You may have seen that last week, we gave Darden the Radcom of the Year Award for 2020. They’re not the only school doing anything noteworthy right now. One runner-up is Berkeley-Haas, for (thank you!) deciding to, uh, change the status quo in how they communicate with their prospect community. This happened in the still-early-days […]
Continue reading...Radcom of the Year Award for 2020: UVA Darden
There is no question about it. No other school even came close. The very best applicant-friendly school on the planet this past year was UVA Darden. This post explains: A study in contrasts: Darden and Tuck We know that other sites have already anointed Scott Beardlsey as the best bschool dean, so this may be […]
Continue reading...The reasons why Michigan Ross’s “waitlist everybody” Rd 1 decision is so cruel.
We actually love Ross but this season, and especially after the first round, not so much. They probably thought they were being fair and applicant-friendly in the decision to not reject any of their Round 1 candidates . But really, the unintended consequences of that in terms of emotional impact on applicants are severe. Here […]
Continue reading...Some schools are being hard-asses about standardized testing and test scores (and a rant)
A number of schools seem to be trying to play the status-quo game: They’re maintaining their pre-covid policies and not really making many accommodations to their processes and policies. In a “normal” year we would not even call any attention to this. It’s what schools do. With the exception of changing their essay questions and […]
Continue reading...What MIT did not succeed at doing with their Class of 2022 admissions strategy.
We spoke about how the MIT admissions season played out in the numbers in our post earlier this week. One additional comment to make is to examine who they actually admitted — or at least, who they admitted, who decided to also attend. The biggest shifts in the class breakdown were in: Women going from […]
Continue reading...($) Some schools really threw out the playbook when coronavirus came along.
We’ve been watching the changes in the bschool ecosystem since the world got upended in March and have been repeatedly surprised — and surprised again when we studied the class profiles of some top schools. Premium content starts here… ———– ———– Premium content ends. But yeah. Talk about being opportunistic and willing to […]
Continue reading...($) Which MBA programs care if you care about their culture?
Yesterday we presented an argument for a strong correlation between an applicant’s success in showing UC Berkeley that they cared about Berkeley’s culture based on how the applicant pitched the admissions team in their MBA essays. We also talked about why you might want to care about culture anyway, regardless of if the school cares […]
Continue reading...More “wow the world in 2020 omg” and also bschools are changing and that gives us hope
It’s safe to say that we are in the midst of massive change in our world. The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday only reinforces that reality — the reality that EVERYTHING is being reshaped and reformed. That’s why everyone is so stressed out right now — that, and the massive uncertainty, where we […]
Continue reading...Tuck sucks. (Not totally. But yeah kind of.)
A generation of BSers ago, EssaySnark had done an informal ranking of “the best” schools — “best” being a term that’s sooooo subjective as to be practically useless, but in this case we were trying to recognize schools that were particularly applicant-friendly. It may sound odd, but traditionally, like for years and years all the […]
Continue reading...($) Writing Week! Day 4: The problem of the parrot.
You may be wondering why we’re spending so much time talking about issues of writing style on a blahg that’s supposed to be about strategies for getting in. A good set of essays for an MBA application will answer the question that the school has posted in its essay prompt. That goes without saying. Anyone […]
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