Accepted Admissions Almanac

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Economic Woes Hurt 2008 Hiring

The drums of economic downturn have been beating loudly. Very loudly during the last few weeks. Almost like daffodils after a spring rain, articles about grads having fewer job opportunities and employers, especially in financial services, cutting college and MBA recruiting have sprouted:

• From The Wall St. Journal: "For Class of '08, A Scramble for Jobs." This article focuses more on this year's college senior.
• From BusinessWeek "It's Looking Grim for New Grads." The impact of the credit market melt-down is felt throughout financial services and by all grads interested in careers in business, specifically those interested in financial services.
• From BusinessWeek "Bear Stearns Rescinds Job Offers." Now it's official Bear Stearns is rescinding some offers extended to members of the MBA Class of '08. While it may have been more shocking if none of the offers had been rescinded, the reality is increasing nervousness and tension throughout MBA-dom. The memories of rescinded offers are recent (2002) and painful.
• From the NY Sun "Economic Woes Could Be Felt by MBAs of 2009.", a slightly more optimistic piece. It looks at the market and concludes that 2008 grads "dodged the bullet." The outlook for 2009 MBA grads is much more cloudy. In fact b-schools, like MIT Sloan, are pro-actively turning to their alumni to help with placement for '09 grads.

Implications

If you are graduating in this market, you may need to be flexible and bring out Plan B. IT, government, and health care are still hiring and going strong. Engineering grads are in demand.  Alternatively, this year may be a great time for travel or community service perhaps prior to grad school with the hope of graduating in an up economy.

But what if you are planning to apply to MBA programs this fall? I went out on a limb and gave my predictions for the upcoming MBA application season on April Fools Day, with the observation that time will tell whether that post was an April Fools Day joke or something more meaty. Commenter "It's Happening" points to the BW articles (published April 3) as proof that my predictions are coming true.

I like to be right, but there is also evidence going in the other direction. For example, MBA Tours reports that attendance at its events in Fall and Winder 07-08 increased 30%. I suspect that much of that increase took place before Bear Stearns collapsed and before the news got as bad as it has been for the last month or two. I also hear that a surge in recently employed investment bankers is taking the GMAT exam.  A year or so ago, I was reading articles about these financial jocks who didn't feel it paid for them to go for their MBA.  Clearly something has changed dramatically.

I still believe that if articles continue to appear about unemployed MBA's, lower average salaries for MBA grads, and more rescinded offers, potential applicants who have jobs will be reluctant to give up the security of a paycheck for the uncertainly of a tuition bills, student loans, and no income.  Fewer applicants could make next year a little less competitive year and an opportune time to apply. Furthermore, the fact that 08 or even 09 could be tough hiring years says nothing about hiring for 2010. Just like last year's recruiting environment implied nothing about this year.

Ivy Acceptance Rates Dive

Almost all the Ivy League schools (and their close cousins) reported record low acceptance rates this week.

• Stanford led the way with its record low acceptance rate of  9.5%. It accepted 2,400 of the 25,298 candidates who applied for the coming fall.
• The acceptance rate at Harvard tumbled from 9% last year to a stingy 7.1%  this year in the wake of Harvard's new and generous financial aid policy and soaring application volume.
• According to the Yale Daily News, Dartmouth reports a 13% acceptance rate.
• Yale reported "a record-low 8.3-percent acceptance rate for the class of 2012."
• Columbia also had bragging rights according to the New York Times:. A record low 8.7% acceptance rate.
• And again according to the New York Times, Brown boasted of a record-low 13% acceptance rate.
• Princeton stated that it "accepted a record-low 9.5 percent of applicants for the Class of 2011, admitting 1,791 of the 18,942 prospective candidates."
• Penn is the only Ivy to report even a small increase in acceptance rate from 16 to 16.4%.

Should these stats be "frenzy inducing" as The Chronicle of Higher Education predicts they will be?

They shouldn't be.

The Chronicle also points to a study that is very good to think about if you or someone you know is applying to college:

In 2007, for instance, 80 percent of current first-year students were admitted to their top-choice college, according to an annual survey of more than 270,000 freshmen conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles.

The sane approach to college admissions requires viewing the process as one of finding the right fit, not the biggest trophy to hang on your resume or the glitziest name to dazzle other drivers from the frame around your license plate on the back of your car.  It's not an ego trip and or a score card. It's a matching process.

