Getting into a Top 5 MBA Program

powerpig

  
   
      
      
   
  

Getting           into a Top 5 MBA Program                   2005           applicant guide to Harvard, Kellogg, MIT, Stanford, Wharton, and other           top business schools.                    This document has been prepared by a group of graduates of various top           US business schools, now working for an international strategy consulting           firm. It is intended as an information resource for our colleagues considering           applying to business school in the future. We encourage you to choose           which schools are right for you and investigate them thoroughly before           applying.

  

   

      
      
      
      

  

  

   
     
   
   

  

Why
    a Top MBA?

  

   
     
   
   

  

Unlike graduates of medical schools and law schools, there
    is no licensing exam required to practice business in the United States. In
    addition, the quality of accredited schools offering MBA degrees varies tremendously.
    This is a degree you can obtain part-time in 4 years, in an executive program
    in 1 year, via correspondence courses, and from schools with near 100% acceptance
    rates.

  

   
     
   
   

  

As a result, the value of your MBA degree is directly related
    to the prestige of the university and business school which grants it.  
    A recent study of the value of MBA programs concluded that “if you
    don’t get into a leading business school, the economic value of the degree
    is really quite limited.” [1]
    The study examined consultants at McKinsey & Company and investment bankers
    at Goldman, Sachs & Co. and found that those without MBA’s performed as
    well, or better, than business school graduates. The fallacy of the study
    was that it did not recognize that it is much harder to get such a job without
    an MBA degree. Intellectual horsepower and potential – rather than business
    knowledge – is the primary criterion top consulting firms and investment banks
    look for. If someone possesses a Ph.D. in economics from MIT or a JD from
    Harvard – quite common at such firms – then that obviously serves as a more
    than adequate intellectual proxy for even a top two-year MBA.

  

   
     
   
   

  

The required curriculum at most business schools consists
    of courses such as finance, accounting, statistics, organizational behavior,
    strategy, economics, communications and technology. Schools may have a larger
    or smaller set of “core” courses, and many give these subjects different names.
    But overall, MBA programs have more similarities with one another than they
    do differences, and most of the same subjects are taught from the same textbooks,
    using many of the same cases.

  

   
     
   
   

  

Thus, the academic content of a business school education
    – much like a law school or medical school education – does not vary greatly
    between programs. But due to the tremendous variation in the standards of
    institutions conferring the degree, an MBA has the most value in the marketplace
    when it is from a school that is highly respected. In addition, the lifelong
    professional network which comes from going to business school is more valuable
    when it is from a school where graduates typically go on to the most successful
    careers.

  

   
     
   
   

  

Ranking
    the Rankings

  

There is no other academic degree which is ranked and analyzed by so many
    publications and organizations as the MBA. While the general public and the
    business world have intuitive ideas of which the most famous and prestigious
    programs are, many of these rankings have highlighted improvements in other
    programs and presented them as viable competitors. Nonetheless, the traditional
    top schools perform the best across the best-regarded rankings.

  

US News and BusinessWeek

  

US News & World Report and BusinessWeek are the most
    well-known and respected MBA rankings, and have each been published for more
    than 10 years. New rankings from the Financial Times, Forbes, the Economist
    and the Wall Street Journal have come out in the last few years. Each ranking
    has strengths and weaknesses.

  

US News is generally considered the best ranking for prospective MBA applicants,
    as their system is the most transparent, and their rankings always come closest
    to peoples’ common sense perception of relative prestige. This is no accident,
    since their ranking heavily favors "peer assessment", which is essentially
    "prestige", as one of their key factors. There are three schools
    which have been ranked #1 by US News in the past ten years – the Stanford
    Graduate School of Business, Harvard Business School, and the MIT Sloan School
    of Management.

  

BusinessWeek is considered the next most useful ranking for
    applicants, since they collect a great deal of data and weight their ranking
    toward student feedback. Yet, none of Harvard, Stanford or MIT has ever
    been ranked #1 by BusinessWeek. Instead, the only schools to achieve the
    top position in their ranking are the Wharton School of the University of
    Pennsylvania, and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
  

  
  

   
      
      
      
   
   
      
      
      
   
   
      
      
      
   
   
      
      
      
   
   
      
      
      
   
   
      
      
      
   
  

Business         School	Highest         Ranking in US News	Highest         Ranking in BusinessWeek
Harvard Business         School	1	3
Stanford Graduate         School of Business	1	4
MIT Sloan School         of Management	1	4
Wharton School, University         of Pennsylvania	2	1
Kellogg School of         Management, Northwestern University	3	1

  

  
  

Outside of these five schools, no other school has ever been
    ranked #1 in either of these rankings. BusinessWeek displays some variation,
    but has generally had each of these schools in or near the top 5. In US News,
    they have consistently been the top five schools every year the ranking has
    been published.
  

