I am planning to persue MBA from HULT Boston campus.
Can anybody suggest what can be good GMAT score?

I have 5 yrs experience & 3.6 GPA

With that very solid GPA and if your work experience is strong and relevant, then I think a 640 or higher will get you a good look. Good luck!

With that very solid GPA and if your work experience is strong and relevant, then I think a 640 or higher will get you a good look. Good luck!

Hi,

As a outsider - One may wonder - getting a admit below 600 GMAT is very tough in any top B school, But in HULT - people with 500 GMAT are given scholarships.

Was reading another blog - and the contents of the post were similar to the common apprehensions people have - but this was from a current student.

http://www.pagalguy.com/forum/international-indian-mba-schools-accepting/34869-feedback-hult-international-business-school.html

Instead of making multiple locations and churning out MBA like a factory product. Would it not have been better to first make a good brand with 1 campus itself.

Education - a business where you are not accountable for the finished product (i.e. placements for MBA) - is virtually a money minting business without any ethical social responsibility.

People are admitted - what ever fee- is received is contribution to bottom line - Have a higher printed tarrif and then discount it by giving scholarships.

No campus means - no library / no sports center / no recreational activities / no overhead expenses. The website does not have a picture of the business school even.

Renting a floor or 2 in a building a distributing MBA degrees for $ 30000 USD is a good business model.

No wonder there are a few people from Harvard etc associated with HULT - any business is good business.

THANK YOU. I agree with some of the general things you said but that discussion thread is rather old, no? From 2009? And there are 2 more positive reviews that follow it.

I also am interested in programs in Dubai and am considering over Cass, Hult, SP Jain. Don't think i would be able to get into INSEAD.

INSEAD or IE would be very good places to pursue your programs. S.P. Jain in Dubai was quite a nice setup. Great professors.

I read Hult brochure ... lots of pages to descrive locations and 4-5 pages for program features :-)

I don't understand how much it costs .. by the way placement/Salary/ranking look ok ....

have a captured there campus details - photo / facilities etc ? You may be spending 2 years in a floor of a commercial building even without basic things like a library in place.

Placements - data is very generic - have you spoken to any alum of previous year to get first hand info on placements

anyone presently studying at HULT ??? Can you share your experiences

Hi, I have some friends studying there and they are very disappointed with the Program and the University. You can find better options! Hult is a company and they are not interested in your education nor in your career. I recommend you to study in real Universities with years and proven success experience, such as Boston University or Babson. Where you are thinking to study??? One year or two?? GMAT??

MBASpecialist, this post is just plain ridiculous. I am a Hult grad and have to say that the program was excellent. Agree careers services could improve, largely because more work needs to be done to improve brand awareness of the school. But 100% disagree that they don't care about the students.

When i was in Boston i had friends at BU, BC and Babson. I don't believe any of these are better than Hult. Obviously MIT and HBS are.

Yes Hult is a company. But I don't think that is a problem at all. On the contrary i see it as a positive. They see students much more as a customer than traditional universities.

iBanker, you might disagree with MBASpecialist but you won't convince anyone by simply asserting that Hult is as good as the other Boston schools.

- There is negative feedback about Hult which is unlike the feedback about those other Boston schools. You have to appreciate that and explain it.

- Small, for-profit, new schools which face huge local competition are, genuinely, risky choices. Other full-time MBA programmes lose money, but Hult has to make money. How can it produce better outputs with less money on inputs in a defensible way?

- Student satisfaction is not the best measure: employer satisfaction is. Kellogg, for example, is focussed on student satisfaction and has been falling in rankings because students don't have the same balance of hard, not-fun, stuff at some other schools.

- Employers are cautious. There's a real flight to quality. Schools that are in the main US rankings are safer choices than those which are not, like Hult.

Duncan:

Sorry. Didn't mean to cause offense. My point was simply that i have been to the school and other people commenting on this thread have not.

