Why MBA Admissions Is Not The Crapshoot You Think It is + The Year In Review
Maria |
December 21, 2021

We all know how difficult it is to get into business schools. When people hear of applicants being accepted into selective and highly ranked programs but being rejected by others, they often start thinking that admissions decisions are made at random. 

In this episode of Business Casual, John, Maria, and Caroline are going to discuss exactly how arbitrary admissions decisions at the best business schools are. Plus, what are the grounds for an MBA applicant’s acceptance to a much more selective and highly ranked university yet a rejection from a lower-ranked university?

Episode Transcript

[00:00:07.510] – John

Well, happy holiday, everyone. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. You’re listening to Business Casual, our weekly podcast. And I have my co host, Maria Wich Vila and Caroline Diarte Edwards. Maria, as you all know, is the founder of Applicant Lab. And Caroline, of course, is the former director of admissions at INSEAD and a cofounder of Fortuna Admissions. So a few things it’s the end of the year and what we wanted to do is to look back on the year and discuss some of the highlights in the area of graduate management education. We also want to look forward a little bit and talk about what some of our resolutions might be as pertains to our business or the business of business goals. But right now, of course, a lot of people are getting their decisions. Some are getting happy decisions, some are getting sad decisions, many are being put on wait list. And a good number are getting kind of decisions from the admissions offices. That leads them to wonder how arbitrary are admission decisions at the best schools? There is one fellow here who mentioned that today he was accepted at Wharton and rejected by Duke Fuqua, and that really surprised him because he thought he was a long shot at Wharton and he thought he was a shoe in at Duke Fuqua.

 

[00:01:34.280] – John

There was another person who joined in on this discussion. This discussion is actually on Reddit who says he was accepted to Chicago booth with a scholarship but dinged at both Dartmouth, Tuck and Fuqua schools that are ranked well below Chicago booth. And it goes on from there. Another person who dined at Michigan Ross and yet got into an M seven school and rightly says admissions is not an exact science. Another person gets a full ride to USC, Marshall, gets $70,000 in discounts or scholarships to UCLA Anderson, and then is waitlisted at the University of Washington in Seattle. And it’s just one thing after another that kind of makes you scratch your head. Caroline, how do you make sense of this when a candidate is accepted to a school that’s much more highly ranked and is more highly selective and then is actually rejected from a small that’s less lower ranked?

 

[00:02:35.340] 

Yeah.

 

[00:02:35.670] – Caroline

I think there is an element of candidates trying much harder and putting much more effort into their applications for schools that are really their dream and their stretch. And it often comes across to file readers if the school is not the dream school. Right. It’s very tricky for candidates because you do have to make each school feel like they are your number one choice, even if they’re not. And even if that feels a little bit artificial. And the schools, of course, know you’re probably applying to multiple schools, so it’s a little bit of a game. But Far readers are very astute. They’re very good at reading between the lines. They understand if a candidate is talking in somewhat generic terms about the school and their sense of fish and their motivation. And the schools can also spot that this candidate is probably a better fit for another school. Right. They may be very well qualified candidate objectively. They may have a lot of wonderful accomplishments and a great profile, but it may not be the best fit for them. There may be other schools that are better options, and schools want to select candidates who are the best fit for them and also who are likely to accept their offer.

 

[00:03:59.120] – Caroline

So if schools are recognizing that it’s not the best option for them, they may be rejecting them. But I do think that often candidates just struggle to put in as much effort to all of their applications, especially applying to multiple schools. That’s very difficult to do. And our readers are very experienced. They recognize that very quickly.

 

[00:04:22.530] – John

Yeah. And the other thing is schools are protective of their yields. That’s a very important statistic that’s looked at, because what it does mean is when you accept the candidate and are rejected, that means they’ve chosen someone else other than your school that can say something about your reputation, say something else about the admissions office inability to close a candidate. That’s a very closely watched metric by the leadership of the school. So it gets managed. Isn’t that right, Maria?

