Stanford GSB’s Class Of 2023
Maria |
October 11, 2021

The Stanford Graduate School of Business is one of the most prestigious MBA programs in the world. In this episode of Business Casual, Maria, John, and Caroline dig into the recently released stats for Stanford GSB’s Class of 2023 and use the data points to speculate on how the MBA landscape in the landscape for all business schools is likely to change.

Discussion items:

  • Stanford GBS’s record high average GMAT score (738) and what that means for prospective applicants. Does the team think this discourages some potential applicants? Should it? 
  • How application volumes have trended recently and what makes Stanford different 
  • The hunt for “gender parity” in MBA admissions and how AdCom’s balance that objective with other diversity goals
  • Why having “above average stats” (even with GBS’s high average) doesn’t guarantee you acceptance (and why the focus on stats is a double-edged sword)

Episode Transcript

[00:00:07.270] – John

Hello, everyone. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. We’re going to take a look at the latest class profile from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and talk about how it compares with Harvard and Wharton with My co hosts Caroline Diarte Edwards and Maria Wich Vila. Maria is the founder of Applicant Lab. Caroline, of course, is the cofounder of Fortuna Admissions and the former director of admissions at INSEAD. So we are going to talk a little bit about the new class profile at Stanford Graduate School of Business. There are some surprises in the numbers. If you’ve been reading quotes and quotes, you will know what those surprises are. But we’re going to put them into some context with Maria and Caroline. And then we’re also going to do a little bit of crystal ball gazing. We’re going to look five years, maybe even ten years ahead, and speculate on how the MBA landscape in the landscape for all business schools is likely to change. We’ve been through an incredibly disruptive time with the pandemic and the increase in the use of technology to deliver education. And so we want to just set aside a little bit of time to talk about okay, what are the long term trends here?

 

[00:01:19.120] – John

What does this look like over the next five to ten years? What are we going to see that’s different from today? First off, let’s talk about Stanford. So one surprise in the numbers at Stanford was the application volume. We also reported earlier, of course, that Harvard was up 5% in applications. Wharton was up two and a half. They tended to be on the low end of the schools that are reporting application increases. Michigan was up 50 plus percent, Indiana Kelly up 60 plus percent. You’ll note that there were 12% increases at Cornell at Yale, at Duke, at MIT, 11% at Dartmouth Tuck, and 10% at Georgetown McDonough. So Stanford is up less than 1%, which is something of a surprise. It’s actually 0.6%. And I think that’s an interesting number. And we’ll talk a little bit about why we think that maybe so. More importantly, perhaps, Stanford established a new class average GMAT record for any business school outside of a few schools in India where the GMAT’s are ridiculously high. They hit a 738, which is five points higher than the previous year when they hit a 733. The new score puts the class that just entered in the 97th percentile, the top 3% of all GMAT test takers in the world, which is really intriguing.

 

[00:02:56.520] – John

Now, Caroline, what do you make of this? I’m sure it’s not intentional.

 

[00:03:03.570] – Caroline

No. I mean, a higher GMAT score is average is a double edged sword, because the issue for schools is that whilst on one hand, it can be seen as a signal of quality, and no doubt it does speak to the incredibly qualified pool that Stanford enjoys every year and the competition amongst those candidates and how hard they’re working to prepare themselves for those tests would be quite incredible. But on the other hand, the schools are aware that that is also a deterrent, and it functions as a deterrent to some candidates from applying and some candidates who they would love to see in their pool. Right. You don’t have to have a GMAT of 730 or 740 to get into Stanford. And Stanford’s Admissions does not want you to have that perception. And I know that they’re concerned that sometimes they miss out on some great candidates because people self select out because they assume if they haven’t got a 737 40, then they’re just not in the game. So it is a signal of quality, of one aspect, of one limited aspect of quality. But it also does have some negative consequences for the schools.

 

[00:04:15.940] – Caroline

And it is interesting that has gone up at the same time as really stable application volume, really no significant change there. And I think that shows that those top schools just have an incredibly consistent pool of strong applications coming through year after year. And when there is, as we’ve discussed before, when there is variation, application volume, and suddenly people applying because there’s a change in circumstances, in this case, it’s a pandemic. In previous cycles, it’s just been a normal recession, economic downturn. More people throw their hat into the ring and those are not always the best qualified candidates or the very best quality candidates. So I think there has been a case here that the top schools have seen pretty steady volume and the schools that are still great schools, but not the M7 necessarily. The M7 schools have seen increased volume because of that sort of variable quality in that increased volume of applications that are coming through.

