EP 017: MBA Applications: What You Need to Know about a Deferred Admission MBA
In this episode, Thomas highlights the best strategy for college students to begin an MBA program.
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MBA is the perfect program for students looking to accelerate their careers and strengthen their skills. These programs are designed to help young students succeed in any business area.
In this episode, Thomas highlights the best strategy for college students to begin an MBA program. First and foremost, it is helpful to look up all the options and all the different courses that universities have to offer. From there, to apply to a program, it is also fundamental to understand the DNA of the program.
Other questions to think about when applying for an MBA are:
What are my goals?
Why is now the right moment to do it?
These are questions that most likely the university will also ask. Tune in to learn more!
Key Highlights
Learn everything about the matriculation of MBA programs.
Usually, April is the end of the admission cycle.
Look up the programs and all the options from all universities.
Things to consider when applying: why is now the right time?
What do you hope to achieve with an MBA degree?
In order to be accepted, it's important to understand the DNA of the program.
MBA programs teach a variety of skills, including networking and leadership.
About Thomas
Thomas is a parent and alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania. After earning his MBA at the Wharton School in 2003, he moved to Silicon Valley. For three years, he was director of admissions and financial aid at Wharton School. He worked closely with admissions professionals, students, alumni, and professors to create the best possible MBA class.
Thomas has been an entrepreneur his entire life in the fields of finance, agriculture, wellness, and sporting goods. As the founder of Global Education Opportunities, he works with diverse and underserved communities to help them become successful college students. Thomas started the podcast Admittedly because he is passionate about demystifying the application process for parents and applicants.
Related Links
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Instagram: @admittedlypodcast
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Hello, and welcome to the admittedly podcast. My name is Thomas Caleel. I'm the former director of MBA admissions and financial aid for my alma mater, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. In this podcast, I don't promise easy answers or quick fixes. But I will use my decades of experience to help you achieve your education goals. Now, let's get started.
Today I'm talking to college students, specifically college juniors, we've been getting a lot of questions about MBAs, when is the right time to do it? What should I be thinking about? And we'll address your kind of classic MBA track in a different episode. But today, we're going to talk specifically about the direct matriculation or deferred admission, MBA program. These are very unique programs, so definitely not for everybody. And we're going to talk about the origins of this program, this type of program, what it is, and what its strengths and weaknesses are. The reason we're talking about it now for juniors is that end of April is when these applications are due. And so this gives you a year to kind of think ahead and plan.
Certainly, there are some seniors at your university, you may know them who've applied to these types of programs. And so you can also kind of seek them out and see what they're thinking and why they chose to do this. But let's start with the first principles. The direct matriculation or deferred admission MBA was started a while ago, I'd say in about 2010. The first iteration of this was Harvard's two-plus-two programs.
Now Wharton had had for many years, a sub-matriculation track, where undergraduate Wharton Business students could apply to sub matriculate, or go up directly into the MBA, and get their BS and their MBA before they graduated. It was a highly competitive program, we took maybe one or two students a year directly from undergrad, and very insular, only available to Wharton students. But Harvard kind of led this charge with a two-plus-two program. And what they did was they said, Okay, there's a lot of non-traditional students who are graduating for whom the traditional path to an MBA where you go out and work for six to seven years might not be the best fit. And so they created this program where you applied in the senior year of your college experience. And if you were admitted, you had up to two years to accept your offer and enroll in a class.
So you could start immediately, or you could wait two years and Harvard provided a lot of opportunities for internships, partnered with a lot of very, very kind of Gold Standard Top tier firms across technology, finance consulting, to give these young men and women a great start and a great experience, a great work experience prior to entering the Harvard MBA classroom.
Over the years, all of the top schools including Stanford, Wharton University of Chicago, Yale, Darden at UVA, and Columbia, have all opened up early-track MBA programs, and without fail, the applications are due at the end of April, it's the end of their admission cycle, they really want to get a sense of your entire senior year. And they're all structured differently.
So I would encourage you to do your research and look at the individual schools, some of them provide you the opportunity to matriculate directly and start in the fall immediately following your graduation from university. Some of them give you anywhere from a two to a four-year window where you can enroll at any time during that some of them have a kind of an enforced waiting period before you enroll.
But the general rule here is they're looking for students for whom waiting six years is not necessarily the best option. And there's a lot of different reasons for that. And let's look at some of those reasons. Maybe you are looking at joining a family business, right you know what you want to do, you know your path you see that laid out in front of you. And so it makes more sense for you to kind of continue getting the MBA now. Prepare yourself for leadership in a family business. Perhaps you are an entrepreneur or perhaps you have an idea or a company that you've developed, even launched in undergrad and you really need this opportunity to kind of Focus and grow and get the skills that an MBA provides.
