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To review the entire dicussion, please read the full transcript or download the MP3.

Here is an excerpt from the Q&A that we found particularly illuminating:

Linda Abraham: The next question is, “How important is it that I rank my schools on the Consortium application?”

Karen Marks DARTMOUTH: It makes no difference; it’s not a factor in admissions decisions. It comes into play during the fellowship component, but in terms of your admissions decision, it doesn’t play in at all.

Jon Fuller MICHIGAN: When the Admissions Committee gets an application, the rank list is electronically blacked out, and that is not actually released until we’ve already made our admissions decisions. That is just our own internal process for that. So just as it was mentioned, the ranking plays no factor in admissions decision or in membership; it really only comes up from a fellowship perspective.

Shana Basnight EMORY: I would just advise that you do your due diligence before you lock in your ratings because once you do, they are set in stone and you can’t change them. So whether you get a chance to visit different campuses or talk to different alums that have attended different schools, do as much research as you can before you completely drop the Consortium application and put in your rankings because you only have one chance to do them.

Jon Fuller MICHIGAN: I think candidates spend some time thinking about whether there is a way to increase the likelihood of them getting a fellowship by how they rank a school, and there is  a lot of agony that goes into that. The advice I give to candidates is that if Ross is your first choice, then you should rank us first. If another school is your first choice and we’re your second choice, then you should put us second and you should put that other school first. Because just as it was mentioned, it’s an individual decision based on the school; it just goes down the rank order of the process that is explained relatively well through the

Consortium documentation that is available on their website. But don’t try to over-think because it just doesn’t work. So rank the order in terms of your enthusiasm of how much you want to attend that particular program.

Rebecca Dockery CONSORTIUM: I’m going to give you an Amen!

Jon Fuller MICHIGAN: Thank you!

Kellee Scott USC: Just to add a little more relief hopefully to this effort with the rankings, the process is that you are only allowed to hold one fellowship that you can call Consortium, but that doesn’t stop other schools from offering you school based scholarships if you qualify for them. So the rankings may say that you are only allowed to get one scholarship that is called Consortium, but if school #3 and #4 really want you, that doesn’t stop them from offering you aid outside of the Consortium scholarship, or offering you any kind of merit based money outside of the Consortium scholarship. So you are not limited in this process; the rankings do not limit you in any way.

View the full Q&A transcript or listen to the mp3 recording of the event now!

Accepted.com ~ Helping You Write Your Best

We highly recommend that you view the full transcripts of these Q&As or listen to the audio files to get a complete picture of the admissions scene—you don’t want to be lacking info that’s already been shared with others!

Here’s an excerpt from the Michigan Ross Q&A (view or listen to the complete Q&A here):

Linda Abraham: When you are evaluating an application, what do you look at first and how do you go through the file?

Soojin Kwon Koh: I start with the resume and this gives me a snapshot of what this person brings to the table in terms of experience, education, interests; all those things that are perfectly standard on a resume. And I just want to make a point to encourage everybody to try and get your resume to one page, and to not include jargon or technical speech.

Linda Abraham: Thank you. Any other tips on the resume?

Soojin Kwon Koh: Sure. I would focus on the impact of each role and not what your responsibility was. I don’t want to know what your job description is; I want to know how you made a difference at the organization that you were employed with and what your impact was. And it should be understandable by your mother or by your brother; if you give someone your resume, it should mean something and be comprehensible. So if you are in some fields in which there is a lot of technical jargon, don’t include that. Try to make that fairly understandable to the lay person. And giving it to someone else to read as a test is a good way to gauge whether you’ve hit the mark. Also it’s perfectly fine to include extra-curriculars, hobbies, etc. I would not include summer internships from undergrad; we’re really primarily interested in your post-undergrad experience in terms of professional experience.

Linda Abraham: No high school grades, right?