With regards to your points:

1. I think that the negative feedback on Hult is a mismatch between the marketing material which is world-class amongst business schools and the reality of the school which is clearly 2nd tier. But that doesn't make it a bad school at all. The fact that it is better (or at least as good as BC, BU, Babson etc) is reflected in the rankings in which Hult participates. As far as I am aware it is higher than all these schools in both the FT and Economist rankings. From my experience students who do their research on Hult (talk to alumni, careers services etc) are positive because they get what they expected. Those that don't bother to do their research may find it doesn't meet their expectations.
2. I don't know of many schools that can continue and make a loss for a long period. Yes IMD can have a loss-making full-time program in order to sell exec ed, but most business schools are expected to make a profit within the university in order to subsidize other loss-making departments such as astrophysics, music etc. Further, most business schools are trying to subsidize expensive research teams which are not really of much benefit to MBA students.
3. I agree employer satisfaction is the ultimate guide. But there isn't much evidence as to this, is there? Businessweek rankings?
4. I do agree that the other schools are better known than Hult. That is why i said in my post "more needs to be done to build brand awareness". But in my year, the best students had no problems getting a job. The bottom-end of students did. But the careers stats of Hult held up against all other one-year programs that i looked at at the time.

1. This form of words about 'participating' in rankings is rather misleading. It is not the schools which decide about whether or not they are in the rankings; it's the ranker. Schools can decide about whether or not they assist, but let's not pretend about why Hult is not in the main US rankings: it's not there because it doesn't have the visibility or the outcomes. There is a dislocation between the promise and the reality. As you can imagine I have spoken to more than a few people who have graduated from Hult or applied there. Their experiences vary.

2. Major business schools are non-profits supported by a mixture of endowments and subsidies. At Tuck, where I had the pleasure of studying, there's a million dollars of endowment for each student. The cost of the education is always far greater than the fees at those schools. For them, subsidized higher education is their core mission. That s obviously not the case at a for-profit school like Hult. There will be loss-leader products only when they are needed to sell the rest of the portfolio: Hult does not make most of its money from exec ed, so the comparison with IMD does not work. The reality is that almost none of the full-time MBAs make money (although, when adding in exec ed and subsidies with of course tend to break even) that will not be the case at Hult.

3. Indeed, the rankings do give good information about employer satisfaction, both directly and indirectly. If you look at the FT rankings you can see that Hult is below average for salary, salary increase, aims achieved, % in employment, and many other factors. It ranks 99th out of 100 for placement and recommendation. Indeed, Hult ranks below Boston College and Boston University on those key factors.

It would be interesting to try to square this with the high ranking for career progress: taken together it seems that the programme recruits junior people, since even after a lot of progression they are on low salaries. Its low cost is one of the key factors helping it in the ranking, along with the diverse student base.

4. Brand is not primarily the product of marketing: it's the result of the real experience of students, employers and other stakeholders. It's not just a question of awareness of the name (Hult thinks it is, hence the sponsoring of case competitions and the like) but of favourable experiences.

Mostly disagree with all of your points.

1. To participate in all US rankings like BusinessWeek, WSJ etc the institution must have a two-year MBA program (if it is a US school). Hult is unusual as being a US school with only a 1-year program. So it can't participate. But i do agree that because of the lack of history and lack of focus on academic research it probably wouldn't do as well as in the FT where the data comes from students not employers.

2. The number of institutions that have an endowment sufficient to actually support a loss making program are very small in the universe of business schools. Even within the US. And almost none outside of the US, where donating money is very rare (except for the ultra wealthy). As you can see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment, Babson, BU and BC only has a endowment fund of between $20k-$100k per student which at today's market is giving a princely income of about $1-2000 per annum per student to support education costs. A small fraction of the actual cost. And i still stand by my assertion that most "non-profit" universities expect the business school to make a profit to help fund other activities of the institution, even after the research costs are paid. Very little of which is of value to MBA students.

