The World’s Most Popular MBA Programs
Maria |
July 19, 2023

Discover the most popular MBA programs in the latest episode of Business Casual with the hosts delving deep into the data, exploring applicants, yield rates, and application-to-seat ratios to uncover the most popular schools. You already know Harvard Business School steals the show, but they also give a shout-out to other top picks like Stanford, MIT Sloan, Berkeley, Columbia, and Yale. The hosts emphasize the importance of yield rates, revealing the number of accepted applicants who actually enroll. They dive into what creates that special “halo effect” for certain schools and how factors like location and scholarship aid come into play. And of course, they will share an interesting discussion on the differences between Chicago Booth and Kellogg, with a special focus on Booth’s scholarship game plan.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:07.450] – John

Well, hello, everyone. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. Welcome to Business Casual, our weekly podcast with my co hosts Maria Wich Vila and Caroline Diarte Edwards. Caroline, of course, was the former admissions director at INSEAD and is a co founder of Fortuna Admissions, while Maria is the founder of Applicant Lab. We want to talk about the world’s most popular MBA programs. We did a little exercise here recently at Poets and Quants. We looked at the school’s candidates identify as their target choices for an MBA program in our Handicapping Your MBA odd series. And we looked at this back to 2005. And what’s interesting is obviously there were hundreds and hundreds of these episodes where we literally tried to calculate the odds of a candidate for a given school. And we tried to see which schools are most popular on the list, and we came up with a list of the most popular MBA programs in the world. You can Google that most popular MBA program is at Poets and Quants, and you’ll see but we also did something else. We indicated the number of applications to the seats available in a class, which also is another indication of popularity.

[00:01:34.370] – John

And then we also published the yield numbers for the schools. And yield for those who don’t know is the percentage of admitted applicants who actually enroll in a program, because obviously some people will be accepted into numerous programs and then choose to go with one over another or several, and that impacts the yield data. So number one on our list, and will surprise no one, is the Harvard Business School. Yet. What’s kind of interesting about Harvard is that in terms of applications per seat, it’s not near the top. In fact, Stanford is at the top at 14.5 applicants per classroom seat. MIT Sloan is next with 13.1, and Berkeley is up there at 12.9 applications per seat. And let’s see, Columbia even is slightly ahead of Harvard Business School nine per seat versus 8.9, which is kind of fascinating. And then also Yale, 9.3 applications per seat. Are these really the most popular business schools in the world? Maria, what do you think?

[00:02:47.990] – Maria

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think there’s a ton of different data that you can slice and dice, a ton of different ways that is going to show which schools are the most popular in the world, especially if you look at it from a high level perspective across total applicant numbers worldwide. I think definitely that’s a really great way to slice and dice it. I’ve always thought that of the easily currently publicly available data out there, I’ve always thought that yield is the if I could only choose one metric to follow, it would be yield, because that’s where put your money where your mouth is, okay? You’ve gotten into one or possibly multiple schools. So if you’ve gotten into more than one school, okay, now you have to take out the loan now you have to pay the deposit. Now you have to probably quit your job and move to a new city and do all of that heavy lifting that goes with enrolling in a school. So I’ve always thought that yield is the most promising metric to use, if I could only choose one. And so I don’t think it’s the only metric that one should follow. But I think it’s probably one of the better ones in terms of what’s out there today. So, yeah, I don’t see any huge surprises in the list. It’s all the usual suspects.

[00:03:56.240] – John

Yes, really. After. Harvard, Wharton, Stanford, it’s MIT, Columbia, Kellogg, Chicago, Booth, Yale, Duke, Berkeley, Virginia, Dartmouth, Michigan, London Business School. INSEAD, NYU, Stern, Cornell, UCLA, UT, Austin, McCombs, Georgetown, Oxford, Carnegie, Mellon, UNC Kenan Flagler. Cambridge and Emory. What do you make of this, Caroline?

