Stanford GSB: Class of 2017 - Calling All Applicants!

I'd say that timing is even more difficult than selection. For me even HBS wasn't clear. I receieved many positive feedback on my application from experts (eg. HBSGuru) telling me I had a strong profile for the school and nevertheless did not recieve an invite. For Stanford, this is even less clear to me. I don't have a clue of the type of class they are trying to build here but apparently it differes from HBS since we have several dinged HBS candidates recieving invites. Now about the timing, I think this really pushes the analysis an extra level. There's no real need to invite the 'brightest' candaites first other than 'OK, we are damn sure we have to invite this one so why delay'. There could be other arguments such as doing it by buckets which means similar geographical / industry area which I don't think is the case. I don't think they invite international students first either since there is no need to make any travel arrangements in most cases.

Maybe is just let's get movin' send the really strong candidates something earlier and let's figure out with more time which of the rest of these we should invite (probably because we need to read every other application to make sure we are choosing the right person and not the other). In the first case, with really strong candidates they are choosing you, not really comparing you to another candidate to see which one to pick, that's why they usually don't need to read all the apps until this point. According to this theory, we should definetely see more URM towards the end of the timeline here for the reasons explained above.

In conclusion, I expect to get my invite in the 10-13 november range.