“The Money Chase: Inside Harvard Business School”

Ouch. Bush was class of '75 and I would like to think a lot has changed in the last 35 years. For the record, Obama went to Harvard Law, not HBS.

While there will always be undeserving individuals that slip through the cracks, I would be shocked if the proportion was higher at HBS than other top institutions. Virtually all of the students here get in on the basis on merit and not lineage. That being said, for every deserving student that gets in, there's probably 2 or 3 deserving ones that don't. Such is the reality of the ultra-competitive MBA admissions process. Adcoms are mortals and when you're choosing between extremely qualified candidates, arbitrary measures will eventually enter into the picture. I don't believe, however, that it makes the admission criteria fundamentally misguided.