In any event it seems perverse to me that a "business" school would not act in the way that it teaches its students. I can't remember any cases where begging for money so that a loss could be made was a great strategy for business success.

3. The average age of my class was 31, so not exactly junior. My peers seem to be doing pretty well in their career progression, but obviously are dispersed all over the world, so salaries are highly variable depending on location. I would have to look at the data to see exactly how this gets taken into account in the rankings. But I don't think the cost of the program is factored into the computation of any of the rankings, is it? In the FT it is just there for information purposes. So can't be a factor in why Hult does well. But agree it does do well because of the diversity of the class.

4. Agreed. But if the institution is 7 years old, as Hult is, then you need to give there time for the brand to build by the method that you suggest. Dartmouth has almost a 100 year head start! In the meantime marketing is what you have to do. Just like the launch of any other product.

This is quite an obtuse answer. Are you choosing to ignore the point that universities break even after subsidies, but Hult must make a profit, and thus Hult must have lower cost?

On your other points...

1. It's not the case that only two-year programmes can be ranked. Pittsburgh runs a one-year MBA; both US News and BusinessWeek rank it. Its two year MBA is actually rather new. So, why do you say that they do not rank one-year programmes? Either you've been misled, or you're making it up. Weak research isn't one of the main reasons why Hult performs badly: it's third-tier outcomes for students and employers, as evidenced by the data collected by the FT.

2. You are quite wrong about the idea that most full-time MBAs make a profit. I work as an MBA admissions advisor, have studied at nine ranked graduate schools, and even without this experience I think it's self-evident that non-profit business schools generally break even. At the programme level, they tend to make a profit on executive education and make a loss on full-time programmes. That is even the case at schools outside universities like IMD and Ashridge. When we look at the ranked schools, actually those are schools with really substantial non-tuition cashflows: According to research by London Business School, top schools get a quarter of their budgets from donations and endowments. Hult does not get that sort of support, and also needs to turn a profit, and cannot cross-subsidize the degree programmes with executive education, because exec ed is not a major part of Hult's business. Therefore Hult must be spending less on students. For every dollar a Hult student spends, profit must be subtracted, so the 'production cost' of a Hult MBA must be less than the tuition and any taxes. In contrast, top schools are taxfree and are supported by the school. State schools often get most of their budgets from state grants. As a result, a dollar in tuition fee always leads to much more than a dollar in education.

3. The FT data are pretty clear: the students get below average salaries and increases, but have higher than average progress. The FT says average salaries for alumni are 107K (compared to an average for the US schools of $120K). Hult alumni get an increase of 87%, compared to an increase of 101%. If that's the case then the pre-MBA salary was $57K, compared to an average of 60K. So, while the Hult students are making progress, they are making less money on the way in, and less on the way out, than their peers. More importantly, the gap gets *wider*. Alumni of most US MBA programme ranked by the FT earn more than Hult alumni. Indeed, alumni of the US programmes where the intake is more junior than at Hult also - on average - have a bigger increase than Hult alumni. That's even the case with schools like Wake Forest, Notre Dame and UC Davies, which have much more junior intakes, but whose alumni earn more than Hult alumni. Hult alumni must be making non-cash progress, like nice job titles or international jobs which don't (even with purchasing power parity) match those of the average in the FT ranking.

4. Hult, of course, is not seven years old. It more or less invented the one year MBA in the US market. The school was founded in 1964, and its shield proudly repeats that. A decade ago, the school was ranking 54th in The Economist's top 100. No, Hult has had plenty of time. But again you miss on the point I made: the brand is about the reality of the outcomes. Hult students boost their salaries by 87% rather than the average (of 101% in the top 100 FT programmes in the US) because employers value the Hult experience accordingly on the basis of hiring Hult people.

I am trying to answer as directly as I can, so not sure why you think i am obtuse. I am saying that most universities have lots of loss-making activities like research, astro-physics departments, sports teams etc that are of no real benefit to an MBA student, but must be subsidized somehow. That subsidy comes from the business school - since business education is by far the most profitable education (high tuition fees and low costs).

