Guys,

I took my GMAT and I got a 690. This is lower than I wanted and I guess because I am from India it's not going to be enough for the top US MBA programs that I was targeting. :(

I would like suggestions on 2nd tier US schools or ones that I could apply for. My goal is to work in the US. From some research, these are the MBA programs that I have found where I was thinking about applying:

UC Irvine
Vanderbilt
Georgetown
BYU
Rice
Hult
Pittsburgh
Ohio State

Would like some input on these and maybe others in terms of which ones are the best to end up working in the United States. Industry doesn't matter but I would like to work in a management position. I have worked in IT support roles for 4 years.

With your background, these are ambitious schools to aim for, with the exception of Hult (I never heard of anyone not being offered a seat by Hult) although I don't know anyone who would place that as high as the second tier. Take a look at GMAT Tiers - strong schools for your GMAT www.find-mba.com/board/27082

Yes, unless you plan on trying to re-take GMAT, maybe pad your applications with a few safety schools.

Lower down the BW rankings you'll find more regionally-focused schools that are still good: Baylor, Texas Tech, Miami, etc.

A 50 point bump on the GMAT, though, that would go a long way towards your competitiveness at schools further up the chain.

Good points. I'm interested in Hult, given its placement in the Businessweek rankings and what seems to be its general openness to candidates who have lower GMAT scores (if I understand correctly...)

However, maybe I will think about taking the GMAT, since it sounds like it will give me more leverage at the schools that will give me better chances of making it in the US job market. I'd rather go to a school like Vanderbilt than Baylor or Texas Tech, to be honest.

Good thinking about the GMAT. As for Hult, it's a good school, but I don't think they publish career reports, so ask them directly about expected career outcomes. I believe that its ROI numbers, as published by the rankings, are driven in a large part by alumni from its international campuses.

In what sense is that a good school? It's not notably selective. Most of its campus have no academic staff. It has no strong relationships with traditional MBA recruiters. It fell out of the FT ranking in its audit year.

It's ranked 21st in the Businessweek full-time MBA rankings. That's the main criteria for why I added it to my list. :)

It's not 21st in the US rankings, though. It's 21 in the international ranking, below the Molson School. That reflects the reality of the school: its owned by a European language school. Use LinkedIn to see where its alumni end up.

Hi Duncan. Thank you for your input.
Just wanted to say that while it is placed below the Molson School, it is also placed above Imperial College London and University of Manchester, which to my knowledge are solid institutions. If inaccurate,that Hult is not better than these, wouldn't this reflect the reality of the rankings?! It is indeed owned by EF making it a private institution, however would this be enough to dismiss the school entirely? Correct me if I am wrong, but this very much sounds like the ownership of Vatel, owned by the Vatel Group, with Founder, Allain Sebban sitting as president. Surely that has not stopped the school from achieving great success and be recognized as one of the top Hotel schools.

If you think Hult is better than Imperial or Manchester then you probably will fit right in. It's certainly a great option for people who cannot get into somewhere better, since I never heard of anyone not being admitted after applying for a place at Hult, but just consider: in The Economist top 100 it comes 92th in terms of the percentage of students who found work; 94th in terms of "Personal development and educational experience" and outside the top 100 in terms of faculty and alumni quality.

Indeed, private institutions can produce great business schools: Harvard is private. Insead is private. To produce a great business school you need to select great students; you need to develop great research; you need the best faculty you can find and you need a generation or two to develop an amazing alumni network. Hult doesn't intend to do that, and so it will not.

[Edited by Duncan on Jul 16, 2015]

690 GMAT should be pretty competitive for Uni of Pittsburg - Katz. I have friends who recently graduated from Katz. Personally, I envy Katz's career services - they have pretty cool corporate relationships with companies like Nationwide Insurance (where I did my internship), Crane Co. etc. Few of international students have landed jobs in Nationwide Insurance, PwC, and eBay. They are amazing people, I am sure they would have landed good job sooner or later regardless of what school they went.

If my memory serves me well, Hult is not a university. Their (Boston campus) physical presence is also limited to having few rooms in some building. My friend graduated from there. Their student satisfaction isn't the greatest one (search this forum for Hult reviews). My friend was lucky to land himself a good job as IT Consultant.

