean necessarily going to get in straight away, right?

 

[00:14:01.650] – John

Definitely not.

 

[00:14:02.540] – Caroline

So they’ll take them forward to interview. If they like the profile, it may be that they will ask the candidates to retake the test. If there are still doubts about the academic ability of the candidate, then they may go back to them. And they regularly do this. They regularly ask candidates to retake the test if they love their profile, but they’re just concerned that they haven’t yet demonstrated that ability to cope with a very, very intensive and demanding program. They may ask them to retake the test.

 

[00:14:34.580] – John

And last week we pretty thoroughly covered the decline in GMAT test taking volume, which is now at historic lows. And we talked about how many programs are now test optional or are more generously waiving the need for a standardized test. I wonder if some other schools, in addition to INSEAD, are doing this without making any sort of announcement or it’s just a little more quietly being done. Maria, do you think that’s true?

 

[00:15:06.320] – Maria

I think it would sort of have to be. Again, the proof is in the pudding, right? If they have been slowly but surely letting in more and more candidates with perhaps less than stellar test scores and those candidates are kicking lots of butt when they get to campus, then that also speaks to the limitations of the test. And so why should I take the test as seriously if it may be an indicator, but clearly it’s not the only indicator of someone’s academic potential. I did want to very quickly point out one quick thing about the score discrepancies between, say, Africa versus China and India, because sometimes people get upset about it and they’re like, I’m from India and it’s BS that I get discriminated against. And people from Africa get this sort of affirmative action treatment. I’m pretty sure that GMAC themselves. I don’t want to put, like, words in their mouth, but I remember once watching a presentation where someone somewhere had done research into they asked people, how much time did you spend studying for this test? And people in countries like India and Africa, which have very heavy testing, those are test taking cultures, right.

 

[00:16:10.980] – Maria

Your entire life is determined by one or two exams that you take as a teenager. And so those are very test heavy. People will reach out to me. I quit my job last year to study for the GMAT, and I’m like, oh, my God, what are you thinking? Right. It’s like, oh, that’s a terrible idea. Oh, well, in India, we do it all the time for the civil service exam. And I’m like, what’s not like that in other places. But I think the average is like the average person in India or China studied something like 200 hours. These numbers are not accurate, but it was something like hundreds of hours. And the average person in Africa studied like 5 hours. Right. So it’s also a culture. It’s not just like, oh, well, these people are less qualified than I am, and yet they’re getting in. It’s also like, hold up. Maybe if you had only studied for 5 hours too, maybe you wouldn’t have gotten that 760 just because it’s just not, of course, thanks to the Internet, etc. And word is getting out like, hey, you should probably study for like several weeks or months.

 

[00:17:08.190] – Maria

But for a while, people were just like, well, it’s a test. And so I’ll study a little bit and I’ll just take it and see what happens. Anyway, I just wanted to point that out. I don’t remember the exact figures, but it was a pretty dramatic delivery.

 

[00:17:21.970] – John

I think we recall that research as well. Yeah. I mean, look, in South Africa, the mean GMAT score of a test taker is 505, and that tends to be on the high side for most African Nations. And so the other question here is, when an admissions official looks at a GMAT score, do they actually look at what the overall score is in a given country so that they actually are seeing? Okay, well, this person has performed well beyond the typical candidate from their country. Is that even taken into account?

 

[00:17:58.520] – Caroline

It is to a certain extent, not necessarily such a granular level of country by country and what is the average? And so on. But certainly admissions staff are aware of the regional differences that you mentioned.

 

[00:18:14.510] – John

Egypt is the average score. Ethiopia 447, Cameroon 427. Botswana 409. These are the average scores in these countries. Clearly, if you want to recruit and basically place a bet over the next quarter century, what’s going to be the most important economies emerging in the world? You’re going to place big bets on Africa, and you’re not going to be able to get massive big GMAT scores. Kenya 463 is the average. Some of these countries, it’s just like all in the 400s. It’s remarkable. So if you score a 600 from a country where the average is 450. Man, you’re really doing well.

 

[00:19:03.350] – Caroline

Yeah, right.

 

[00:19:08.070] – Maria

I was just going to say the country of China clearly thinks that Africa is going to be the next hotbed of growth. They’re investing so much money into that region that I know in the US, we may not be quite as it may not be quite on our radar, but other countries are taking note, other superpowers are taking note. And so, yeah, I mean, if you want talent, they need to start grooming that talent now to be ready for the opportunities later.

 

[00:19:31.430] – Caroline

Yeah.

 

[00:19:31.700] – John

And this goes back to how standardized test scores kind of are discouraged diversity, because we know based on the fact that if you’re an underrepresented minority and you grew up without the benefit of College educated parents speaking about professional things in public policy in the economy around the dinner table, you’re not going to score as well as someone who had those advantages. And so if you want to increase the diversity by recruiting more under represented minorities, you’re going to have to look at other aspects of their application to more fully evaluate them than a standardized test score because it’s just not going to work. And we’ve said this before about the test is in English, and students who are taking this test who didn’t grow up with English are also at a natural disadvantage. So you have all of these other factors that have long plagued standardized testing in general and are increasingly being acknowledged by University admission officials, whether at the graduate level or the undergraduate level, because they contradict goals for diversity. And I think that on some level, this move by INSEAD needs to be looked at in the context of these newer trends where schools want and have put great emphasis on diversity and inclusion and equity and gender balance and greater representation from countries around the world that are more diverse in the typical industrialized economies.

 

[00:21:20.070] – John

And if that’s going to happen, there’s going to have to be more flexibility in interpreting a standardized test score.