And it doesn't really make sense for you right now to go and try and bootstrap this company, because you can use the resources of the school, the incubators, the access to faculty, the access to alumni, business plan competitions, on all of those things, your classmates to help you really learn and grow and get your arms around this company.
Another reason for this is what we refer to as underrepresented groups may be students looking to enter the nonprofit sector, women, and underrepresented minority groups for whom stepping off a career track and five or six years is not necessarily a reasonable option. And I can give you a very good example of this when I was running MBA admissions for the Wharton School. Our average age was about 28. And I got contacted by one of our students, and she said, Listen, there's this. There's this woman, Janet Hanson, who is a legend in the finance community. And I'm part of this mentorship organization that she founded and she'd really like to talk to you about why you're not admitting younger students. And to be honest with you, I had heard a lot of arguments from people over the years.
Why don't you admit younger students? Why don't you admit younger students we had reasons for not admitting them. We didn't feel like employers would want them. We weren't sure about their fit in the classroom. Faculty were unsure about it. And we had some data, we had our sub-matriculation program. But I said, Of course, I'm always happy to talk to people, I'm always happy to learn I have a very open approach to this open mind. And Janet's reputation precedes her. So let's see what we can do.
So Janet was very gracious. She had fought founded an organization called 85 Broads, which was a riff on Goldman Sachs's Lower Manhattan office address, which was a networking group for women in finance. And she had managed to expand it into mentorship for young students, college students, and women from very different career paths. And so I traveled down to New York with this student, walked into what I thought was going to be a one-on-one meeting with Janet, and she just completely ambushed me it was beautiful, walked into this conference room. And around this table were about 15 young women all currently in college, Janet and a couple of her top top lieutenants.
And she kind of smiled and said, Okay, I've heard your reasons for why Wharton is not going to accept younger applicants. But I want you to meet some of these potentially younger applicants. And I want you to hear in their own words, what they bring to the table. And why waiting six or seven years after graduation is not optimal for them in terms of stepping off a career track in terms of, do they want to have a family do they want, can they afford to take time off at that point in their life. And let's have a conversation. And so I sat there and just had this incredible dynamic back and forth with these young women. They were passionate, they were focused. They really, they had a clear sense of what they wanted to do. And I and I could really see that they had thought about this, and they had very compelling reasons.
So I said, Okay, Janet, points made, you got me, I admit that I was not expecting this, but it was fantastic. I said might you know, my main concern is if we bring these students in if we admit some of these students, I need to be sure that they can get a job at the end because I've spoken with career management, and they're unsure, I said, So the worst thing to do would be to bring them in, and at the end of this experience, they've taken on the debt, at that point is about $120,000 $125,000 with a debt to get their MBA, and they find that they can't get a job to pay that off. And that's not benefiting anybody.
And she said You're absolutely right. So I promise you, we will put the full weight of 85 broads behind this and we will get each and every one of them a position upon graduation, and internships, whatever they need. So we kind of shook hands. And we received a just absolutely incredible bunch of applications from these young women. And we did workshops with them, I talked them through the application process, as I did with many different groups and many different people and organizations, and told them how to approach this, how to think about it, talk them through how we make decisions at the admissions level.
And we ended up matriculating a cohort of maybe about a half dozen of these young women and what If I kept in touch with them during their time, as students, I followed their progression through career management. And they came back and they had a uniformly positive experience. But some very important learning came out of this. And you'll see, a lot of the MBA programs are still maintaining a somewhat high average age.
Now, it doesn't mean that they don't have this very young students, early career students coming in. And not saying that they don't thrive. But there are some pluses and minuses, the pluses, of course, is that you get a running start on your career. You don't have to wait. You don't have to take a break and step away from your earning potential or promotion potential, you really get all that education under your belt early. And you're kind of turbocharged and you hit the ground running, and you're off. I think some of the downsides that we saw from this experiment, experiment experience, I think is a better word was that and this is from these young women that we admitted, they came back and they said, so here's the thing.
Did we have fun? Yes, did we learn a lot? Yes, but I can see where now, you're making students wait a couple of years and get some experience, maybe six years is not the right time, maybe it's two years. But in the classroom, even though they are exceptionally bright. And we have this issue as well, with some of our matriculants, they lacked the work experience.