I had applied to UC Irvine back in 2012 with my GMAT of 630. I was fortunate to have received their admit, but couldn't join them without any scholarship. So even though I am from India and had a below average GMAT for 630. I really appreciate that they really look at the profile holistically, my interview with them went over 90 mins. It was one of the most wonderful interview experience I had. So don't loose hope, you don't know unless you apply there.

I think just formulate some sort of strategy about your post MBA career goals - in terms of function, industry, company, geography etc. It will help you shortlist your schools. Having spent my summer in Columbus, OH, I visited the OSU in 2014 - pretty nice place to be in.

IMHO, Getting a job in US is more dependent upon an individual's skill set and experience and less on the school that individual graduated from. The brand name/career services/alumni network helps in making the first connection - which is always welcomed. The tricky part is getting your petition picked up in H1B lottery, and the USCIS approving it.

Good luck with your MBA journey,

Ayon
P.S - I am a recent graduate from College of William and Mary

Best Faculty and Develop great research, is that not what the merger with Ashridge is all about? Do you not think the school will become more selective as it matures? or Has gradually become more selective over the last 7 years?

The merger with Ashridge is not Hult turning into Ashridge. Even Ashridge shared some of Hult's weaknesses: very few career resources and almost no active hiring relationships with mainstream MBA recruiters; no notable resourcing for alumni networking; no PhD programme; very few full-time faculty, preferring to use freelancers; few faculty who are active in mainstream academic research; no reputation for selectivity; and so on. The merger is certainly a win-win, but the reality is that Ashridge has not succeeded as an MBA player. It has three students in its full-time MBA programme. It won't have too much impact on Hult's 2,300 students.

Will Hult become more selective? I doubt it. Why would it want that? As long as it maintains its bait and switch marketing campaigns, getting students to apply for the MBA and then moving them onto other programmes, it can keep the MBA's selectivity statistic high and still admit 1,000 times more students than Ashridge.

[Edited by Duncan on Jul 17, 2015]

Thank you for answering those questions.
when talking about the selectivity, I have to disagree with you. How's not becoming more selective a sustainable long term growth strategy? The school has to become more selective if it wants "to maintain its bait."
Based on your analysis,the school surely has a lot to work on, but I Believe Hult's intentions are that of any other private business. Hence, why would it not want to become more competitive?

Go take a strategy glass. Hult isn't a niche play. It's already the biggest on-campus MBA in the rankings. Merging with Ashridge gives it even more capacity. The 'bait' is simply that it admits people who would not get into other schools but can afford a premium price. This is the strategy, more or less, that allows GWU to grow. It's not really competing with other schools.

I doubt that most of Hult students are other school's rejects, perhaps some, but isn't that always the case(Except for Schools like IE, Harvard,etc)? In the long term, why would anyone be willing to pay a premium price if the school's got no real selling point and creates little value.
No need to be condescending, I appreciate that you taking the time to debate this with me.

Yes, it's wrong of me to condescend, but I do honestly feel that the comment reflected a lack of understanding of the options for corporate strategy. Hult's goal is to produce a premium priced MBA without the premium cost that comes from full-time faculty, a strong research orientation, a PhD programme and the larger real-estate and staff base needed to house and support them. It's reengineering options to fit a place on the value curve, and seeing that the sort of intensive marketing that works for language schools produces both promotional skills and lists of people who want to study in English. Reflecting the heritage of ADL and Huron, Hult is about providing opportunities for people who have the finance for higher education, but perhaps don't have either the ability to get into better schools or the insight to see how different those schools are. The notion, for example, that Hult is better than Imperial or Manchester.... well, I think that is remarkable.

There are lots of premium-priced schools with no great added value, at at least no more than what happens when you get bright, privileged people together. Look at the different European Business School campuses, or the places like the European University, Schiller, Webster, the American University of 'x' or the International University of 'y'. There's a nice for kids who are better connected than average, often from family businesses, but who don't have the background needed for a better school.

This is reflected by Hult's lack of focussed relationships with traditional MBA recruiters at the MBA level. Of course they spin that into a positive: no school places students into more firms, and that flows from having a lot of students and no strong relationships that concentrate alumni into partner firms. Our of 5000 Hult alumni on LinkedIn, for example, no firms has more than 24 of them -- other than Hult itself. There is no school that has more of its own alumni on the payroll than Hult.

