The #1 Quality in the Best MBA Admissions Consultants: Brutal Honesty
MBA admissions consultants are everywhere these days, and if you’re reading this little blog post, odds are good that you’ll hire one someday – despite my words of caution in this article about MBA admissions consultants, this other article, and even this article over here.
So what’s the #1 thing you should look for if you’re shopping for an MBA admissions consultant? Brutal honesty. Without it, you’re absolutely wasting your hard-earned money.
The Harsh Truth About MBA Admissions
Let’s start with a nice game of “which applicants got into their first-choice MBA program?” Here are three candidates:
Candidate A: white American female, 620 GMAT, 3.8 GPA from a low-ranked public university, marketing job for a non-prestigious small company, interesting but not mind-blowing extracurriculars. Target MBA program: Stanford, Round 2.
Candidate B: white American male, 660 GMAT, 3.5 GPA from a not-quite-elite private college, non-prestigious experience with a financial services firm and a not-terribly-successful tech startup, mediocre extracurriculars. Target MBA program: HBS, Round 3.
Candidate C: white American female, 770 GMAT, 4.0 GPA from a top-three Ivy League program, experience as an auction house specialist, fitness instructor, ballerina, and bodybuilder. Target MBA program: HBS, Round 1.
OK, so who do you think actually got into their first choice MBA program?
Sorry, you won’t like this. The answer is… none of them.
Here’s the reality that most of us – including the overwhelming majority of MBA admissions consultants – don’t want to admit: it is intensely difficult to get into elite MBA programs. Candidate C sounds like a total badass, right? Well, I don’t know her personally, but she’s mentioned in this wonderful (and disturbing) Poets & Quants article by John Byrne and Sandy Kreisberg – and she got rejected from Harvard.
In that very same Poets & Quants article, Kreisberg offers a brutal truth: 70% of HBS applicants are qualified, but only 11% get in. That 70% estimate sounds about right to me, and if anything, the MBA applicant pool just keeps getting stronger. So for every six badasses like Candidate C, only one will be admitted.
And for what it’s worth, poor Candidate C didn’t even get an interview. Ouch.
Always Choose an Honest MBA Admissions Consultant
OK, so what about Candidate A and Candidate B? Clearly, they had absolutely no hope of getting into Stanford and Harvard, right? I think we can agree on that. If Candidate C couldn’t get in, then the other two are way beyond hope – especially since Candidate B was inexplicably trying to get into HBS in Round 3, when the odds are usually even lower than in earlier rounds.
Despite this unfortunate reality, MBA admissions consultants took Candidate A and Candidate B’s money and told them they had a chance. At best, the MBA admissions consultants were being clueless and incompetent – and that’s the nicest thing I could say about them.
I actually think that they were being unscrupulous, money-grubbing slimeballs. But maybe I’m wrong and they were just being dumb.
Either way: don’t let this happen to you. If you're looking for a great MBA admissions consultant, the first thing you should do is ask for an honest evaluation of your candidacy. If the evaluation is nothing but puppy dogs and sunshine and unicorns with rainbows pouring out of their butts, you might have an MBA admissions snake-oil salesman on your hands – unless you really think that you’re the perfect MBA candidate.
But Candidate C sounded pretty perfect too, didn’t she? So if an admissions consultant says that you’ll definitely be admitted to an elite MBA program (with their help, of course) – then run in the other direction.
The very best MBA admissions consultants I know will give you the honest, brutal truth about your odds right up front. They’ll probably try to steer you toward a nice mix of elite and less-selective MBA programs. And if they think you have zero shot at the elite MBA programs, they might still help you with your MBA applications – but only after you repeat the phrase, “I understand that my odds are incredibly low, and I want to pay you to optimize my MBA application anyway.”