Do Top B-Schools Care About the "Prestige" of Your Company?
I was curious if business schools in the category of H/S/W care about whether you work for a relatively well known New York IB, or a smaller regional boutique? Thanks.
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Generally speaking, yes. All other things equal, the guy from GS TMT in NY will have better odds than the guy from Stephens in Little Rock. Doesn't mean the Stephens guy can't make it but the finance cohort is extremely competitive at all three of these schools (glut of super qualified MM/UMM/MF PE applicants).
Yes, I think it matters. It impacts you as an applicant and also your recommenders.
They do, unless you did something quite unusual/interesting that you can leverage on
Yes, they care a ton. To give an example, I work at a relatively unknown F500 and took the job out of UG over jobs at much more well-known firms in my industry and others. The position is among the toughest to get in the company and my whole group came from MBA business schools">M7 MBAs, but almost no one at the company (maybe one a year) gets admitted directly into an MBA business schools">M7.
I had a 3.6/770 from a top UG and was a top performer at my firm, got great recs from C-suite execs, and only got admitted to one M7. I had friends with lower stats and very similar work backgrounds but at well-known firms that send many people a year to M7s, and they got into H/W. My colleagues were pretty surprised at my results but then as they thought about it shrugged and said "must've been the firm we work for". Not impossible to get to top programs from any given company, but much harder to stand out if you're not from a top employer and bucketed in with other white males with similar stats who work at Amazon, Disney, Google, Ford, etc.
This is true. MBA programs are much bigger prestige whores than they like to admit. Look at M7 candidate profiles at Linkedin and you’ll lose count of how many come from MBB, BB IBD, or PE.
I see, thanks. But what if we're talking about a well known MM (think RJ, Piper, Oppenheimer) compared to a relatively unknown LMM regional boutique?
To better understand this we'd need to know how many interviews you got
2 interviews at M7s, one was at Kellogg where everyone gets an interview.
Yes it helps but only to a certain extent. Unless you're in the top tier of employers you're not going to check the "rockstar" box. That's fine. I went through the process R1 last year and can say that my employers certainly weren't the most prestigious. I applied to H/W, a couple others and got a really great outcome. With less than "gold" employers you just need to work harder on your story (and the story matters more). Referencing the first poster, if the candidate from Stephens paints him/herself as more interesting (life outside of work, clear post-mba ambitions/LT goals, passionate for a certain industry) then they'll have a shot to beat out the more check-the-box candidates.
The idea is that if you can't compete against others strictly on work experience, then give the admissions committee something else to judge you off of.
Yes. It's also important to note there's an unwritten rule/understanding that top B-Schools need to be very open about accepting applicants from companies which also recruit at said B-Schools.
For one, it's pretty logical to assume that such candidates will do well at the MBA program. After all, if they can succeed at a prestigous company in a pre-MBA position, then there's good reason to believe they'll do so in a post-MBA role.
Second, it's subtle "tit-for-tat" play. Let's say a school stops readily accepting applicants from McKinsey, then McKinsey may start recruiting less MBAs from that school. Places like McKinsey obviously want to keep their pre-MBAs happy and have a vested interest in their future success (it's one of the firm's key recruiting points).
I hired a consultant to help me out with my MBA apps whom was a former admission director at Wharton. When I asked her about this question, she told me that it matters less than you think.......
To stick with your example comparing IB's, the problem with well known New York IB's with large Analyst classes is that admissions staff becomes worried about your relative performance in your class. When they've got GS and JPM coming to campus to recruit MBA's they don't want to have accepted a "mid or bottom bucket" analyst from those banks. Relative ranking is very difficult to verify and they worry that hiring managers from those same banks recruiting MBA's will view the school unfavorably if they know they accepted a sub-par analyst.
The benefit of being at a smaller regional shop is that there usually isn't a huge population of recent applicants from your firm for admission committee's to compare your application to. There are other benefits to being at a smaller shop like more responsibility, more client interaction, "no place to hide", etc. that admissions committee's are well aware of. It is your responsibility as an applicant to highlight those benefits in your profile so that you can compare favorably to other applicants from IB.
I'd argue it matters more than you think. Per P&Q article "Stanford admits who have done a stint at consultants McKinsey & Co. at one time or another account for an estimated 10% of the class. The other five companies who had employed the most members of Stanford’s latest incoming class are Boston Consulting Group, Bain, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and J.P. Morgan/Chase. Together, these half dozen firms represent an estimated 33.9% of the 397 first-year students in Stanford’s MBA program."
The key phrase there is "done a stint." I think the reason for those stats is that those firms either have an MBA requirement or tend to place a large percentage of their analyst classes into Private Equity. Private Equity and Consulting generally require business school as part of career progression. The majority of the data points in that study were probably MBB>H/S/W or GS/MS/JPM >MF/MM PE>H/S/W as opposed to GS/MS/JPM>H/S/W. As such, if those schools accept alot of applicants from MF/MM PE (which they do) or consulting (which they do), they are by definition, going to accept alot of applicants who have "done a stint" at MBB/GS/MS/JPM.
Smaller regional banks do not place nearly as many people into MF or MM PE. Furthermore, they don't have alot of junior staff to begin with so ex-Analysts from XYZ bank in Kansas City, MO are never going to make up a large % of any MBA class. Most banks do not require an MBA for career progression so the pool of applicants from banking is not nearly as large as the pool from PE. I'm not as sure about consulting but I know MBB have large analyst classes and an MBA requirement. I don't know if other consulting firms have classes that are as large or have an MBA requirement.
All that P&Q article tells you is that Stanford takes alot of kids from MBB consulting and probably private equity. As both PE and consulting (i believe) requires an MBA as part of career progression, the pool of applicants from those fields is quite large and as such, the statistics skewing in that direction is not surprising.
Good points all around here, but Stanford has so much demand that they don't have to mold their class based on demand (ie just because a lot of consultants apply, doesn't mean they have to fill their class with lots of consultants). The data shows that Stanford and to a slightly lesser extent HBS really value employer prestige.
You see a lot more people who are impressive but might not have "gold" jobs at the non H/S MBA business schools">M7
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