I have to disagree with you, I think comparing Hult to European University is not a fair comparison either. I think during its 8 years of existence, the school has invested much more in corporation relations, faculty, and research than any of those schools. If it wasn't for the marketing the school wouldn't have never had the capital to invest in any of the aforementioned. So yes logically their initial strategy was to feed on "kids who are better connected than average" but I am sure that is being phased out. No doubt that as the school matures it will have a more traditional MBA.

lets not forget that My comment about the Ranking was a response to yours. "It's 21 in the international ranking, below the Molson School. That reflects the reality of the school". If being below Molson School "reflects the reality", then so should being above Imperial/Manchester. My comment was more directed the ranking's inability to properly assess business schools.Therefore I saw your use of the ranking for comparison as useless.

Forging corporate relationships takes time, and the more alumni are recruited by big corporations, the more these will enticed to recruit directly from Hult.
So let's look at the actual numbers. Hult Vs. Insead
Looking at the percentages(#of employees/ Network Size), For Hult based on the linkedin numbers of the top 25 employeers (excluding EF) employ 4.35% of the total network
The list includes
Deloitte, IBM, EY, Accenture, Google, PWC, Bloomberg LP, HP, Cognizant, Oracle, Microsoft, Uniliver, J&J, l'OREAL, state Street, American Express, Amazon, Citi, DU, Cisco, Mindbody, Wells Fargo, Barclays, Phillips

For insead the top 25 employeers employ 8.9%
With a list that includes Mc Kinsey, Boston Consulting, IBM, bain, Google, syngenta, SHell, Accenture, HP, Sap, Valeo, Amazon, L'Oreal, pwc, eY, credit Suisse, AMro, Standard Chartered bank, Deutsche Bank, PWC, Deloitte, Novartis, Heineken, Alcatel

The reality is in the numbers, 4.35 is almost half of Insead's. What does that say? For a school with 8 years of existence, wouldn't that be competitive compared to a school that was established in 1957?


I suppose nobody has a chrystal ball to really know what the school's real intentions are. However, it really seems like a start up trying to establish itself.

and a doing a pretty good job at it, I might add.

So, there's a lot we agree on. Hult has great execution. Large numbers of motivated graduates with access to high tuition fees will often end up employed by large organisations. Hult does not belong in a ranking of the top 20 business schools outside the USA. Neither of us owns a time machine.

What are the questions we can focus on?
- Will Hult qualitatively narrow the gap between itself and the top business schools? Without full-time faculty members who are focussed in research before teaching or administration it cannot run a traditional PhD program, it cannot become part of the academic research conversation (even in the way that top schools without PhD programs are, since they still have faculty and - often - post-doctoral researchers), and with cannot become a serious provider of research-driven advisory services to business and government. There is are no short-term profits in such an enterprise. Nor are there in developing an alumni network: it takes decades before donations from an alumni network would match the cost of the sort of alumni program run by the top business schools.

Your comparison with Insead is not exact since it uses LinkedIn data and LinkedIn (like Hult) has the largest part of its network in the USA while Insead is most rooted in France. But it is instructive that Hult's top industry is marketing and advertising, while Insead's is management consulting. McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group are geared up for MBA talent in the way that Deloitte and IBM (Hult's top non-EF employers) are not. The seniority of the roles is not comparable: Hult has 22% of the number of alumni on LinkedIn as Insead, yet only 5% the number of people at VP level; 6% at CXO level; but almost four times more people in internships.

To start placing more alumni into roles in general management leadership and consulting, as opposed to marketing management roles, the school would need better students and a stronger curriculum. For example, look at the finance content: at Hult, Finance is one of five courses taught in the January-February module. So, one day a week over eight weeks, with probably three or four hours of lectures giving 24 or 32 hours of contact time. Corporate finance isn't in the core: it's an option that students can select in March/April. So, this is not only less time than you would get on finance in any other MBA I am aware off, it's less than in any EMBA and some executive non-degree programmes. And without having that, how can Hult MBAs be effective when managerial choices have to be made over project finance, M&As, asset management, risk management and entreprenurial finance -- and they are key issues even for MBAs in start-ups, not only for those in investment banks.

Shifting that, of course, means making the MBA experience more challenging and less enjoyable for students. It also means getting academics who are at the front of the game because you can't use practitioners using 20th century knowledge, for instance who teach disproven methods like CAPM, and then produce students who can do well in the 21st century.

Business schools need to be knowledge-intensive, and research-intensive, if they are to produce students who can lead at the leading edge. That's where Insead alumni are. Hult alumni are doing the marketing, and don't even report to the Insead grads.