I don’t know how many of you are in the same dilemma that I am in it. With younger applicants aimlessly flocking to the MBA destination, I am wondering if I’m going to find myself in an odd situation a couple of year down the line. Many thoughts are running through my mind. Due to my age (33), either the addmission committe would reject my application or I might not get a job post-MBA. Why age is such a big deal when I know that I have one thing that will make all the difference – “determination”. My determination keeps me going through thick and thin and will continue to do that. Researching the MBA colleges I have to wary about the college “application culture”. If a college focuses on the ranking and career prospect, I would rather go somewhere else.
With this thought in mind, I embark in this MBA journey. My first criteira of selecting a school is to understand the admission culture. And to understand the culture, I need to find the antedotal evidence for their thought process. Here are some excerpts. With hope that my effort will help you, I am going to post excerpts from those colleges that I am planning to apply. If you have anything to add, please send a message to me.
Excerpt from Cambridge :
Now, I am a firm believer in being clear about the people you don’t want on your program and, in many cases, communicating that forcefully. However, what shocked me was the reason they gave for their assessment. They assessed that the candidate was of an age when it would be difficult for their career services to place him in a job within 3 months after graduation, or place him in a job that would give him a sufficiently high salary increase. Their main concern was the impact that this would have on their school’s rankings.
Coincidentally, Lucy Kellaway of the Financial Times replied today to someone who has been rejected by several MBA programs because he was too old (he is 61).
At this point, I should say that I can’t comment on either candidate. But it does seem to me that MBA rankings have become such a powerful signal to candidates of a school’s quality they are now driving admissions behaviour in unhealthy ways. While schools owe it to their students to offer strong career services infrastructure, a blind focus on rankings at the admissions stage can only lead to a decrease in diversity as schools only admit students who have the necessary credentials to move into high-paying industries.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that we should ignore a candidate’s career goals when making an admission decision. However, the admissions decision has to revolve around questions regarding the candidate’s overall quality and what he or she would bring to the class, rather than the impact on the careers aspects of rankings. In many cases, a candidate’s quality (however you choose to measure it) is linked to their possible careers outcome, but in admissions, I distinguish between the two factors. In cases where we are happy with a candidate’s quality and feel they would make a strong contribution to the class, but are unsure if he or she could meet their career objective, we typically extend an offer of admission and I personally call the candidate to explain our concerns. The candidate is then free to make their own decision whether to accept our offer or not.
As a last thought, while I am not making any assessment of the 61-year old candidate, I would like to say that we have had students in their late 40s on our MBA who brought interesting work experience and insights to the programme.
ISB – Chat Transcript by Accepted.com
Response from Hima Bindu when asked about the cliche question about “too much of age”.
No, it does not. Every application at ISB is assessed holistically and, Chandra, you’ll be happy to know we have people with as little as three-years work experience up to 22-years of work experience composing the class. In fact, around 15% of the class has people with over 10 years of work experience. So, there’s actually no right age or wrong age to do an MBA, it is when you’re ready for it. We have army officers, as well as surgeons who come in with around 18, 16, 13, 22 years of work experience, who have been accepted in the school and are doing very well and are giving the younger students a run for their money in the competition.