[00:04:24.370] – Caroline

I think it’s a great list, John. I think it makes, in some ways, much more sense than many of the MBA rankings out there. I think it reflects the reality of the relative prestige of many of the schools and actually what applicants do think about the schools and where they would like to go. If you look at your list, you’ve got the M7 right there at the top right from one to seven. Not necessarily in the order that we would put them, but it’s a good list. And Stanford is there at number three, partly because of the small class size. And so with that small class size, I think some people select out of applying, perhaps, and therefore your handicapping index, it’s lower than Wharton and Harvard Business School. Of course, I would like to see some of the international schools higher up the list. That may also be a function of, to a certain extent, the audience that is at least in the handicapping index. But I definitely agree with Maria that yield is really an interesting metric and says a lot about, actually what candidates really think about a school and where they actually want to go.

[00:05:46.990] – Caroline

And it’s a metric that admissions officers care a huge amount about. Right. They put a lot of effort into yield.

[00:05:55.410] – John

What do you think INSEAD yield is, by the way?

[00:05:58.370] – Caroline

INSEAD has very high yield, I would think.

[00:06:02.050] – Maria

Yeah.

[00:06:02.520] – Caroline

I mean, it’s typically between about 70 and 80%. So having a high yield is a great position for a school to be in because it means that you are playing less of a guessing game about who is actually going to join the program from the candidates that you’ve admitted. And so it gives you much more power over how you craft your class. If you have a yield that is sort of 50% or lower, then I’ve never been in that situation in the admissions office. But I would imagine that that makes it much more difficult to make sure that you’re getting the kind of diversity representation of different backgrounds that you’re looking for and sort of craft that ideal mix because you have no control over who is going to accept and who’s going to turn down your offer. Although I’m sure they have a good sense sometimes of who is less likely to accept their offer and who is more likely. So they’re probably admitting candidates on the basis of an estimation of their chances of accepting as well. But I think that crafting the class gets much more complex for schools that are further down the list in the yield ranking.

[00:07:17.290] – Caroline

And therefore it’s something they care an awful lot about because the more they can do to push that up, the better they look because as we say right, it shows that the school is very desirable and it’s a wonderful metric to perform on from an external perspective. But also it just makes the lives of the admissions office that much easier if they can make sure that the people that they’re making offers to actually attend the program and they’re not having to sort of admit two or three times the number of people that they actually need, because then it gets difficult to craft the class. And also, I think it must get much more difficult to craft the class in terms of the size of the class and trying to figure out exactly who is accepting who is not going to come. And then you have to admit people from the waitlist. You have to keep people on the waitlist to manage the buffer. So it is a pretty complex equation for the admissions team to manage.

[00:08:17.170] – John

One thing you don’t get by looking at yield is how many of those people who decided to go to a given school were scholarship and how scholarship money was used to induce them to go to the school. And obviously, schools that have large amounts of unrestricted giving have a lot more leeway in luring candidates away from other schools that they’ve been accepted into and improving their yield rates. Maria, you were the first one to said yield is all that matters to you. It’s the single most important stat. What’s your take on the yield numbers in the table that we’ve published?

[00:08:57.530] – Maria

Yeah, I mean, they’re not know. So for those folks out there who might not know what yield is, maybe it would be useful if we define it super quickly. So the yield number is the percentage of people who actually enroll in a school after having been given an offer. So if a school offers 100 folks acceptances, if a school has an 85% yield, that means that 85 out of those 100 people chose that school versus another. And one of the things that I think is interesting about the top three schools in particular and their high yield numbers and also, I think INSEAD also with Caroline mentioning its high yield number is that I think it’s a really good sign of just how well respected these programs are. But also it’s interesting because I think when people start this process, when I look at, for example, Harvard has 85 and a half percent and Stanford’s at 80%, I think a lot of people lump those two schools together and they say, I’m applying to Harvard, Stanford. You sort of hear it in the same breath. They concatenate those two words together. It’s harvard, Stanford, HS.

