Calling All Fall 2012 Consortium Applicants!

I have to step in here and refute this point, although I certainly respect your and your coworkers' opinions. A disclaimer first: I'm from LA and have very close ties to both schools and alumni networks. For those who aren't familiar with LA, UCLA and USC are the biggest game in town, with Loyola serving as a distant third. UCLA and USC are deep rivals and you have to take allegiances into account when anyone, myself included, says anything about either school. USC is private, downtown, and known internationally for the strength of its network. Although it's located in a rundown neighborhood, USC is frequented by the kids of LA's elite and offers a pretty good all around experience as well, especially for athletics. UCLA, a public school, is located on the west side, which is the most beautiful part of the city. Its network, at least its undergraduate network, has nothing on USC's, but if you get good grades at either school, you'll get a great job in LA and have strong options in NY and even stronger options in SF.

Now for the b-schools. What everyone discovers in grad school is that you're not really connected to the undergraduates. Your network is not really the UCLA or USC network, but the Anderson and Marshall networks (and if we're all lucky - Consortium, Jumpstart, MLT, etc.) The undergraduate career services center is focused on undergrads, so if you go to Marshall, you have to either rely on Marshall's career services or hustle (some call it a self-directed job search). And while the reviews on Marshall are positive, the reviews on its career services are mixed. Anderson, on the other hand, is one of the more progressive b-schools in the country. In recent years it has slowly and stealthily gone private (following the UVA model), joined the Consortium, and revamped it's cirriculum as well as its career services in response to the recession. As a first year at Anderson, you tell them what you want to do and they give you a 2nd year advisor, put you in a professional club, prepare you for interviews in your chosen field, and bring lots of employers in to conduct interviews on campus. It's the home of the Riordan scholars program and despite its pathetic minority numbers, it does very, very well by those it accepts. State politics affect Anderson's diversity admissions - specifically the passage of prop 209, which prevented the school from using race, gender, or ethnicity to admit students.

The bottom line here is that both schools have pros and cons. The important thing for URM's to consider is how a school caters to URM's both in terms of campus culture and career search. Is there a mechanism in place to help diverse MBA candidates adjust? Is the alumni diversity network active? Are there alumni minority mentors, for example? And of course, how does the school utilize diversity recruitment channels for its diverse MBA candidates? If your ethnic or racial community is important to you, these are the kinds of questions you need to ask. But enough splitting hairs - these are the two best schools in one of the world's best and most famous cities. You can't really go wrong either way. A belated congrats to all our admits! If I'm lucky I'll join the celebration in the next few weeks.