Thoughts on Harvard MRE

Did not attend the Harvard MRE program and not up to speed on exactly what changed recently. That said, I do have a fair amount of knowledge of the previous MDes program and a bunch of people who did it.

The thing that you have to keep in mind about all of these programs is that the people attending them almost invariably have previous work experience. They are also older than undergrads, and vary in talent, polish, etc.

This is in contrast with undergrads, whose work history is very limited and who can get away with being less polished and knowledgeable in certain ways. For undergrads, their university and degree program are substantially bigger parts of their overall personal brands, since there's less other stuff for prospective employers to go on. The older you get, the less your prospects depend on where you went to school and the more they depend on what you've actually done.

(By the way, this is true everywhere. Given two HBS students, the one with years of IB and PE experience is going to have better luck getting an offer from Blackstone than the one who did Teach for America before and has no work experience in finance.)

The median Harvard MDes student, as far as I could tell, probably had a worse employment outcome than the media HBS student. But I think that's less due to the lesser prestige of the MDes program than to the lower overall quality of the students who attended the program. The best of the group- very impressive MDes students- seemed to do well in the job market.

Whatever the baseline quality of the program (probably somewhat mediocre in the past, hopefully improved now) a sufficiently talented and motivated person is going to treat it as an chance to plug into the overall university and network, will soak up value from a broader range of programs and people, and will go on to do well.