BusinessWeek Rankings of Undergrad Business School

BusinessWeek released its rankings of undergrad business schools this week.  And the winners are...

1. Wharton
2. University of Virginia
3. Notre Dame
4. Cornell
5. Emory
6. Michigan
7. Brigham Young
8. NYU
9. MIT
10. University of Texas

More important than the raw rankings provided above are the data and insight provided by BW in developing the ranking. BW combines 9 measures which includes surveys of students and recruiters, salaries of graduates, and a measure for academic quality gleaned from a number of statistical sources like SAT scores, student-teacher ratio, etc. It prides itself on being a consumer-oriented ranking since the ultimate "consumers" of a business education are the students and their employers. To the extent that the ranking has value, you need to have a thorough understanding of the methodology behind the rankings to extract it.

Also, directed at  applicants to business school, but valid for most undergrad applicants are the suggestions contained in "Extracurriculars that Count." Surprise, surprise. No specific extra-curricular activity will guarantee admission, and quality of commitment trumps quantity of activities any time and across the board.  I recommend this article. You may also be interested in "What is 'Passion' in Admissions?"

Three Stories

Once upon a time there was a wedding (actually yesterday). The father of the bride wanted to give a speech. His wife (me) worried that he would bore the guests. Mildly insulted and not wanting to forgo an opportunity to praise the bride, his new son-in-law, his son-in-law’s parents, and to share a few words of wisdom, the proud papa insisted on going ahead with his speech. However, he also decided to use stories to illustrate his points. He kept his guests’ attention during his 15-minute discourse. When he returned to the table, he triumphantly said to his wife, “See. I told you I wouldn’t talk too long.” He came about as close to “I told you so” as he could.

Once upon another time, there was an elite business school by the name of “Harvard.” (Its friends called it “HBS.”) HBS had a professor named John Kotter, who became an internationally famous “leadership and change guru.” When he wanted to spread his gospel of change to the widest possible audience, he didn’t publish a thick tome full of facts; he didn’t write a philosophical treatise on the truth about change and leadership. (Been there; done that.) He wrote a fable. Why? In Kotter’s words, fables “take serious, confusing and threatening subjects and make them clear and approachable. Fables can be memorable…They can stimulate thought, teach important lessons, and motivate anyone…” His book has become a best-seller.

In fact stories are so important that another top business school (Michigan’s Ross School of Business) has an award-winning screen writer, Robert McGee, come to its orientation “to teach business leaders how to tell a riveting story.” McGee wants to challenge the new MBA students to “take a case study and create a story that will persuade. He wants them to answer the question … What is the inciting incident that upsets the balance of forces in this company’s life? What is the object of desire?”

Ross gets it. Harvard gets it. Even my husband gets its. The engaging and persuasive power of a compelling, succinct story.

Do you get it? Considering that you want your essays to engage and persuade, can you afford not to use one of the oldest and most successful techniques of communication known to man? You really can’t.

Embrace stories. Show what you want to communicate. When you sit down to write your AMCAS essay, application essays, or personal statement, which succinct anecdotes illustrate your point? What were the turning points in your life? In your dreams? What motivated you to change?

Keep it real. Keep it memorable. Just tell a story.

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Washington Monthly's College Rankings

According to the Washington Monthly, colleges should " be engines of social mobility, they should produce the academic minds and scientific research that advance knowledge and drive economic growth, and they should inculcate and encourage an ethic of service."

With these criteria and publicly available data, they ranked US colleges and universities as follows:

1. MIT
2. UCLA
3. UC Berkeley
4. Cornell
5. Stanford
6. Penn State
7. Texas A&M
8. UC San Diego
9. University of Pennsylvania
10. University of Michigan

Certainly a different approach. Maybe this ranking that indicates where the government should invest its dollars. I'm not sure it reveals where parents should invest their dollars.

US News Rankings

US News college rankings are now online. The "top ten" are:

1. Harvard
2. Princeton
3. Yale
4. Penn
5. Duke
6. Stanford
7. Cal Tech
8. MIT
9. Columbia
10. Dartmouth

To US News' credit, it has broking down the rankings into numerous sub-rankings. The sub-rankings in my opinion are more important than the overall because you can slice and dice the data in ways that are more useful to you.

Furthermore, US News provides a lot of information about its methodology and using the rankings intelligently.  The "rankings" are really misnamed; they are surveys and data banks. To use this information beneficially, you need to know what it measures.

To use the data reached via the first link in this post, read the second link.

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