 

[00:04:56.490] – Maria

Absolutely. And I think, as Caroline said, I think sometimes candidates have a tendency to underestimate the intelligence of the file readers. I mean, these people are pretty astute, right? So if you write an essay that’s like, I like the way that your business schools, a schooling in business is why I want to go to your business school. And it’s like, oh, my gosh. Okay, well, do you really love me? Right. If you’re dating two people and you take one of them to a Michelin starred restaurant and you take the other one to a Burger King off the interstate, you think the second person isn’t going to think to themselves, Maybe I’m not this person’s first choice. I mean, it’s pretty these little hints. And right now you’re like, oh, that’s an exaggerated Maria. Like, I actually put the name of the school in my essay, so I don’t make those mistakes. But little subtle clues like that can absolutely come across. And I think in terms of yield and fit. We were chatting right before we started recording this. I was sharing an anecdote of how after I do HBS mock interviews with folks, I just write little private notes to myself.

 

[00:06:00.150] – Maria

I’m like, what do I think their chances are just to see how good my Spidey sense, how good my six sense is on candidates. And there was one person that I wrote at the end, I wrote, I love this guy. The only way he’s not getting in is if they figure GSB is taking him instead because he’s so good. He’s definitely getting into GSB. And therefore the only way he’s not getting into HBS is if they fail. And sure enough, I got the email in a GSB rejected from HBS. And I’m not saying that that’s the reason. But I was like, boom. I am sure that this person was so strong that they knew he was going to go someplace else. And so why spend the effort and get your heart broken if he’s just not that into you or you know that he’s going to date someone else and take them to the Michelin starred restaurant, why would you even bother with the Burger King date? I just think that I think that’s a really big part of it. And in some cases, I think the schools are actually doing people a favor. Like this person, as much as I love HBS, this person is actually going to be Stanford is going to be a much stronger program for them for very specific reasons that I won’t get into.

 

[00:07:06.150] – Maria

But so I’m like, you know what? I actually think they’re pushing you in the right direction there. So, yeah, I think that’s part of it.

 

[00:07:12.840] – Caroline

And yeah, and at the end of it.

 

[00:07:13.900] – Maria

Some of it also just comes down to luck. Let’s be honest, it is not a quantifiable process. If the schools only had 20 candidates a year, you might say, wow, this is really shocking. But the school says thousands of candidates a year. And in that pool of thousands of candidates, there are dozens, sometimes perhaps even hundreds of copycat resumes. Right. There are only so many investment banking analysts. After a while, they all start to look pretty much the same. And at a certain point, I think you just have to say, well, we can only take one out of these three.

 

[00:07:45.900] – Caroline

Boom.

 

[00:07:46.400] – Maria

And so it’s not necessarily a rejection of you as a person. It’s not necessarily that you were a bad candidate. I sometimes get emails of people saying, well, what went wrong? Especially if they get on the waitlist, I’m on the waitlist. What do you think went wrong? And I’m like, nothing went wrong if something had gone wrong and rejected.

 

[00:08:02.490] – Caroline

Yeah, what the heck?

 

[00:08:04.190] – Maria

So anyway, those are my thoughts on this.

 

[00:08:06.500] – John

Now, let’s face it, admission officers also make mistakes, don’t they?

 

[00:08:12.650] – Maria

Not Caroline. Caroline didn’t.

 

[00:08:15.230] – Caroline

I never did, of course.

 

[00:08:16.520] – Maria

When she was a hot person. Yes. But ever since she left, I do have to say that perhaps a few admissions officers and other lesser schools have perhaps from time to time made mistakes.

 

[00:08:31.350] – Caroline

It’s not a scientific process. Right. And there is an element of luck. You could be the 55th file that the poor reader has plowed through that day and they’re not in a good mood. And you just get shunted aside in a way that you might not have if you’d be on top of the pile that morning. So there is certainly an element of luck. And the interviews also play an important role. And that is you don’t have as much control over how that goes as you have over your written application. Right. So you may have a good report with the interviewer or you may not. And again, your interviewer may be having a bad day, and that can influence the report that they give on. You know, there’s just a lot of variability. Or you could do what my husband did, which is tell his Kellogg interviewer that GSB was his target score.

