HBS Blueprint

User11221122:

Could you elaborate?

I've talked about this at length before so will just provide a brief summary of my thoughts. Although this is just my opinion (and I'm sure many will disagree with me), it is based upon me having talked to around a dozen different admission services, exhaustive research of the admissions process, and private conversations with admission officers at the school i ended up attending.

1. The key drivers of MBA admissions is work experience (prestige of the firm, career trajectory), undergrad (quality of the school, major, gpa), GMAT, and then the X factor (interesting background stuff such as ex-military special forces, worked in White House, grew up in poverty, etc. Some of this obviously overlaps with work experience). These are things that are set in stone by the time you apply. The admission consultants' main value add is helping to craft your story and your overall narrative through the essays and to a lesser extent recommendations. I personally don't think essays are that important to admission, provided that they are not bad. I have heard this directly from adcom at school in a private conversation, and publicly Derrick Bolton of Stanford GSB has come out and said that he could make admission decisions without reading essays. The people who will need a consultant's help are non-native English speakers who can't write if their life depended on it. But look, if you are a successful smart professional who has a fairly good idea of what you want to do after an MBA, your motives for applying to the schools in question, and have done enough research on essays, I just don't think a consultant adds value that can be justified by the price tag.

Now, a common retort has been "Well given that b-school is super expensive, why not drop say $5K, and if you get in, it will be worth it. In the grand scheme of things, that's not a lot of money." I deeply resent such a lazy line of reasoning. So because b-school is super pricey, we should drop more cash on hiring a consultant? How does that make sense? But more importantly, this view presupposes that a consultant played a meaningful role in helping that person get in. In other words, this is an utterly unverifiable claim: that without the consultant's help, that person would not have been admitted. Consultants will then parade meaningless "stats" such as "90% of our clients got into one of their top 3 choices," "a client with 580 GMAT got into HBS!" Without us knowing exactly the background of these clients, none of this should be applicable or relevant.

2. To use an economics term, the admission consulting market is basically a form of perfect competition. There is little difference in terms of pricing or quality. I have talked to a ton of services and could not distinguish between any of them. And unlike other professional services, there is no way to identify which consultants are actually generating "alpha" and getting slightly mediocre applicants into schools that are a bit out of reach for them. For instance, a top surgeon or lawyer can deliver results that normally cannot be obtained by their peers, hence why they have such stellar reputations and price tags to match. If I am to pay money for a consultant, I need to know that he/she can outperform their peers in this space. Now they will probably say that they are not miracle workers, that they can't guarantee admission to one's top choice school, and that they are mere guides to help along with the process. But if you hear what they claim, they constantly parrot their success with admission and how they possess an informational advantage due to "deep" knowledge of the schools and the process. So if that's the case, then they should either lower prices or provide a partial refund if an applicant doesn't get into one of his top choices. After all, a smart studious person can go through the process on his own, or with some help from friends, and write great applications. I know plenty, including myself, who got into great schools without help from a consultant.

Just my humble 2 cents.