Looks like H, S >> W. You know things are bad when soft skillets are choosing Tuck and Anderson over Wharton.
Wharton says the decline, combined with a stronger applicant pool and a higher percentage of accepted applicants who enroll, proves that the school is doing a better job targeting candidates.
Is wharton still a good school?
Wharton is still the top target school for investment banking. The article mentions a dicline in applications but does not attribute this to any specific variable. According to the
Wharton is a perfectly good school. Harvard and Stanford are just fine too. So is the rest of the MBA business schools">M7.
Over a 40 year career, prestige from 6 years of undergrad and an MBA amounts to a very small portion of the overall prestige the quality of your professional work creates.
Strongly disagree with the premise of this article.
First of all, HBS and GSB are simply better than Wharton. Have been that way for quite some time, and will continue to be. Someone turning down $70k from Wharton to go to HBS is not that surprising, and is definitely not a sign that Wharton is "declining". I have no idea what declining applications means. Maybe it is a sign, as Jeremy Shinewald pointed out, that people are going H/S or bust. I would believe, given the people that I know that are doing/have done that, that it's simply a sign of the economy. People are less willing to leave a good job today than they were five years ago, so they set the bar even higher than they used to.
Second of all, the two students the interviewed, from Tuck and Anderson respectively, do not appear to have applied to Wharton. Let's be frank here (and I am applying to both Wharton and Tuck this year ,and love both schools): Wharton is better than both those schools, and significantly better than Anderson. The Anderson applicant wanted to be in the "Tech Scene", but didn't go to Sloan, Haas, or GSB? He was most likely not qualified.For the Tuck student to not pick Wharton because of its lack of General Management program is pretty insane - it has the most electives of any school on earth. Pretty sure you can make a nice general management education for yourself.
Do I think the decline in application numbers mean something? I'm really not sure, but it's definitely hard to ignore when it's been four years in a row. At the same time, I just don't see it meaning much. Wharton still has insanely good placement, and is as hard to get into as ever. If all schools with the finance perception were declining, then I don't think that CBS would have seen a 6% application increase this past year.
Yep. And when you think through the numbers, this definitely makes sense. Their yield is higher than ever, but their apps are down. To me, that means that they're simply fighting less head to head battles with H/S, which would have hurt their yield in the past, but increased total application numbers.
Really solid take on the WSJ article from Wharton professor Adam Grant linked below:
http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130930000358-69244073-whar…
Not quite sure about this. MBA apps are up this year at the majority of schools, and I don't see the trend slowing down among finance people either. Perhaps finance professionals are less willing to apply to b-schools with 2-3 years of work experience and are waiting a bit longer to apply? So for instance they want to see if they can get a great buyside gig without b-school before throwing in an application.
Cannot wait for mbavsmfin's comment on this...
Wharton is a perfectly good school. Harvard and Stanford are just fine too. So is the rest of the M7.
Over a 40 year career, prestige from 6 years of undergrad and an MBA amounts to a very small portion of the overall prestige the quality of your professional work creates.
It's a Friday afternoon. Time to start making evening plans rather than worry about boring stuff like prestige.
Big ups to the Big Ten btw, Big Tenner UG myself.
Best advice on this thread.
Neither will ever be as good as a Princeton undergrad.
My Mom went to Princeton. She worked for like 4 years and married my dad, who went to some shitty state school in Ithaca. Can't remember the name, but he's way more impressive than her.
Was being fairly facetious. These topics are silly.
You may be biased.
You may be biased.
If your dad went to Princeton, and your mom went to a no-name school, would the outcome have been any different?
A made a few videos on this subject when i was applying a few years ago. Hopefully they will be helpful.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtOsAhMz3k0
Wharton MBA
I think the slight decline for applications at Wharton is probably people that were a long shot at the school have decided to apply EA at Columbia. When they get in they don't apply to Wharton. Their Average GMAT is 725. Not to many schools beat that.
Also glad to see that whoever mentioned fighting in the front lines of the infantry and joining Bain in the same vain of accomplishments rescinded their post.
I think part of it, like they said in the article, is due to the new group interview. I know several people who held off on applying until the second round to get a look at how the group interview played out.
Everyone I know in finance is still applying HSW and maybe Columbia or Booth, but if they don't get into HSW, they're considering staying put.
It's a hit piece by the wsj. Almost no substance in terms of content. The fact that some people only do hbs and stanford is old news. They then interview a guy who chose tuck, a mistake imo. Wharton offers way more general management courses than tuck so no idea what this guy was smoking. As for the ucla guy, it did not say he actually turned down wharton. His tech comment was utterly ludicrous given wharton's strong placement at tech firms and a growing entrepreneurship focus. The gap between wharton and anderson is truly a vast one.
The high turnover in admissions deans is worrisome. No idea why ankur kumar replaced jay cutler so quickly but she's doing a great job thus far, especially raising the % of women in the class.