 

[00:09:32.070] – Maria

Did he get into Kellogg?

 

[00:09:33.950] – Caroline

So his interviewer, apparently his jaw completely dropped. Can quite believe what he’d said. Poor guy. He’s just very honest. Right. He’s very honest. And no, he got rejected by Kellogg. Of course he did.

 

[00:09:50.680] – Maria

That’s a good thing. He actually got into Stanford because otherwise. Yikes. Yeah.

 

[00:09:55.500] – John

That’s so funny.

 

[00:10:00.190] – Caroline

Yeah.

 

[00:10:00.740] – Maria

Anyone listening? Don’t do that in your interview.

 

[00:10:03.160] – Caroline

Exactly. Yeah.

 

[00:10:07.430] – John

Oh, my goodness. That was gutsy. Because obviously he didn’t have a Stanford except in his pocket yet.

 

[00:10:16.500] – Caroline

Yeah. I’m not sure he thought it through very carefully, being brutally honest, which he generally is something that I’ve learned to live with.

 

[00:10:30.050] – Maria

I love this story.

 

[00:10:33.710] – John

That is a riot. Now, this just tells me, look, it’s really important to apply to a range of schools, not just one or two, because any kind of thing can, in fact, happen. I mean, you could get at the bottom of the pile and you’re the 55th read that a reader has, and they’re just not in a great mood and they’ve seen too many like you, or you are naturally a better fit for another school, given your background and your career aspirations. So I think it’s important to let every school know they are your first choice, number one. And number two, to apply to a number of schools just in case. Because in the event that you draw a bad straw, it might be very helpful to have other options, right?

 

[00:11:27.430] – Maria

Yes. And one more thing I would say. One thing that we were chatting about before was you had said that someone on the Reddit Post had said, oh, I had totally I nailed this one schools interview and I didn’t get in. And the other interview, I had a fever of 107, and I got in there. I don’t understand. I find that candidates are often very bad at judging their own performance in the interview, not because of any lack of critical thinking on their part, but because in the interview, your adrenaline is going 100 miles an hour. And so your memory or your emotions are heightened. And I just feel that people walk out of interviews sometimes feeling like they nailed it. And sometimes or they walk out and like.

 

[00:12:01.540] – Caroline

Oh, she hated me.

 

[00:12:03.410] – Maria

And I just think there’s just so much emotional variability. Caroline pointed out that there’s a lot of variability in what you will do in the interview, what kind of interviewer you will get. But I also think that sometimes my message here is, do not read too much into the interview. I have so many people even like, oh, I just bombed it. And I’m like, you don’t know that yet. Maybe they were being tough with you because they actually respect you. Or my interview was too easy. My interviewer was too hard on me. That means I bombed it. My interviewer was too easy on me. That means I bombed it. And I’m like, just don’t. Or Conversely, like, I nailed it, man. She loves me.

 

[00:12:36.040] – Caroline

And I’m like, maybe not.

 

[00:12:38.730] – Maria

So that’s the other thing I would say is just do as best as you can in the interview. But please do not torture yourself over it or get too cocky.

 

[00:12:47.350] – John

Yeah. So the general conclusion here is that admissions really isn’t the crapshoot that it sometimes appears to be. It really isn’t as arbitrary as it can seem. Right? Is that what the bottom line is?

 

[00:13:00.080] – Caroline

There is an element of luck. But as a candidate, you don’t have the full picture.

 

[00:13:05.540] – Maria

Right.

 

[00:13:05.940] – Caroline

Because you don’t have access to the pool, you don’t know who you’re being compared to. You don’t have the feedback that your interviewers have given. So even though you feel that you have a strong sense of how things went and where you should get in and where your chances are more tricky, you don’t have that full picture that the admissions office has. So as you say, you need to therefore hedge your bet.