 

[00:05:23.650] – John

Yeah. In Caroline, it was only a few years ago that Kirsten Moss publicly said that she was worried that historically the highest in the world for an MBA program of any prestige. What was in fact discouraging people. They were at 737 for the entering classes in 2016 and 2017, and it dropped to 732 in 2018. And it was widely interpreted as Kirsten actually dropping the GMAT because of the comments that she made publicly that she felt it was discouraging many really good applicants from applying that year. In 2018, entering class, Wharton managed to tie Stanford for the average at 732. Since then, Wharton has fallen behind. And even though Wharton’s average went up by eleven points this year, which would have equaled last year’s GMAT average at Stanford, Stanford managed to increase by five. So they stay ahead. It’s also noteworthy that on every other level, GRE scores as well as GPA, Stanford is number one in the world. Their GPA this year is 3.78. The GRE is even up a point. On the quant side, these numbers tend to matter if you care about rankings. I don’t think Stanford cares all that much because rankings really don’t determine application volume or interest at Stanford.

 

[00:07:00.190] – John

But Wharton certainly seems to be very conscious of that. Maria, do you think a 738 might discourage applicants?

 

[00:07:09.300] – Maria

I agree with Caroline that I think it discourages certain applicants, but I also think it has the opposite effect where sometimes when we emphasize so much these quantitative data points, someone who has like a 740 but is otherwise completely unremarkable will say, I’m above the average of Stanford here I come.

 

[00:07:29.270] – John

Right?

 

[00:07:29.860] – Maria

Then it becomes like this huge disappointment for them. So it’s great that the school it’s funny because they’re all like, well, it’s a holistic process. If it’s such a holistic process, then why is it that you happen to have the highest GMAT score every year? That’s weird. You would think that it would fluctuate and it would be a lot more ups and downs between that. I wish that for all the emphasis on the GMAT, that they would also publish other data. I don’t know, like how many people in our class were promoted early by their firms, how many people in our class had PNL experience? How many people in our class, if they came from an analyst, like a ranked analyst program, how many people were in the top 1% of analysts in their analyst class or whatever? I wish they would also provide other metrics in terms of the quality of the candidates, because a 740 GMAT is not going to get you into Stanford. A 680 might get you in if you were helping a company launch its operations in Italy. And you know what I mean, you’ve knocked it out of the park.

 

[00:08:32.450] – Maria

So it’s just I wish that they would either not focus on this stuff at all or if that’s unavoidable because of the rankings dog and pony show, then at least provide other data a little bit more like, hey, yeah, 740 is great. But also it would be really cool if you were a top performer and if you had convinced a company to change direction or if you had convinced a local government to implement a new service that supports women entrepreneurs or a little bit more data like that. Because I think when you report simplistic data, you get simplistic judgments from applicants that sometimes are not beneficial.

 

[00:09:11.910] – John

Yeah, that’s really a good point, because those other data points that you suggested reporting would really help a lot of people, frankly, and would certainly confirm the quality overall of the entering classes at some of the top schools. And Stanford does report, for example, first generation College students. They’re saying, for example, that the students who were the first in their family to graduate from four year College or University this year went up by a third to 12% of the class, up from 9% a year earlier. And what’s interesting to me about that stat, and I think you’ve mentioned this in earlier podcast, Maria, sometimes if you admit, let’s say, white students from socioeconomic backgrounds that weren’t privileged. You kind of don’t get credit for that. And you probably should in diversity terms, because the school also reported increased black American students by 43% this year to 10%, up from seven. Asian-Americans were increased by 30% to almost a third of the class, and Hispanics rose about 9% to compose 12% of the incoming students. So there’s a lot of attention being paid, obviously, to the racial and ethnic diversity of the class. That is true at all business schools today in the US, where this has become a really hot issue.

 

[00:10:41.510] – John

The other interesting thing is that while Harvard and Wharton considered the peer schools to Stanford for sure, hit record levels of women in the class, Stanford was down on women, 44% of the incoming students are female, down for 47% a year earlier. And that’s when Wharton, you’ll recall, exceeded gender parity with record 52%, and Harvard achieved a record of 46%. Now there is a whole lot of difference from Harvard at 46 and Stanford at 44, even though it’s a three percentage point decline for Stanford from the year earlier. What do you make of that, Maria? Why do you think? Because you got to know they were aiming to get closer to the gender parity, having been only three percentage points below it last year.

