Hello Forum -- I had something disheartening happen to me today during my MBA search. A top-tier, 1-year program in Europe (that was potentially going to be my first choice of MBA programs) told me that I have too much work experience and am too old for their program. I have 16 years of work experience and am 38 years old. I was pretty shocked.

Has anyone else had this experience? Should I just write this off as one negative experience and continue on pursuing my other top picks? Or are there specific programs that I might want to avoid/pursue?

Thanks.

I come across this quite often in mainland Europe. It's very common (and legal) to see age limits for courses.

The key element here is that this school is looking for students who will feed easily into its main corporate recruiting partners, and that normally requires fairly homogenous students with similar levels of work experience.

If you aim for schools with a higher average age, or which have a diversified recruiter base, then you'll be more successful. I recommend Ashridge, Cambridge, Cranfield, IMD, Oxford and Warwick to you. Also look at the Sloan Fellows programme at London Business School, the Nanyang Fellows programme in Singapore and the IBEAR MBA at USC.