So when you're participating in a case study, they could Yes, bring a very fresh kind of unbiased view on what was being discussed. But also, they lack the experience and credibility of having worked out in industry or in finance or in consulting. And so there's a little bit of a disconnect there with their classmates where they felt like they weren't able to connect on the same level. The same thing in terms of the age gap.
In an MBA program, you have a wide variety of, students, you have students that are married, you have students who have families who have students that are single and having fun. But the difference between, let's say, a 27, 28-year-old and a 21-year-old in terms of how they want to spend their free time, life experience, maturity levels, definitely came into play, they said socially, they were not as integrated into the classes as they would have liked. And these were very outgoing, sociable, experienced, well-traveled people, young women. And so it was something where the culture of the school was not as welcoming.
And then interestingly enough, in some industries, particularly in consulting, for example, it was difficult to find top placements of finding good job opportunities, because even though the companies were telling us Yes, we'd like younger graduates, because if we hire somebody in 24, 25, we can really kind of inculcate them into our culture and grow them on a career track, we know they're not going to leave for an MBA.
But when push came to shove, they really were not liking the really early career candidates. And we're still skewing towards a little bit older, so that as they were putting them on teams, as they were putting them in front of CEOs and senior management teams of Fortune 500, global 100 companies, there was credibility, there was a sense of experience there in the room. So obviously, all the business schools have worked to figure this out. If you look at the top schools, as I said, all of them have some variation of this program.
So what I would really encourage you to do is, don't view this as a default, this is not something where you say, Well, you know what, I'll throw an application at it and see if it works, right?
Because the school is going to be looking at you very closely, and they're going to be asking you, why do you want an MBA? Why is now the right time in your career? And why is our school the right place for you to pursue this? And why do you want the MBA and why is now the right time? Those are two very kinds of interlaced questions. It's very important because you need to make a compelling case for why you want this early career opportunity, right? What is it about you? What is it about us specifically, and the path that you see yourself taking? Why not wait five years, and it's incumbent on you to do the work and the research, and the thought process there so that you can articulate that in a way that resonates?
So as you're considering these three questions, why do I want this MBA? Why is now the right time, as you are articulating that you also need to make a compelling case for why this program is the best place for you? And here, just like when you were doing your university applications, you really need to get in and understand the DNA of the program.
Because each of the programs is very, very different. There are very different teaching modalities or different ways in which you interact with your classmates, different ways in which you interact with the professor different opportunities in terms of clubs and, and, international outreach, and all of these very unique things to the program, that you as an early career candidate, not only do you need to understand that, but it's really important that you can articulate that in your application to convince the school that what you're doing, and you're ready for this.
So I do urge you, if you're thinking about anything, where you do need to serve in a leadership role, even if it's a career in nonprofit, or government and MBA can be extremely, extremely valuable for you to learn leadership skills, to build networks, to understand marketing, to understand decision making, how to build a board, how to lead a board, all of these things come into play, how to understand a balance sheet and an income statement and all the things that go into managing budgets, whether for government or nonprofits, or the social sector, whatever that might be.
So if you can clearly articulate this to yourself, because this is a very large investment, you're talking about two years of your life, right, which is time, which is by far your most valuable resource. But these programs are not inexpensive. And yes, many of them do have scholarship programs specifically targeted to early career students.
But I think you really want to step back and say, okay, is this the best time for me to make this investment in myself and in my career, and if it is, by all means, do the research, plan ahead, make that application in April, make it as strong as you can make sure that your academics are rock solid, make sure that you've done the standardized testing most programs will ask for either a GMAT or GRE, I think very important for you to think about your own strengths and weaknesses. Think about the program that you're attending.
So if you were an English Lit major, and you were applying to a school like Wharton or Chicago that has a strong quantitative focus on their curriculum, taking the GRE might not be the best demonstration of your ability to handle the academic rigor you might really want to kind of buckle down and brush up on your math. Take the GMAT and show them, yes, I am an English Lit major. But I can handle the rigor. I know what I'm doing on the math side. Am I going to be the top finance student? Absolutely not. But can I hold my own? Absolutely.
So all of these things are coming together. You're articulating your vision. Hopefully, you are communicating that clearly and succinctly, and effectively to the admissions committee, and opening up this whole new world for you in terms of this next transition to the next phase of your personal and professional life. Thank you. Thank you for joining us today. Please take a moment to subscribe to the admittedly podcast and download this episode. I welcome you to share your thoughts and questions with me. You can find us on social media at admitted We podcast. I look forward to continuing our journey together.