On the other points:

1. This is based on an interaction with the editors of both the WSJ and Businessweek when i was a student at Hult. I will dig out the emails.

2. I think we are talking at cross-purposes. I am saying that most business schools OVERALL are trying to make a profit. Where they make that profit differs. Of course schools with sub-scale full-time programs make a loss there (In the case of Ashridge not sure if this is deliberate or just because they don't attract many students. But in the case of IMD it is clearly deliberate to get a good full-time MBA ranking). But i don't believe that schools with large MBA programs are making a loss on these. I don't doubt that top schools get a lot of income from endowments, but i was talking about 2nd & 3rd tier schools - BU, BC, Babson was where this debate started. There I provided the data on how little a subsidy the endowment provides in my last post.

3. Fair enough i get your point. I haven't analyzed the data to that level of detail.

4. If you know about Hult then you will understand that for most of its history it was a subdivision of the Arthur D. Little consultancy not really trying to be a school competing in the open market, but actually teaching 20-40 students that came from clients of its consulting base. Of course a brand and employer reputation isn't going to be built with only 20-40 graduates per year and most of these going to their employers. So for the purposes of building a reputation with employers the school is around 7 years old.

1. I'm making the point that the top full-time MBA programmes don't make a profit, but that the cost are subsidised through grants, endowments, government funding, tax free status and executive education. Because these methods are not available to Hult, Hult must produce MBAs at a lower cost. You are countering this argument by ignoring it, and making a different case: you are arguing that the surpluses from executive education can also be used to subsidise other things as well. Of course your point doesn't in any way challenge mine. I think I and others familiar with graduate schools of business will know that most business schools prefer to plough surpluses back into the business school and are often able to do that well.

2. It simply is the case that most full-time top MBA programmes break even only after subsidies. Have some conversations with people in other business schools.

3. I'm glad you don't challenge the FT's data. It's really key to your point that Hult is better than BC or BU. I think it's a personal choice, and that different schools fit different people. As you say, Hult's marketing is at a totally different level to that of other schools, especially in terms of its telesales and direct marketing. That gives it the ability to reach a layer of the market that other schools cannot get to. But the school is only as good as the quality of the intake, the experience and the outcomes. At the moment Hult is not adding value in the way that other schools do. That's the key driver of reputation.

4. ADLSOM had about 5000 [Typo - actually 2000] MBA alumni ten years ago: it had then around 100 students a year, balanced 3:2 between the full-time MBA and the part-time MBA. It was a school for experienced professionals, more like the Sloan programmes or the Theseus MBA which EDHEC bought. 68% of students were seeking employment, so it's not the case that most students returned to employers and thus the school didn't need a high profile: quite the opposite.

The major recruiters from ADLSOM were Citi group, General Electric, Ford, Kaupthing, Johnson & Johnson; PwC and BP. The school also educated around 200 non-degree students a year, which included Arthur D. Little, British Airways, the US Navy, Philips Electric and State Street Bank. The placement and exec ed means the school will have had both careers services and business development contact with recruiters. That's a substantial base to build from - if ADL had not built that, why would Hult have not just built a school from scratch?

It is obvious from your answer to the last question that you don't know Hult as well as you think you do. Feel free to count the people in the graduation photos in the lobby in Boston, there are no where near 5000 graduates. The biggest graduating class was 80. Even after all the growth of Hult, there is less than 5000 graduates in the whole world today.

The rest i can't be bothered to comment on, I am back at work now. If you think non-profit organisations are the most efficient way of organising anything, then you must be crazy is all i can say.

Ah, yes. That was typo. I should have said 2,000. According to ADLSOM's own data, the school had 95 MBA students in 2001.

Saying the other person is mad is not a great way to lose an argument. And neither is putting in their mouth something they did not say. Perhaps these skills are the ones which are getting Hult graduates lower salaries than their peers?