[00:10:05.090] – Maria

And it’s interesting because when you look at the yield numbers, I think anecdotally sometimes you see people when you work in admissions consulting, you see people who are more Stanford than they are HBS-sy, and a lot of people will apply to both programs, but a lot of people will only get into one versus the other. And I do think that some of these programs do a really good job of assessing fit in a way that when people are first starting the process right, and they just lump the programs together, they might not realize some of these nuances. But it’s interesting that there is such a high yield for both Harvard and Stanford insofar as a lot of people tend to apply to both of them. However, it’s clear that when they accept people, they are accepting people who have more of whatever their unique DNA is.

[00:10:52.350] – John

Yes, really. Man it makes the admissions job so much easier when you have confidence that more than half of the people that you’re accepting will in fact come, makes the job a lot easier. What about the whole notion of applicant to seat ratio? As I mentioned earlier, Stanford’s at the top 14.5 applications for every available classroom seat. That’s really kind of a remarkable number. At Wharton, for example, it’s 7.1. At Harvard, it’s 8.9 schools like Chicago booth 6.9. It tells you a lot about the appeal of Stanford. And I will say that although Harvard usually tops the yield tables every year for a little while, Stanford actually got ahead of Harvard on yield, and Harvard came back this past year, in fact. But what about application to seat ratio? Is that an important number?

[00:11:57.430] – Caroline

Caroline well, it’s an eyewatering number for some of those calls, right. With 14 candidates for every seat, that’s pretty crazy. But that’s also, as you said, it’s a function, partly it stamps with the small class size. Right. And Maria made the point when we were chatting earlier that there is a lot of overlap in the applicant pool between these. So, you know, many candidates, as she said, will be applying to Harvard, they’ll be applying to Stanford. And so the fact that Stanford has a higher applicant to seat ratio is more a function of the class size, yet having a somewhat similar applicant pool as Harvard, which has Harvard, of course, having a much bigger class size. But those numbers are remarkable because many of the candidates applying, a vast majority are very well qualified. Right? They are very self selecting pools. Many people don’t apply if they think they haven’t got a chance of getting in. And so those schools are in an enviable position, right, because they are getting to cherry pick, really the best of the best.

[00:13:07.960] – John

And as we know, a lot of people obviously most people apply to a number of schools. So many times when you look at, like, a Kellogg or Chicago Booth or know those students are applying the Harvard, Stanford and Wharton MIT. And if they get into Harvard or Stanford, for sure, they’re more likely to go then, you know, naturally a Kellogg or Chicago may lose out to a Harvard or Stanford, but it’s only because that person’s first choice was Harvard or Stanford. And Kellogg or Chicago, looking at that candidate’s profile, sees a very valuable, ambitious, smart person that they would love to have as it’s there is that factor in here because these candidates are applying to numerous schools. So the applicant to seat ratio is affected by that in a meaningful way. But I agree with the two of you. I think this is a pretty darn good list of the schools that are the most popular, not necessarily the best, and not best for you as an individual candidate, because it could be that Emory Goizeta is better for you than Harvard Business School. In some cases, it’s really possible. Or Brigham Young, if you happen to be Mormon, the appeal of that school to Mormons is massive, which reflects that 86.8% yield rate for the Marriott School of Business at Brigham Young.

[00:14:45.450] – John

And it also is not a measurement of the schools that have the highest employment rates, the highest salaries, the most selective admission standards in terms of acceptance rate, or GMATs or Gres, this is simply and merely the most popular schools, which I think it is kind of a cool list to look at. I agree. I don’t see many aberrations here. I’m kind of surprised to see Cambridge and Oxford in the top 25, as opposed to Achesa, Paris, and IESC in Barcelona. But then again, Cambridge and Oxford are considered to be among the five world best universities. So the halo of that overall university does cast an incredible shadow over the MBA program, and that means a lot. Any final words on the data, Maria?