 

[00:11:34.310] – Maria

Caroline could probably talk to this infinitely more than I can. I mean, it’s an imperfect thing. They might have given offers to 50% of women, 50% women, 50% men offers, but maybe for whatever reason, women chose to go someplace else. So you can try as hard as you want to kind of engineer some of these things. But I also think at the end of the day, and especially if we’re talking about Stanford, which has a relatively small class, I haven’t done the math. I do not have my Excel spreadsheet open right now. But if we’re talking a 3% difference, we’re probably not talking less than 1012. I don’t know. Gosh, I should have opened the Excel spreadsheet before I started talking at this point. But the point is we’re not talking about like it’s not like 100 women these fluctuations. It’s silly.

 

[00:12:25.650] – John

Yes, because there are only what is it, 436 students? Something like that in Stanford’s class. I think that’s what the number is exactly.

 

[00:12:38.710] – Maria

Yeah, we’re talking about 13 students would be a 3% class of 13 students.

 

[00:12:46.170] – John

To me, in a way, it does speak to you. You put your finger on one lever and it affects other levers. So if you want more black American students, more Hispanics, more Asian Americans, you want more internationals, because of course they increase. You want more first generation College students. Maybe something else is going to just go off kilter. I can imagine that, Caroline, when you were managing the numbers at INSEAD, this kind of thing happened where you try to increase something and then obviously something else falls.

 

[00:13:19.920] – Caroline

Yeah, there’s a lot of variables to manage at the same time. And yeah, it’s definitely the case that yield is typically lower on women admits versus male admits because there’s just more competition amongst the top schools for those fantastic women candidates. So I’m sure that’s the case that they had made an equivalent number of offers to female candidates as the men, but their yield would have been lower. Yes.

 

[00:13:47.890] – John

The other thing we don’t know is the financial incentives. Right. Because if you increase racial and ethnic diversity in the school, when you don’t increase gender diversity, you might presume that more of the financial rewards are going to the diverse candidates to get them to come because they’re less likely to have savings and money or want to take out big loans. To the extent that you only have available pool of scholarship money and then you shovel more to get the racial and ethnic diversity, you might hurt the gender diversity.

 

[00:14:20.610] – Caroline

Yeah, that’s true. Although I think the top schools don’t have too much of an issue with the depth of their pockets. But I do think that sometimes female candidates are more sued by scholarship offers than male candidates. I have seen that in my clients that sometimes men are more willing to walk away from a great scholarship offer from one school because they just really want to go to the other school. I have with my husband, he had a scholarship offer from HBS and didn’t get any scholarship money at all from GSB. And what do you do? Right. But he just really wants to go to the GSB. And I think men sometimes are more likely to make that decision than women are because sometimes women can be a bit more risk averse, practical. That’s true. That’s right. We’re not as crazy.

 

[00:15:16.790] – John

Calculated risk as opposed to reckless risk.

 

[00:15:20.630] – Caroline

Yes. And overconfidence in one’s ability to.

 

[00:15:28.890] – Maria

Be my mouth up. And I’m like, I think it’s more a little this expectation that men like women are like, okay, well, I don’t know. I’ll probably make more money if I get an MBA, but who knows? What if I have kids and what if I need to stay home? And I think men are like, whatever. If I get into a school, I’m going to be the CEO of Apple tomorrow. Look out.

 

[00:15:47.120] – Caroline

That’s right.

 

[00:15:50.130] – John

Tim Cook. Watch out.

 

[00:15:52.350] – Maria

Oh, boy. He’s shaking at his boots.

 

[00:15:56.070] – John

Yeah. And the bottom line, of course, with this and every of the class profiles at these grade schools, again, it’s a testament to the incredible quality, the diversity, the richness of the candidate pool and the enrolled student body for each of these schools. These are just exceptional people on every level. To think that they’re in the top 3% of all GMAT test takers have the highest average GPA, the highest Gres diversity, while some people, I’m sure would take issue with some of the numbers is fantastic, really. And that doesn’t even include the work backgrounds. The international student body went up significantly as it has at all the schools because the year earlier comparison was affected by the pandemic travel restrictions visa difficulties. So in fact the international MBA students is up to 47% at Stanford which is more than a third increase from the previous year when it was down due to the pandemic. So all in all great class and while Stanford won’t tell you what it rate is, we’re estimating it’s about 8.7% which is also the lowest of any prestige and be a program in the world that has historically been true at Stanford, Harvard is close or so and wardens slightly above 20 but there you have it.

