16 Top US Business Schools Visited – Impressions

Dear all,

A couple of months ago I happened to visit 16 top* business schools in the US. The regular visiting routine – class visit, infosession, lunch with students, campus tour. I‘d like to share my generalized impressions. Generalized – for the reason that in those couple of hours it is impossible to get a representative feel of the whole school with its dozens of classes and the whole student body with its hundreds of students. So I had to average out a bit the impressions.

• They do not differ that much. I mean, the schools. We, here in the forum, or with friends, or whomever else, try to find the bestest (pun inteded) of the best school for us. But I‘d say that one top b-school is different from another of the same league as much as a Chevrolet Corvette is different from a Dodge Viper. They ARE different, technically, but in my opinion the differences are mild (except the location and surrounding industries).

• The adcom staff at all schools underlined how unique that particular school was. If the school had a class of less than around 300 students, their advantage was „tightly knit community“. If the class was bigger, then diversity was the sales pitch. Oh, and all, ALL schools (students) said that they have heard that other schools have a rather competitive atmospheres. But not theirs!

• The content of the lectures. I have a bachelor‘s degree in business administration, so may be that is why I did not find the content of the lectures interesting per se. The same models, even the same examples and one familiar case. I started to think that if there are benefits to going to a b-school after an undergrad in business, these benefits must be anything but the lecture or textbook content. Network, social skills, leadership – agreed. The same business related classes as in undergrad – I‘d have second thoughts about that.

• The more quant a class, the more male dominant the audience. The derivatives class, laden with moderately complex maths, had 1 in 10 female students. Only one class out of more than 20 I attended had more than 50% of women students. It was a business ethics class.

• The majority of schools allow laptops in classrooms. Though, some don‘t. As a visitor I was usually placed in the back of the class and hence I could see what the students were doing on their PCs. Most often it was Facebook, career sections of corporate websites. Not so often – some material to aid the class.

• Eating in classrooms in general was the norm. I don‘t know whether it‘s the lack of time of MBA students, or the general culture of society, but I found it a bit awkward to see students crumpling wrappers or slurping noodles. Some classrooms had signs „NO DRINKS ALLOWED“, but, well, incidentally it was in that classroom that one student ran away with a coffee soaked Ipad.

• I could split the format of classes I attended into two rather neat categories: cases and lectures. Cases were mostly in the classes such as leadership and marketing, whereas lectures dominated quant classes. About each of the two:

o Cases are something to be filmed and put into a promotinal material. After any question about half the audience raise their hands and have things to say. And the students do adhere to the ground rules waiting to be called. Professors, also, are nothing less than awesome. Very animate, intelligent and with a sense of humour.

o Quant intensive lectures left a completely different impression. One example: the professor was asking whether anyone had done their homework – solving some math problem. No hands came up. „All right“, said the professor, „So did you have any trouble with the problem?“ No hands. „Could anyone try to calulate that value right now?“ No hands. At that moment I thought – come on, are these the people who wrote in their essays about leadership instances in their lives?... Later in the lecture it became obvious that no one actually had a clue about what the material was about. And they did not bother to ask the lecturer to stop, repeat, explain – nothing of the kind. The students sat with their head tucked into their laptops social networking. Felt like high-school. And it happened more than once in the very best schools so I conclude that quant classses, difficult as they are, are less fun to participate than case-studies, in which even I could have commented reasonably intelligently without reading the case.

• Campuses. More often than not, there is nothing more a reasonable person could wish for. An occasional parking problem, but then, why have a car in e.g. NY. But otherwise – great places to study or spend time otherwise.

• Number of international students, as reported by the schools, is often a misleading number. Usually it encompasses permanent residents of which there are many. The result is that people who did their undergrad in US or even have been living for 10+ years count as foreign nationals. The result is that out of the usual 25-35% international students less than half have come to US to study MBA only.

Now I want to underline that all of the above are my personal impressions from visiting the schools. They are not an insider‘s view. Neither they are representative of any single school. I could have participated in a poor or perfect class and hence made an incorrect conclusion. I try to accept limitations of my experience. Therefore the generalized view.

Hope you found this interesting. Any questions – I‘d be glad to answer.

*Stern, Columbia, Yale, HBS, Wharton, MIT, Babson, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon, Tuck, Kellogg, Booth, UCLA, Stanford, Haas.