  
  

Other Rankings
  

  
  

The newer rankings, The Financial Times, Forbes, and the
    Wall Street Journal, are essentially specialty rankings which weight specifically
    chosen criteria very heavily to produce different results. The end results
    have some similarities with US News and BusinessWeek, but also produce many
    curious outcomes for individual schools and are more useful for the data they
    collect than the rankings they produce. A summary of the methodology issues
    with these rankings:
  

  
  

   
      
      
      
   
   
      
      
      
   
   
      
      
      
   
   
      
      
      
   
  

Ranking	Methodology	Problems
Financial Times	Focuses on self-reported         salary data several years post-graduation	Unreliable and incomplete         data: self-reporting bias
Forbes	Focuses on self-reported         salary data several years post-graduation; focuses on ROI	Unreliable and incomplete         data: self-reporting bias; penalizes schools with high entering salaries         (inversely correlates program quality and applicant salary)
Wall Street Journal	Based entirely on         recruiter satisfaction	Recruiters who tend         to be unsuccessful at attracting interest from students at top schools         tend to give those schools poor marks (inversely correlates program quality         and graduate choices)

  

  
  

These methodology problems produce some questionable results,
    such as the Wall Street Journal ranking Stanford outside of the top 40, Forbes
    ranking MIT Sloan outside the top 15, and the Financial Times ranking Yale
    and NYU ahead of Kellogg. As such, the top business schools don't pay as much
    attention to these rankings. Stanford's dean even commented, quite justifiably,
    that doing poorly in the Wall Street Journal ranking was probably a better
    indicator of the quality of a program than doing well!
  

  
  

The Top Programs
  

Harvard, Stanford, MIT Sloan,
    Kellogg and Wharton stand out consistently
    amongst their peers, and have historically been considered the most prestigious
    MBA programs. They are also considered the best programs today.
    Two other notable programs are the University of Chicago
    and Columbia Business School. In fact, the deans of
    Harvard, Kellogg, MIT Sloan, Stanford, Wharton, Columbia and Chicago, meet
    regularly to share benchmarking information, and generally consider each other
    to be peer schools.

  

The reason that Columbia and Chicago are generally considered just below
    the other five is because they carry somewhat less prestige, as reflected
    in a couple of key statistics. Columbia used to have a 46% acceptance rate
    as recently as 10 years ago, far higher than any other top school, admitting
    nearly half of all applicants. Meanwhile, Chicago consistently has a much
    higher acceptance rate than any other top school (above 25-30%) and through
    much of the last 10 years maintained a 50% yield – in other words, nearly
    half of the people offered admission to Chicago choose not to attend. Nonetheless,
    these two schools are considered among the most prestigious after the top
    5, and are even ranked in the top 5 in some finance-heavy rankings. Siebel's
    "Siebel Scholars" program recognizes the top MBA students in the United States
    by awarding $25000 scholarships to the top five students at each of Harvard,
    Stanford, Sloan, Wharton, Kellogg and Chicago.

  

After these seven schools, other well known and highly regarded programs
    include:

• 
     
  Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College
  
    
• Haas School of Business, University of California-Berkeley
• Yale School of Management
• NYU Stern School of Business
• Ross School of Business, University of Michigan
• Anderson School of Business, UCLA
• Darden School of Business, University of Virginia

Collectively, there are about 15 schools in the United States with a claim
  to "top 10 status" in one area or another.

Additional
  Statistics

  

Top MBA programs by subject area – one of the best ways
    to think about the top five MBA programs is to consider that they are all
    excellent in nearly every discipline, but are #1 in different specific subject
    areas:

  
   
      
      
      
   
   
      
      
      
   
   
      
      
      
   
   
      
      
      
   
   
      
      
      
   
   
      
      
      
   
  

Business           School	US           News #1 in 2006 for...	BusinessWeek           "top-rated" in 2005 for...
Harvard           Business School	-           Management	-           Finance           - Management           - Entrepreneurship
Stanford           Graduate School of Business	-           N/A	-           Management           - Entrepreneurship
MIT           Sloan School of Management	-           Information Systems           - Production/Operations           - Supply Chain/Logistics	-           Finance           - Management           - Marketing           - Entrepreneurship
Wharton           School, University of Pennsylvania	-           Finance           - Accounting	-           Finance           - Management           - Marketing           - Entrepreneurship
Kellogg           School of Management, Northwestern University	-           Marketing	-           Management           - Marketing

  

   
      
   
   

  

  

Yield – that is, the % of students who accept offers
    of admission. While some less prestigious programs may have high yields because
    of a highly targeted audience, the top programs are certainly competing with
    one another for many of the same students. In other words, the typical explanation
    for someone turning down an offer of admission at one top business school
    is because they accepted the offer of a school they would rather attend. Since
    top candidates receive more offers of admission, their choice of program is
    a factor which can be used to gauge the quality of each program. The yields
    of the top schools (2004 figures) are:

  

   
     
   
   

  

   
      

powerpig

copied from: http://geocities.com/topmbaprograms/mba.htm

chasing_dreams

Wonderful. Thanks.