The Economist Dis on MBAs: Is the Degree Still Worth It?
Business School News | General | P&Q Podcast "Business Casual"
Stanford GSB’s Class Of 2023
Maria |
October 11, 2021

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] John Byrne: Hello, everyone. This is John Byrne with Poets& Quants. We have a really cool story to relate to you today. Me and my co host, Maria Wich-Vila and Caroline Diarte Edwards, are going to talk about the most disruptive MBA startups of the year. Every year, Poets& Quants invites the top schools all over the world.

To submit nominations for ventures with what we call the greatest potential for lasting beyond business school. So what we want to do is acknowledge MBAs who have launched really cool companies that are paving the way for the future. And this year, we have 41 student startups that we have honored in what is the sixth annual list of the most disruptive MBA startups.

And they come from all over. We got nominations from Stanford, Wharton, Kellogg, MIT, INSEAD, London Business School and others. And, uh, I think what the basic list shows is that entrepreneurship is alive and well in business schools are a lot of great ideas. A lot of them are powered by AI. No surprise there.

They involve every imaginable industry. There’s a good number of these in the business of health as well as in beverages, consumer products and things like that. And I wonder, Caroline, if you have a favorite among this group, and I bet you it’s going to be an INSEAD startup.

[00:01:30] Caroline Diarte Edwards: Yeah, I have a few favorites, and definitely INSEAD is on my list, although I’m going to start with a London Business School one.

Um, and there were a few international ones that I thought were really interesting. I like the story from kiro, which is a fintech startup, coming out of London Business School, founded by LBS student Alicia Chowdhury. she secured 200, 000 in funding, and it’s the first AI powered financial coach, which is designed to help,

Gen Zed, as I would say, or Gen Z, as you would say. and young adults, get personalized financial guidance. So that’s something that jumped out to me, given that I now have a young adult among my children and trying to teach her financial literacy is somewhat challenging, so I can definitely see the need for that. And she tells a really interesting story about how financial literacy was something that she had struggled with and realized that there was a gap in the market, right? There’s a lot of great financial information out there, but it’s not necessarily tailored and communicated well to young people. And she ended up working in finance before business school.

she doesn’t have a tech background, but she did. Teach herself the fundamentals of AI and machine learning, and she assembled a technical team to work with her. And I thought it was really interesting as well, how she leveraged the LBS resources. And I think a lot of the stories that you have in this article really tell a great deal about the power of business school experience in helping people launch a company. And of course, there’s often a lot of criticism about the value of going to business school. And if you want to be an entrepreneur, there’s no point going to business school. And I think that this article really debunks that. so for example, this is how she benefited from LBS.

She was a finalist in the LBS Launchpad. She completed the LBS Entrepreneurship Summer School. She joined the LBS Incubator. She led the LBS Entrepreneurship Club. And then, of course, she benefited greatly from a lot of the courses that she took at LBS. I got a lot of great advice from LBS faculty, as well as the Institute of Entrepreneurship and Private Capital.

I think a wonderful story about how a student had a vision of something that she wanted to do and saw a gap in the market and really went after it, leveraging that wonderful ecosystem that you get at business school and she’s got a VC group backing her. So that’s one of her investors and Aviva Group is a huge financial company.

I think it sounds very promising. So congratulations to Alicia.

[00:04:11] John Byrne: Yeah, you’re right. One of the things that comes through here is the support that students get from the schools. And their classmates and their professors, it’s a real terrific thing.

As you said before, a lot of people say, hey, if you want to start a company, instead of paying a school tuition, just use that as your seed capital and you’re going to be better off, but the truth is that a business school you’re surrounded by really smart colleagues and people who’ve been through this before and mentorship from professors and seed money from the many venture challenges that occur at different schools can make a very big difference and shift the odds in your favor of success. Maria, do you have a favorite?

[00:04:53] Maria Wich-Vila: Yeah, my favorite.

startup was Cell Mind, which is out of the Johns Hopkins business school. This one really hit home for me personally. What they are trying to do is they are trying to maximize access to a type of cancer therapy called “Car T”. And I have indirectly lived this. We have a good friend from business school who has been battling cancer for several years, and last year there was a complete rollercoaster around  this car T therapy. And I apologize to any doctors if I’m butchering this. But basically, my understanding is that if it works for you, it essentially can cure your cancer or cause it to go into remission. But, if for whatever reason, if your body is too weak at the time that you receive it, it can actually kill you. Unfortunately, it can cause something called a cytokine storm, I think.