Blackhat, your comment was hilarious because it is so off base.
I could certainly see choosing Tuck over Wharton based on the differences in lifestyle/culture. To do so for any other reason, however, seems silly.
Hell, I'd seriously consider doing that (choosing Tuck) just so I could snowboard a few days a week for two years.
Frankly I think UIUC has a much better MBA program than H/S/B/W.
If you want prestige, get an MBA at a Big Ten state school. If you can't get into the Wisconsin School of Business, Harvard or Wharton make nice backups too. I'm just surprised everyone in these backwater ivies are fighting about prestige. It's not like they go to UMich or somewhere where prestige matters or is important.
Lol, says the guy who goes to one of the most prestigious programs of its kind in the world...
I really hope you get in a position where you are solely responsible for making hiring decisions at some point. You will spend so much time looking for needles in haystacks at places like Wisconsin. After 5 years or so, my guess is that you'll just relent and recruit from MIT after wasting inordinate amounts of time on your recruiting efforts.
Frankly, the quality of undergraduate Engineering students at Illinois is about the same as ORFE students at the target school I'm at now.
Citadel, GETCO, DRW, Jump, GS all recruit quants, developers, and sometimes traders from Big Ten engineering programs.
We don't get AQR, but they probably fill their entire quota of Midwesterners from UChicago.
If Wharton's stats are still in H and S territory, I don't think the decline in apps would seem too worrisome. However, the decline that Philly has been going through for decades vs H and S' cities may start to be a drag on the long term quality of the applicant pool. I like Philly, but Boston just crushes it.
would agree with you except hbs campus is in middle of nowhere :-)
Philly sucks, but it's not as bad as people make it out to be. The area around Penn campus has been gentrified like crazy, and the city's restaurant scene is vastly underrated.
I agree that Boston is far better, mainly because it's a city for students: during the school year you have around 200,000 undergrad and grad students, so it's just a dynamic place to be if you're a student. But as Patrick said, HBS is in a weird industrial part of Allston with almost nothing in its immediate vicinity. Whole Foods and Trader Joe's are like 10-15 minute walk away, Harvard Square is about a 20-minute walk away, and it's nowhere near a subway station. Unless you have a car or are taking a cab, getting from HBS to downtown Boston is a pain in the ass.
It's certainly not a 20 minute walk, but Anderson Bridge always seemed like one of the coldest place in the universe in the wintertime, especially when you're only wearing DHAs. Ugh.
Do HBS students hang out more in Allston than Cambridge?
Talking about the decline of Wharton is like talking about the decline of Apple. Is it perhaps not the far and away leader anymore? Sure. Would you not kill to be accepted to either place? Sure.
...yeah. If apple were in 3rd or 4th place. Maybe a better comparison would be Research in Motion.
As long as top notch employers are lining up to hire Wharton grads, then the MBA program is doing just fine. I don't see that changing any time soon.
Sure, it isn't competing with HBS - who cares. If you go to Wharton, you'll have similar career opportunities right out of the gate, and then from there it is up to you to determine the next step. Successive jobs depend a whole lot more on your work than the name on the degree.
Think the latter point is more true for undergrad, but employers generally have less pity / sympathy for lower tier MBA schools than they might when considering lower tier undergrads. My point being that you can get by with a lower tier undergrad by killing it in the workplace but youre climbing a much steeper hill coming out of a lower tier MBA program.
My point is I don't see Wharton as a lower tier MBA program.
A Wharton MBA starts at McKinsey, Goldman, KKR, Google, etc at the same level as a HBS MBA, all else equal. It isn't like McK hires both HBS and Wharton, and says "Ok HBS grad, you start at EM level because you went to HBS. Wharton kid? Yeah, you go to Associate. Should've went to a better school". From the point they're hired, the Wharton MBA could be god's gift to consulting, and climb the ladder faster than their peers. The HBS MBA might find out that being on the road 4-5 days per week really sucks, and drag their feet through every project, eventually getting counseled out of the firm.
My firm has people that are HBS guys working for guys that graduated from Cornell. End of the day, an employer cares a lot more about results than they do about prestige of your firm, once you're in the door.
What many people, especially younger ones, don't realize is that prestige does not ebb and flow year to year. Annual rankings might make someone at a school that goes from 12 to 9 feel good but it doesn't matter.
Prestige is made of stone. It takes a long time to die and a long time to build. The MDs/PMs/VPs etc. they are not looking at current application numbers or rankings. To them Wharton is Wharton. For current students that should be all that matters. Granted if trends like this continue over the long term then there can be potential implications down the line. However, for now, outside the world of frazzled applicants Wharton is still as prestigious as it gets.
Holy shit, are people really comparing Wharton to RIM, and saying that it'll be "hard to make up for" unlike an Undergrad degree? IT'S WHARTON. It's the third best business school in the world.
As Hamm said, you think anyone at McKinsey or GS is going to look down on a new Associate because they went to Wharton?