Soojin Kwon Koh: No high school grades please. And even for college, we don’t want a whole laundry list of all of the activities and all of the courses you took; we are really looking for a snapshot. So given that you only have one page to get me familiar with who you are, make sure that you are not focusing on your undergrad days only; it should be driven by your work experience as well. After I look at the resume, then I will look at the recommendation letters, just to get another sense of how someone else sees you. It helps me get a gauge of whether I see a potential fit in terms of achievements, interests, work style, team work skills, and all those kinds of things that we ask your recommender. And a good way to understand what we are looking for is to look at the recommendation questions themselves. And on the ratings grid that we ask your recommenders to fill out, those are the things that we are looking for them to evaluate and those are the things we are watching to see in our students. A word of caution on the ratings grade: there is often a tendency for recommenders to put ‘top 1%’ for every category just to ensure that their candidate gets the highest chance of being admitted. We are very familiar with that approach, and it really doesn’t differentiate anybody given that everybody else is rating their candidates at the top 1%. So we’re looking less what the tier of the ranking is and more on how they rate you on the different dimensions, and how they differ one from another. Then after the recommendation letters, I read the essays to say okay, now why does this person want to get an MBA? What do they say about themselves and can I imagine this person fitting? After I bring all of that together, then I read the comments to see whether someone from the Ross community agrees with the picture that’s been established based on the written materials by way of the application, the recommendation letters, and the essays. And if there is a fit there and the academic quality is there, then they are a strong potential for an admit. If there is an inconsistent picture between the interview and what’s on paper, we will take an even deeper review of those candidates and have a discussion amongst the Admissions Committee. But in most cases, the interview lines up fairly well with the application materials, so it’s rare that we are so troubled by the inconsistency. Generally people are pretty good at representing themselves on paper as well as in person, once they get to that stage.

Here’s an excerpt from the Yale SOM Q&A (view or listen to the complete Yale SOM Q&A):

Linda Abraham: Ritcha asks, “Are there any specific criteria that Yale SOM looks at while reviewing an application from a career changer?” And Bruce, while you are thinking about how to answer that question, I want to ask the applicants how many of you are applying to the MBA program with the intention of changing careers? Okay. We have 48%, which would be right in line.

Bruce DelMonico: Obviously given the number of people who want to change careers through an MBA program, that is obviously a very important and relevant question. I would answer it on two different levels. The first is substantively in terms of the substance of what you want to do. We tend to be pretty agnostic; we are not valuing one type of career over another. So say you are in finance now and you want to go into marketing, or you’re in the public sector now and you want to get into finance, or you’re in the non-profit and you want to do healthcare, we are not making a judgment about which of those changes are better or worse. So we are indifferent and agnostic on that level. What we are looking for is to get a sense of how deeply held that switch is; how well thought out is, how much that switch is supported by evidence of commitment to that switch.

Linda Abraham: In other words, if somebody says that they want to save the whales but they’ve never been to the beach, that’s a problem.

Bruce DelMonico: Exactly. And because we have a reputation for being strong in the non-profit sector, we have a number of candidates every year who will throw in there that they want to go into non-profit. They’re not doing that right now, and they’ve got no evidence or indication anywhere that they’ve volunteered or have done anything to show an interest in this area. So it’s that exactly; save the whales, but I’ve never been to the beach. I like that example. One thing that goes along with that is that we are not judging the switch you want to make or what you want to go into, but we also want to get a sense that it is somewhat realistic, that you have a sense of what it takes to make that switch. I’ll give another example. Private equity has been very popular and every year we do have a number of students who go directly into private equity, but it’s very difficult to do if you are not coming from finance or you don’t have some background. And every year we get candidates who are doing something completely unrelated. They may have done good work, and it may be very interesting work, and it may be very valuable work, but they say that directly after the MBA program they want to go into private equity. Well, you need to have a better sense of what the trajectory of someone is to get into private equity, and what the steps you need are to make that switch. It’s not something you can just jump right into; there is a lot of work that goes into it. And so you need to have a sense of the steps that it takes; that you may need to get some more general experience in diversified financials, and then maybe do some investment banking, and then work your way into PE. That would show that you are a much more serious candidate, and you are being much more thoughtful about the process rather than just saying I’m going to go from retail to private equity and there is nothing in-between those two.