And so, the decision of whether to go or no go is obviously one that is very fraught with a lot of, emotion and risk. And so, we actually had a friend who last year was approved for CAR T. But then in the weeks right before they were going to give it to her, they then disapproved her because she had gotten weaker … it was this whole roller coaster.

And so any sort of startup that is doing something to figure out, which patients actually are likely to do well with this therapy? Can we expand our doctors being perhaps understandably a little too cautious because they’re concerned about the negative side effects, perhaps being worse than the.than the cancer itself.

Anything that can help expand access to this is why they were number one in my book. And as you guys were just talking about. Because Johns Hopkins is one of the best, if not the best medical school in the world, this is a great example of a business school student or group of business school students leveraging the resources and the expertise at that overarching institution, trying to find ways to commercialize it, and just make the most of those resources.

I really loved that story.

[00:06:40] John Byrne: Yeah, and that’s what you increasingly find. it’s not a bunch of MBA students doing their thing. It’s reaching out and having these really entrepreneurial collisions with students from other departments, other schools where they have deep expertise in computer science or engineering or medicine or law or public policy or environmental sciences teaming up with MBAs to launch things. which really give them extra power.

One of my favorites comes out of, uh, Chicago Booth. And, it’s sort

a really interesting idea where, first off, it’s called Encore, and it’s a marketplace for high end collectibles. Now, you think, how could that really be a cool thing? What they’ve done is they’ve combined TikTok style videos. With the traditional eBay auction format, to create a really engaging experience for people who want to shop for these collectibles. But what’scool is the MBA who’s behind this. His name is Will Enema, at first thought he shouldn’t apply to Chicago Booth, new venture challenge, because he had already raised a pre seed round and thought that Encore might not be good for that traditional, giving money out kind of program. But, he entered it after he was urged to by a number of professors at Booth. The idea placed second in the competition. He won $350, 000 to help launch his company, but here’s the real kicker:

Within two weeks of that competition, a venture capitalist who participated in the judging agreed to lead their seed round. So it just shows you how, incredible things can happen, in the environment of a business school.

Now, Caroline, I’m sure you have others that you really thought were really cool. Name another one.

[00:08:29] Caroline Diarte Edwards: Yeah. So my second one is of course, an INSEAD startup and it’s called faceflow. ai. And I really liked this one because it’s an AI powered skincare platform. So again, relating it to my personal experience of having four daughters who are constantly clamoring for the. latest ridiculous beauty product that they’ve seen on Instagram.

I think this is a fantastic idea.

What it does is it actually gives you scientifically based product recommendations, right? So they have for the two founders, Daniel Patel and Simon Zhang, Patel had previously founded a marketplace for international skincare brands. So he knew the skin, the beauty industry, skincare products.

And then his partner, Simon, is an experienced AI engineer, and so they’ve combined their expertise to bring AI to skincare recommendations. And it’s underway. I checked out their website. I have signed up already. The product is not yet available, but I’m looking forward to when it comes through.

And they won the INSEAD French competition and, talk about how they’ve benefited from the very entrepreneurial environment at INSEAD,

I really enjoyed reading about their experience and I’m excited to learn more about their products.

[00:09:49] John Byrne: Yeah, absolutely. And now

Maria, I know there are 2 Harvard startups on the list from your alma mater. did you pick 1 of them as your 2nd choice?

[00:10:00] Maria Wich-Vila: It was not necessarily my 2nd choice, but there was 1 called Vulcan Investments. This is a little bit out of my, Wheelhouse. So I think we all tend to gravitate towards something we know or something we have experience with, but it’s trying to figure out how to solve the rare earth magnet problem. Right now. A lot of these rare earth materials that are powering modern technologies are coming from China, which poses several challenges, especially should relations with that country not go well in the future. So this is trying to solve for that issue. I think that was a really interesting one.

But actually, my second choice was one that again, I have indirect personal experience with, albeit in a different way. It was called Yogger. What they’re trying to do is, I believe it’s taking your phone to watch you as you perform exercise then give you feedback on, your gait, your form, et cetera.

And this was really interesting to me, not so much because of exercise, although I wish it were (ha ha) (though: side note, my dad was a track and cross country coach for decades and I totally forgot about that in the moment, but I should have mentioned that!!! D’oh!!!), but who knows, maybe this will motivate me to jog more (har har har).

