What’s the Best MBA Program?

Anna: We hope this newsletter series is helping you get ready for Round One. But where will you send your applications?

Marlena: Let’s talk about a kind of request that Anna and I sometimes get. A person we do not know will contact us by email with a question that gets straight to the point: Please name the MBA programs to which I should apply.

Anna: The last such request I got was from someone you sent, Marlena.

Marlena: Well, what I probably said was a version of: “Anna Ivey is taking questions on MBA Central’s Admissions Forum.” He didn’t post the question! But since several of you have written privately to ask for a list of programs, we know this question is on your minds. We appreciate your politeness and directness. Today we’d like to explain why this is not a question to which there is a quick and easy answer.

As an independent admissions counselor, my goal is to help you identify the programs that are the best programs *for you*. This is not the same as listing the best programs *as such*. Best—for what?
For whom?

The best program for someone who wants to advance within his or her current company while studying part time in the city of X will not be the best program for someone who wants to change careers and double his or her income.
Furthermore, the highest-ranked program may be a program for which you do not have the qualifications; so it would be pointless to say it is the best program for you.

That’s why I need to get to know someone—his or her academic qualifications, grades, GMAT scores, work experience, recommenders, aspirations—and what the candidate is willing to do to achieve those
goals—before I can begin to suggest MBA programs that are a match for that particular scenario.

Making a match depends also on soft factors, such as the culture of a program. Programs have personalities, much as people do. As an independent admissions counselor, I travel to schools to get a sense of the atmosphere on campus, in addition to hard data about, for example, recent placement records. I listen for news about what may be happening next year, not only what happened last year.

For all these reasons, it would be irresponsible of me to simply “name names.” Anna, what do you think?

Anna: Agreed. That’s also my philosophy when I’m counseling applicants. This also feeds into the topic of rankings, which we’ll discuss in greater detail in another newsletter. Suffice it to say here that I don’t think rankings are bad per se – they are often great starting points for applicants, but it’s important for applicants to figure out what their own criteria are. Both you and I are “in the business,” and even we are constantly learning more about programs out there.

You and I were just at a conference in New York where we visited NYU Stern and Columbia Business School, and last year I did visits to Kellogg and Chicago (now Chicago Booth). Any good admissions
consultant is constantly educating herself and visiting schools because there’s not one “right” program for everyone, and schools change over time, too.

For example, when we were at Stern a few weeks ago, I was very impressed with their special track for people interested in the film industry – film finance in particular. I admit I had a personal interest. In my “former life” as an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles, I specialized in the financing of independent movies (with a lot of the funding coming from Germany because of a loophole in the
German tax code – Hollywood movie deals often involve international finance). But aside from my professional nostalgia and trip down memory lane, I now know that I can happily and in good conscience recommend Stern to applicants who have career aspirations in that field. That’s just one example. Is Stern at the top of *everyone’s* list? Probably not. For someone interested in film finance, though, I would argue it should be at the top, or near the top. That’s just one example.

I’ll also point out that there are areas that we (Marlena and I) don’t know as much about. For example, neither of us has much expertise in distance learning programs; the applicants we work with generally
don’t lean in that direction, and that’s one of the reasons we love having people post their questions in the XING forums, because we can all “crowdsource” our knowledge. Our members have lots of useful
information, and we can learn a lot from each other.

Marlena: It was important for us to spend a little time examining the question, “What’s the Best MBA Program?” I hope we’ve explained why the more meaningful question is, “What’s the Best MBA Program for Me?” Next time, we’ll give you enough information to get you started answering that question!

Anna: And remember, you are welcome to post questions for discussion on the MBA Central Admissions Forum!