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Accepted.com ~ Helping You Write Your Best

Top 30 U.S. Business Schools of 2010 (2008 rankings are parenthetical.)

1. Chicago Booth (1)
2. Harvard Business School (2)
3. Wharton (4)
4. Northwestern Kellogg (3)
5. Stanford GSB (6)
6. Duke Fuqua (8)
7. Michigan Ross (5)
8. UC Berkeley Haas (10)
9. Columbia (7)
10. MIT Sloan (9)
11. UVA Darden (16)
12. Southern Methodist Cox (18)
13. Cornell Johnson (11)
14. Dartmouth Tuck (12)
15. CMU Tepper (19)
16. UNC Kenan-Flagler (17)
17. UCLA Anderson (14)
18. NYU Stern (13)
19. Indiana Kelley (15)
20. Michigan State Broad (2T)
21. Yale SOM (24)
22. Emory Goizueta (23)
23. Georgia Tech (29)
24. Notre Dame Mendoza (20)
25. Texas-Austin McCombs (21)
26. USC Marshall (25)
27. Brigham Young Marriott (22)
28. Minnesota Carlson (2T)
29. Rice Jones (NR)
30. Texas A&M Mays (NR)

Top International Business Schools

1. INSEAD (3)
2. Queen’s (1)
3. IE Business School (2)
4. ESADE (6)
5. London Business School (5)
6. Western Ontario Ivey (4)
7. IMD (7)
8. Toronto Rotman (8)
9. York Schulich (2T)
10. Cambridge Judge (2T)
11. McGill Desautels (2T)
12. IESE (9)
13. Cranfield (NR)
14. HEC Paris (2T)
15. HEC Montreal (HR)
16. Oxford Said (10)
17. Manchester (2T)
18. SDA Bocconi (NR)

BW bases its rankings on employer and student surveys, as well as what they call “intellectual capital,” or school research output. For more information on how the rankings are determined, read BW‘s “How We Rank Business Schools.”

Other articles in the report that may interest you include:

• “The Best U.S. Business Schools 2010” – This article highlights ways that business schools are dealing with the sour job market—putting a new emphasis on job placement, reaching out to alumni for job leads, using technology to connect with recruiters, and bolstering career services departments.
• “Top Global Business Schools” – Read about how the Great Recession has affected the international MBA scene, why new schools have popped up on the top 10, why students are being drawn to emerging markets, and more.

Related Accepted.com Resources:

• The Rankings, a free special report on how you should interpret the rankings in your own b-school quest.
• Internationalizing the MBA, a free special report that will help you determine whether an international MBA program is right for you.

Accepted.com ~ Helping You Write Your Best

The lead article to the new BW rankings, “Part-Time MBAs: Greater Expectations,” explains how student motives are shifting away from career advancement to a switch in job or career placement. Because of this shift, students are expressing a greater demand for career services than did their predecessors.

Monica Powell, associate dean at the UT-Dallas School of Management, explains:

When you talk to this current group and ask them why they are pursuing this degree, students say they are doing it because they want to make themselves more marketable in the job arena, distinguish themselves from others, and further their educational backgrounds. It’s partly generational because of Gen Y and the Millennials, but there’s been a shift away from doing the degree for the company toward doing it for themselves. For them, it is almost as if they are doing this as an insurance policy for their careers. If they are going to be on the chopping block, maybe they will be later in line if they have this degree, as opposed to the head of the line.

Why do Gen Yers and Millennials feel the need to pursue an MBA as insurance? It always comes back to the same thing: The Economy.