 

[00:21:26.740] – Caroline

John, I’m glad that you raised your children talking about public policy and the economy at the dinner table. I’m afraid that conversation at my dinner table is more about please don’t throw food at each other and stop arguing. Maybe my kids are going to be at a disadvantage when it comes to taking the GMA, but just to be able to the advocate and argue in favor of the team in terms of diversity, it’s very difficult. Right. For schools evaluating candidates from all across the world. And so it’s actually in some ways a benefit for candidates coming from different backgrounds to have a data point that enables them to be compared to the Wall Street investment banker and the McKinsey, London management consultant. Right. Because although they may not do, they may not get a 730 like those other candidates. It enables them to demonstrate academic ability and potential for the program in a way that may not be quite so obvious from their background, which may largely be because the school just is not familiar with where they went for their undergrad and they don’t know the company that the candidate is working out. And so that unfamiliarity with their background can also be a barrier.

 

[00:22:47.030] – Caroline

And so there’s also a benefit in taking the GMAT from the GRE in that it’s a common data point across the pool and it means that it gives you credibility and it reassures the school of your ability, which is especially valuable for candidates where they’re concerned. The school may not know that my undergraduate program was incredibly demanding and I did brilliantly and they may not know my company. They wouldn’t have heard of this, and they don’t know how difficult it was to get this job and how well I’m doing right. So there is a benefit in having that common data points.

 

[00:23:27.340] – John

True. I’m going to go back to what Maria said last week, her strategic advice to the Graduate Management Admission Council. Promote the executive assessment. It’s a shorter test. It’s an easier test. People could still get confidence. That is, the admissions officials can still get confidence in the person’s ability to do the meager quantity in the core curriculum in an MBA program. And everyone will be happy because they don’t have to study for three months to get a 700 plus score. Maria, I still think that’s the best advice ever for them.

 

[00:24:07.000] – Maria

I know they should call me.

 

[00:24:13.330] – John

Totally true. The other thing that’s happened this week and this is something that we’ve talked about in the past as well, is Harvard announced its round two decisions, meaning that the school released thousands of applicants in round two, released as their euphemism or rejected, and invited several hundreds of people to interview. And so this week there are a lot of very disappointed people out there who were turned down by Harvard Business School. And I know in the past, in fact, you could look this up because I thought we had great advice for you. If you were feeling down and disappointed after being rejected by Harvard Business School, you are not a loser. You are in very good company. The types of people who get rejected are really superb, and in many cases, there’s very little that separates them from the people who were chosen to be interviewed. But I wonder if you two might console many of the people who were turned down this week. Maria, what do you say to them?

 

[00:25:27.670] – Maria

And this is going to sound flippant, but I don’t really mean it that way. It’s Harvard. It’s not Hogwarts. I say that frequently. It’s not like, oh my gosh, I either get into Harvard Business School or my life is over and I’m going to be a troll that lives under a bridge. No, there aren’t these sort of binary outcomes in life. So not only is it like, look, I think we’ve spoken in the past about where people reach out and they’re like, what went wrong? And it’s like sometimes something went really wrong. Sometimes if you write a terrible essay or if you’re completely unqualified, sure. But most of the time it’s not that anything went wrong. It’s just that there was somebody else who maybe edged you out on ways that you will never know and you could have done nothing about it. And it’s not a reflection on you, but it’s also not a reflection on your future potential and where you’re going to go in life. I don’t say this to be sort of consoling in an artificial way. There are so many amazing MBA programs out there. As long as you go to a school that has a decent core curriculum, you’re going to get 80% of the education that is important from business school anyway.

 

[00:26:37.150] – Maria

And what you end up doing with that education is up to you. If you look at the Fortune 500 CEOs, yes, some of them have MBAs from fancy school, but a lot of them don’t. So it’s not like, oh, you have to get this MBA that has to be from Harvard otherwise. So sad, sad, trauma. And I also think, by the way, there are people who graduate from Harvard Business School who don’t necessarily achieve career success, who struggle professionally. They might have been the admissions mistakes a little. I know they like to say that they don’t make admissions mistakes, but I think sometimes they do. And so it’s also not like, oh, well, if I get in that’s it my life is rainbows and Sunshine for the rest of my life. So, I mean, you tried. God bless you. You wouldn’t have gotten in if you wouldn’t have tried. But please don’t hype yourself into thinking, thinking that like, oh, it’s over. And now, I don’t know, I should just cry for the rest of my life.

 

[00:27:44.250] – John

There was one comment on Reddit from someone who was rejected. He said he had to just go into a business meeting and he was doing everything he could to hold himself together.

 

[00:27:57.550] – Maria

It is tough for some people.

 

[00:28:00.650] – Caroline

It’s like the first time they’ve ever been rejected from it. They really want it right.

 

[00:28:05.270] – Maria

It’s a good point. That’s a good point, Caroline, especially the people who went to Yale undergrad Goldman Sachs or McKinsey gotten everything they’ve ever applied for. And this might be right. That’s a great point. It might be the first time someone told them no.

 

[00:28:19.990] – John

So let me remind all of you out there who were disappointed this week that there are plenty of other great schools and fantastic MBA programs that will very much invite you in and welcome you and will help you achieve your dreams. You don’t have to go to a Harvard or a Stanford or an INSEAD London Business School to get a great MBA education, to have a great career and a meaningful and influential one. So I think it’s always important to keep that into perspective. Meantime, I hope you enjoyed our podcast this week. Thank you, Caroline. Thank you, Maria. And good sleuthing, Caroline on that big breakthrough story on INSEAD accepting and welcoming lower GMAT scores. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants you’ve been listening to Business Casual.

 

Why INSEAD Is Welcoming Lower GMAT Scores
Maria |
February 8, 2022

[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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