In the interview with the entrepreneur. he talked about how you can do things like a gait analysis right now, in other words, tracking how your legs move when you are running or jogging, and then providing an analysis, but these sorts of things are very difficult to get to. It’s expensive. You need to be set up with, they put a whole bunch of sensors on all of your joints. and I have a friend who has a child with cerebral palsy and they’ve had to do these, go to actually Hopkins (this is not a Hopkins based startup, it’s from Tuck, Dartmouth Tuck), but they’ve (my friends, I mean) had to go to Hopkins and actually have these, it’s a day long thing to set up your child with the different sensors. And so the thought of using something as simple as an iPhone app, perhaps, machine learning, et cetera. all that good stuff to analyze your gait and make this accessible. It’s not only I think useful for casual exercise enthusiasts, but I think it could also have ramifications and uses even in other areas. For example, kids with special needs. So I was really excited about this one.

John Byrne:

MIT Sloan has three startups on our list this year.

That’s more than any other school. And one of the really cool ones is called Vertical Horizons. This is an incredibly ambitious startup. It’s all about commercializing high density, high efficiency power supplies for AI computing. Essentially, it’s a semiconductor company. and you might not think that an MBA would be involved in actually creating a semiconductor company.

But it’s founded by Cynthia Allen, an MBA in the class of 2024 at Sloan and one of her professors. So it’s a good example of where university develop some sort of new technology or new insights. And then needs to commercialize it. And in this case, you have an MBA coming along, who has a great interest in this, and is helping to commercialize it. The actual idea of it has 4 million in research grant funding to develop the technology. So there’s a good amount of money behind this very ambitious idea.

I think, stepping away from the individual startups, what I think this says about, the ability of people who want to go to business school and use that experience as an incubator to launch a startup, it’s alive and well, it’s a great way to launch a company because it does take a lot of risk off the table and these startups, these 41 startups that these different business schools really give you a great insight into what different people are doing.

Caroline, I’m sure, and Maria as well, you probably meet a number of people in your practices, that want to use an MBA to do a startup. Do you think they’re ready to take full advantage of these experiences?

Caroline Diarte Edwards:

Yeah, I certainly hear from a lot of candidates who are hoping to launch a venture. Some of them want to do it as soon as they graduate and for some of them it’s more of a longer term ambition because of course financing can be a challenge.

Especially if you’ve invested a lot in taking on a lot of debt with your MBA and a lot of the themes that I hear, candidates are interested in come through in your article as well. So it’s noticeable that there are quite a few startups in your list that address, healthcare issues as Maria highlighted, also education, environmental challenges. And I think those are three areas that I hear a lot about from candidates in terms of where they would really like to have an impact.

And I think, something else that is noticeable is that a lot of them are really trying to have a positive impact on the world as well. They’re really trying to address,  fundamental societal challenges, many of them, which I think is wonderful from health care, mental health issues, pollution. et cetera. There’s a lot of really interesting, and important issues that are being addressed by some of these startups. and, I think it’s wonderful that we have this young generation, going through business school who are ready tackle these challenges that that they have inherited from our generation.

John Byrne:

Yeah. And these ideas are going way beyond, some of the earlier ideas of five, 10 years ago, hookup apps and match.com, uh, wannabes and things like that. some of these ideas are remarkably sophisticated and elegant as well.

Maria, last words.

Maria Wich-Vila:

I think that this article not only is very optimistic in terms of these amazing ideas that are out there, but I also like that it shows that there are so many different paths to entrepreneurship through the MBA that first of all, number one, the NBA is valuable for entrepreneurship, which, as you noted a second ago, is often a stereotype that that exists that, oh, I don’t need this. but also there are so many different MBA programs out there. Look at the range of schools that are creating these amazing startups. Look at the fact, one of the, Stanford ones, the student was not an MBA student. They were an MSx student.

Sometimes I’ll meet people who are a little bit on the older side who are applying and they’re like, I have to do the two year program and I’m like, no, you can… you just need to get your foot in the door and even if it’s that MSxs program, it’s one year versus two years. For example, you can, you just need to get to a university that’s going to teach you the things you need and give you the resources and then you can take it from there.

So I, the other thing I really appreciate about this article is showing the breadth of programs and the breadth of students and the breadth of backgrounds of these students who are creating incredible new companies.

[00:16:37] John Byrne: Yeah, check it out. It’s called most disruptive MBA startups of 2025, and it’s on the Poets& Quants website.

If you are interested in doing a startup, I think you’ll learn a lot about how business school can help you make it a reality. This is John Byrne with Poets& Quants. You’ve been listening to Business Casual, our weekly podcast.

Maria

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