And now…the rankings:

Top 10 Part-Time MBA Programs (Rated best for…/average salary increase)

1. CMU Tepper (Job changers, 44%)
2. Drexel LeBow (Career switchers, 24.9%)
3. U. of Richmond Robins (Job changers, 47.5%)
4. Maryland Smith (Career switchers, 31.9%)
5. Lehigh University (Career advancers, 18.2%)
6. U. of Nebraska (Job changers, 60.7%)
7. Michigan Ross (Career switchers, 44%)
8. Indiana University Southeast (Job changers/career switchers, 28.9%)
9. Chicago Booth (Career switchers, 33.2%)
10. Case Western Reserve Weatherhead (Career switchers, 38.4%)

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Of course, each school will attribute its recent drop in selectivity to different causes. Michigan Ross, for example, opened a new building which allows for a larger class, thus allowing the adcoms to accept more students this year than in the past.

University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business, the school that reported the greatest selectivity decrease among the top 30, attributes its drop to “better marketing.” The school also increased its class size by 22% this year.

Randall Sawyer, assistant dean of admissions, financial aid, and inclusion at Cornell’s Johnson School, states that the program’s decrease in selectivity is due to the increase in the quality of applicants. “Candidates are getting smarter about where they apply,” he says, “giving admissions committees fewer but better choices.”

Some programs, on the other hand, are bucking the drop-in-selectivity trend. While some schools are expanding their class size, some are decreasing it. Georgia Institute of Technology’s College of Management is one such example of a program that decreased its class size; 38% of applicants were admitted in 2005, but only 20% in 2010.

Other schools that have reported higher selectivity or no changes include Chicago Booth, Harvard Business School, Notre Dame Mendoza, and Northwestern Kellogg.

And of course this article reflects last year’s application stats. This year both Cornell and Ross happily report that their first round application volume has headed north in comparison to last year’s round 1.

Accepted.com ~ Helping You Write Your Best

• Chicago Booth
• MIT (Sloan)
• UC Berkeley (Haas)
• Michigan (Ross)
• Duke (Fuqua)
• UCLA (Anderson)

GMAT to Applying Time – is applying 5 years after the GMAT a disadvantage?
Inspiring You Tube Videos – Updated Weekly – Inside the HBS Case method, Bill Gates’ speech, and the next Lebron James

According to a Chronicle article, “Global Focus Draws Students to Europe for Business,” European MBA program “are making headway in their efforts to recruit foreign students…by emphasizing their multicultural strengths.” An additional draw, especially for American students, is the fact that most European programs are only one-year long, allowing students to pay for one fewer year of school and to avoid forgoing an extra year of earnings.

Meanwhile, the number of foreign students entering American MBA programs is dropping. Non-Americans are deterred from U.S. b-schools since foreign work visas have been harder to acquire since the September 11 terrorist attacks. Also, as more and more local options pop up, foreign students become less likely to travel abroad.

The article cites a GMAC study that shows that the number of GMAT scores sent to American b-schools has gone down from 75% in 2000 to 42% in 2009.

According to Pierre Tapie, dean and president of Essec Business School in France, European schools offer a more genuine multicultural experience than the U.S. schools. “We are more international naturally because our countries are smaller and English is not our mother tongue,” he says. Most European MBA programs require a minimum of two languages for admission. A new global MBA program at Essec requires that students speak at least three.

While European business schools in general may have a stronghold on diversity and the international experience, there are, however, some American programs that have no trouble holding their own in the global debate. For example, Wharton’s students come from 68 countries and represent 36% of the student body; the faculty is 40% international.

Thomas S. Roberson, Wharton’s dean, explains that as top European business schools strengthen, so does
Wharton. “The better those schools become, the better the exchanges we can set up for students and faculty,” he says. “We do everything conceivable to be an international business school.”

According to Ulrich Hommel, associate director of quality services at the European Foundation for Management Development, Michigan’s
Ross School of Business, another top U.S. MBA program, “comes closer to the more practice-oriented European model…in which students practice their skills working in teams for companies in different countries.”

But when it comes to the sheer number of international students, U.S. programs really can’t compare: At IE and IESE, for example, two top business schools in Spain, non-Spain residents make up 90% and 80% (respectively) of their student bodies.

Are you thinking about pursuing an international MBA? Check out our new special report, Internationalizing the MBA, by Accepted’s internationally-based consultant and editor, Tanis Kmetyk. (P.S. It’s free!)

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