 

[00:13:36.010] – Maria

And that’s the benefit that people like Caroline and I bring. Not to Pat myself on the back publicly on this forum, but that’s the part of the benefit of hiring someone with a lot of experiences that we do see. You might be like, I’m the only person out of my group of ten friends who’s applying to Booth, and I’m the strongest out of all ten of us. And it’s like, yeah, but there’s like a thousand other people you start seeing pattern matching. So I think earlier, before we started reporting, John, when you were reading out some of these very flummoxyen and confusing results, I think Caroline and I were like, oh, but it could have been this or it could have been that. So I think it’s a lot. Once you start pattern matching, you start seeing that there is an element of luck. Absolutely. But it’s not as random or crazy as I think it seems.

 

[00:14:22.790] – John

Yeah, absolutely. All right. So 2021, I think pretty much all of us are kind of happy. It’s coming to a close, just as we were with 2020, given the lingering aspects of the pandemic and this new Daunting variant that seems to be exploding around the world, that’s leaving us entering 2022 with tremendous amounts of uncertainty and some anxiety. What do you think this past year for our business, the business of business schools? What has it been like, Caroline?

 

[00:15:04.730] – Caroline

Well, it’s been as crazy than 2020 as you said. I do wonder how things are going to evolve over the next year and we say, oh, we’re glad this year is behind us.

 

[00:15:16.000] – Maria

I wonder if we stay the same thing.

 

[00:15:19.250] – Caroline

Right, we’re not out of the woods yet. The good thing is that schools have learned to deal with the uncertainty. And whilst it was just an incredible scramble and a total nightmare for the administration to deal with when things changed overnight in 2020, things have continued to change fairly rapidly this year. But the schools have just got much better have developed systems for being more flexible. So that will be a great asset to the schools going forward, because frankly, we don’t know how things are going to evolve and when this will finish, if it ever does finish. So that experience of juggling things and having the capability of just delivering so much more in a virtual format or in a blended format is a great ability for the schools to have, and they may well need to draw on that again in the future. Who knows how things are going to go?

 

[00:16:22.190] – John

Yeah, that’s true. And you’re right. I think that schools have more or less learn how to have in person classes with a backup of hybrid models and ready to go if there is in fact a problem of any kind. And given all the testing, the vaccines, most schools have kind of learned to live through it. Meantime, the demand for the degree seems to be holding strong. As we know, during the peak of the pandemic applications exploded, they still seem to be very strong and the quality of the entering classes also remains very high. So it’s not like the degree is being viewed as less useful, less valuable. If anything, it’s more valuable than ever. And the compensation packages that have been reported by the schools for this past year are in most cases, record numbers on pay, as well as on sign on bonus in record placement rates, extremely high success rate on job offers and job acceptances in many cases also at record levels. So on one level, the MBA seems alive and very well, even in the uncertainty of time, when the pandemic still lingers, when there’s still a lot of test optional admissions processes going on, and the number of people taking the GMAT has declined significantly.

 

[00:18:04.380] – John

Maria, what’s your take on the year?

 

[00:18:07.170] – Maria

It’s funny, I think this time last year we were a bit more optimistic about 2021 than we are now. At the end of 2021, there was news of like a vaccine was on the way, it was being tested, and I was like, Hallelujah, this will all be behind us by May. And it’s funny, I think one of my favorite tweets that I saw during this past year was, guys, I’m starting to suspect that 2021 is just three 2020s in a trench coat. In 2020 we were like, 2021, man is going to be the year when everyone’s going to get vaccinated. And so I just think, oh, my gosh. As Caroline was saying, things are still in the dumpster fire, but we’ve all gotten really good at adapting to the dumpster fire. It’s easier from that perspective. Like my son’s school. They’re like, yeah, we had two covert cases in the 6th grade, so we’re shutting down for a week, and it was like virtual classes. There was nobody back. And it was just like, oh, yeah, okay, fine. Clear the kitchen table. We’ve been through the drill already for a year and a half, and so I think the business schools are in the same boat and as our students.

