Wednesday, March 21, 2007

B-school Diversity

I often read questions such as these in BW forums "I will be a permanent resident next year. I will become a US citizen next year. Will it increase my chance of getting an admit in top schools?". Lets look at HBS class profile for example(courtesy- HBS website).

North America68%
- United States62%
Asia/South Pacific14%
Europe11%
Central and South America4%
Africa1%
Oceania1%

32% constitutes international pool and lets say, HBS would like representation from 70 countries then perhaps 69 countries fall in the 32% bracket! Whew! that is way too competitive. Then I read a response from one of the admissions consultant. She happens to have some experience in the HBS Adcom. According to her HBS considers country of birth and not citizenship toward diversity.

For example, you could be born in the UK, but lived through out in India and currently work in the US. Even under these circumstances you will be considered with the UK pool of applicants. Why is that diversity? Somebody - please enlighten me. If I live all my life in India but was just born in the UK, what would I know about UK(apart from reading newspapers, magazines etc...)? This seems totally absurd to me.

Well, if this is really true then future parents- you might be better off having babies in some country which is highly underrepresented in the HBS applicant pool. In the name of representing 70 to 72 countries, that very "country of birth" might make a difference!

I don't know about other schools. I will enlighten you when I learn more about them.

Ciao

3 comments:

Quest 4 MBA2008 said...

re: your post below about Manhattan Gmat CAT. Is the deduction true only if you took one of the CATs in 2006 or does the deduction still hold true now?

mba2009 said...

I took the Manhattan GMAT CAT in Dec 2006, so I'd assume that things have not changed in 3 months. However, I'm curious to know of your experience.
I did communicate my experience to Manhattan GMAT.

mba2009 said...

Another way to check if MGMAT CAT has really made the change - check how many questions you get incorrect. For example I used to get 13 to 14 incorrect and still get a 42 score in verbal. No doubt that the MGMAT CAT's are harder but on the real GMAT if you need to score 40+ on the verbal you can't make so many mistakes. You could probably make 10 mistakes or less. Well this if from my experience. So much so I always aimed for less than 7 to 8 mistakes. Accuracy Vs Speed - you need to strike a balance