I was admitted to Wharton and turned it down after I thought it did not compare favorably following comparative campus visits between there and my eventual choice. Plus, at the time I was nowhere near dead-set on Finance so that actually added some risk should I have chosen Wharton.
For undergrads looking to go into analyst programs, a finance-related sweatshop like Wharton is probably the best way to be the most 'desk ready.'
They cherry-picked the fuck out of those statistics.
"Wharton's M.B.A. Admissions Director to Resign"
http://on.wsj.com/1730tSV
Unbelievable. Applications were due yesterday. The Wharton admissions office must be in complete turmoil.
"Ms. Kumar said that she has been 'pursuing several different opportunities in New York City in the past few months.'" Wonder if she'll be joining CBS or Stern.
Wonder if Wharton knew that she was looking to leave, since they named that other person to be Deputy Vice Dean of Admissions just last month. If not, what a brutal time to leave.
Well, Wharton has probably gotten slightly easier to get into this year and next, but I don't think the brand name is going anywhere.
If you're a candidate who's on the cusp for W, or a recruiter looking for MBAs, my advice is to buy low sell high.
I don't think this says much about the quality of the students or the quality of Wharton's name. I do find it mildly irritating that east coast folks use the phrase H/S/W and not H/S/B/W. Harvard=Stanford, Wharton=Booth.
Booth has proven to have a pretty resilient brand that stretches way further than I initially thought. I was talking to some international friends the other day and they said that Booth has an incredibly strong name in South America due to the UofChicago economics program. Wharton was much less so.
Additionally, Booth's core admissions statistics are nearly identical to Wharton (avg GMAT score is within 2 points I believe). Some people argue that Wharton opens up access to PE much moreso than Booth, however, Booth has pretty dominant access to the Chicago PE scene (shared with Kellogg). I know a handful of very qualified PE professionals that got rejected from Booth this past year, so clearly Booth isn't desperate to grow their PE presence stats. It seems to me that Booth is focusing its efforts away from financial services (while still maintaining the core) and into things such as Tech, Entrepreneurship, and similar fields.
So R1 was due last night around 5pm. Do you think they didn't get enough applications?
The fact that this thread has blossomed into a 2 pager says alot.
If that's the case, this may be a good time to apply to Wharton R2.
Wharton would either need to accept fewer students or make it a tad easier for candidates on the cusp.
I think people who are buyers of Wharton right now will be very happy in ten years.
Even the people that are in for Round 1 (myself included) might have a better shot at things this year. Buy low, people.
Didn't see this coming. Knee jerk reaction imho.
Wharton's M.B.A. Admissions Director to Resign
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240527023041769045791111327928381…!
My impression of Wharton relative to Booth is that it is more well rounded. Booth + Kellogg = Wharton. I don't really see the argument that Booth is and better than Kellogg, just different focuses. So if you're annoyed that Booth is left out of the conversation, then be annoyed with Kellogg, but at that point its 5 schools and the exact reason why Booth is left out. Gotta draw the line somewhere.
You guys cannot be serious.
Let's go down the logic train!!!
The mere idea that Wharton is going down the tubes is downright comical. Wharton is the most analytic and finance intensive MBA out there. You want fluff, go to H & S. If you want to learn something useful, go to Wharton.
This is true.
AMEN! Preach on, brother!
people are reading too much into a single data point. i don't think application dips mean anything. declines are not evenly distributed across the quality spectrum of the application pool. i would bet the vast majority of the decline came from the auto-ding end of the spectrum. student quality is probably as high as ever if not higher.
and this certainly does not mean wharton has dropped to booth's level. booth has a difficult enough time competing with columbia and MIT sloan for first backup to wharton and that has not changed. i would be shocked if cross-admits to wharton and booth don't choose wharton at a >90% rate. booth is a great school but these brands haven't budged over the last year.
Mmmm, Booth seems to be killing it in investment management right now.
Firms have always wanted diversity of ideas, geographies, etc. And Booth has an advantage in that it's not AS correlated with Harvard as Wharton is with Harvard or Columbia.
Folks in Chicago- both Northwestern and UChicago- think a little different than folks on the coasts. That's a good thing and you want different kinds of people on your team.
Hard to get this to format correctly, but we received this from Glocap who came to talk about recruiting. I think it shows pretty clearly that for PE at least, Wharton still has a huge lead on Kellogg, Booth, and Columbia.
MBAs with Full Time PE Investing Experience
2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 Harvard 123 118 133 125 105 104 98 82 Wharton 83 98 84 79 77 49 42 42 Stanford 60 64 56 52 50 47 51 40 Kellogg 30 30 42 38 31 15 28 29 Booth 29 21 24 23 19 11 10 16 Columbia 32 31 32 35 27 14 14 14 Tuck 5 11 6 9 11 13 9 9 TOTAL 362 373 377 361 320 253 252 232
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