 

[00:19:14.750] – Maria

So I don’t know, man, this is ridiculous. The politicization.

 

[00:19:21.170] 

Wow.

 

[00:19:21.450] – Maria

I can’t speak. The whole fact that people don’t believe in science is driving me crazy.

 

[00:19:26.450] – John

That’s really true. And you’re right. I think at the end of last year, we thought, oh, boy, isn’t it wonderful that it’s come to an end? It’s got to be better in 2022, and it was better in 2022. I think just the emergence of the Omnikron variant in this last month has led many to be much more wary than we were for most of the year. And concerning because at Cornell University completely shut down its campus cases of coping in the past. But even there there’s some positive sense of this because by all estimations, you know, the people who get COVID more often than not get very moderate cases of it. Far fewer go to the hospital and far fewer die from it, largely as a result of vaccines. It may be a different story for the unvaccinated, but we’re not necessarily talking about them because most people on a graduate business school campus are vaccinated for sure. And in fact, in many places you cannot go if you’re not vaccinated. So that’s a bit of a different story. I think for the new year we might wonder if the MBA will remain strong. My guess is that it will in part because the economy is continuing to recover and in part because there is a labor shortage worldwide that has led to these extremely high, often record placement rates in the past year.

 

[00:20:56.990] – John

There also is no shortage of major challenges facing businesses all over the world, whether it’s global supply chain, whether it’s the climate change concerns, and how that’s going to affect business in the future, both positive and negative, whether it’s the need for analytical skills to better make use of massive sets of data for decision making. All of these trends bode well for the value of the degree and the value of applicants and candidates who are seeking the degree. Do you all agree?

 

[00:21:35.990] – Caroline

Yeah, absolutely. I think applications will remain strongly over the next year. I think, as you said, the demand will continue whilst they will continue also to be new options that increase and gain market share. So Masters in Finance, Masters in Management, Masters in Data Analytics, Online Programs. I think all of those will continue to gain importance in the market. But certainly I don’t see much change over the next year in the demand for an MBA from one of the top business schools.

 

[00:22:14.460] – John

Yes, totally. Maria, last words.

 

[00:22:18.170] – Maria

I think that if anything, a world full of constant volatility is just evidence that a general management education is more necessary than ever in order for you to be nimble, to adapt to whatever the world throws at you. And so I continue to be optimistic about the fate of the degree. Even if these other specialized Masters programs do come out, even if some of them do cannibalize from the MBA, I don’t necessarily think I think that it’s not going to take away from the MBA. I think it’s just going to be a great rowing pie of people that will just be getting some form of management education, whether it be data analytics, marketing, automation, you name it. There may be some cannibalization, but I don’t think that the MBA is in trouble here.

 

[00:23:04.960] – John

We are all unabashed advocates of the MBA, for sure and for very good reasons as well. Well, hey, it’s been a wonderful year. Despite the pandemic and despite the fact that we haven’t seen each other in person, but only on Zoom, and sometimes not even on Zoom, because my technical problems often require me to shut my camera off as I am off right now. But, hey, it is what it is, right? So for all of you out there and for Caroline and Marie, I wish you the best over these holidays and a really wonderful and fulfilled and healthy and safe New Year for all of you out there, the New year is a good one for you. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. You’ve been listening to Business Casual, our weekly podcast.

 

The Economist Dis on MBAs: Is the Degree Still Worth It?
Why MBA Admissions Is Not The Crapshoot You Think It is + The Year In Review
Maria |
December 21, 2021

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

That’s the class of 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

New around here? Iโ€™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 โ€œscaled myselfโ€ by creating ApplicantLab. ApplicantLab provides the SAME advice as high-end consultants at a much more affordable price. Read ourย rave reviews on GMATClub, and check out our free trial (no credit card required) today!