[00:15:46.850] – Maria

I think the usage of the term halo effect is really useful for a lot of these, right? So when you look at, for example, people who apply to Stanford do tend to not always, but they do tend to be very interested in careers in the Bay Area or careers in technology. And so I think HAAS benefits quite a bit. Berkeley, HAAS benefits quite a bit from sort of a geographic halo. And similarly, I think, you know, MIT might benefit more from being in Boston. And so people I started, I think sometimes what happens with people is they say, well, I’m interested in Harvard, so let me look into Harvard. Hey, Boston is actually a really great city. Hey, boston actually has a ton of amazing I should maybe I should prioritize trying to go to school in Boston. I’m not saying that’s obviously not what happens with everyone, but I think I feel like I’ve seen that kind of thought process evolve in that way. So I definitely think that there’s a halo effect. One thing that I liked seeing personally as someone who lives in Los Angeles, was how well UCLA Anderson did. One of my pet peeves with the US.

[00:16:47.330] – Maria

News and World Report rankings is how they essentially interchange USC and UCLA, which is an understandable conclusion to jump to if you’re not really living in the city and interacting with graduates of those two different programs. But I do feel that strongly that UCLA is a notably stronger program and attracts notably stronger students. And so I was happy to see that, and I was happy to see Duke Fuqua in the top ten. Their yield rate of almost 55% is, I think, a real testament to how well they select for culture. They do a really good job in their application. They have a pretty unique application, right. For folks who might not know they have one of their famous questions is, give us 25 random facts about you. And it’s a little bit quirky and a little bit different. But I love that question, and I think they attract a certain type of person with that question. And so then I think when they accept folks, I think that there’s a good cultural fit, which is in fact, reflected in a higher than expected yield.

[00:17:48.470] – John

Yes. And we should point out on the list, UCLA is 18th. USC is not in the top 25 at all. It is in the next group, but nowhere near UCLA in terms of popularity, which is telling given some of the latest rankings from US. News, which has placed USC above UCLA. And that’s a head scratcher for sure.

[00:18:13.550] – Maria

Indeed.

[00:18:16.430] – John

Caroline, any last words or thoughts?

[00:18:18.770] – Caroline

Yeah, well, as we’re talking about the halo effect and the benefits for some schools of being in a certain geography, I think that also applies to Oxford and Cambridge, because I think for some applicants and I see that, for example, for candidates from the US. They are more inclined to apply to Oxford and Cambridge because they know the school name and they feel comfortable being in the UK as another English speaking country versus perhaps applying to some of the other schools that you mentioned, john So Ashesay in Paris or ESA in Barcelona. They may feel a little bit more nervous about going to a country where they do not speak the language. And so I think that Oxford and Cambridge benefit from that draw for native English speakers around the world who are interested in studying in the UK. And of course, as you say, they are globally renowned institutions, so I am not so surprised that they’re on the top 25.

[00:19:16.690] – John

Very true.

[00:19:17.910] – Caroline

What do you guys make of the difference there between Chicago Booth and Kellogg? There’s quite a big gap there, isn’t there, in the yield?

[00:19:26.010] – John

Yeah, there is. I think it’s scholarship aid. I think Chicago Booth is so much more aggressive because years ago, they got the largest single gift ever given to a business school, $350,000,000. And that was unrestricted. And the 350 doesn’t even account for the dividend stream that came from the gift, which has brought that gift to a value over 550,000,000. And Chicago is literally buying students with that.

[00:19:54.000] – Caroline

Right, okay. Yeah. Because I was surprised to see that it would be so much more popular in terms of yield than Kellogg, but that would make sense.

[00:20:02.040] – John

Yeah. And yet Kellogg gets more applicants per seat than Chicago Booth.

[00:20:07.590] – Caroline

Interesting. Yes.

[00:20:10.690] – Maria

And I think Booth has been buying good applicants or good students, and I think that that’s helping to bump them up in the rankings. And so it’s become like this kind of positive upward cycle where higher they go in the rankings, the better people they attract. But I’ve seen people get into another top five or an M7, and then Booth just doubles the scholarship money and wow, things like that, where it’s been pretty stunning. Yeah. I was surprised to see that Kellogg’s yield is as low as it is also because I have seen, of all the top programs unofficially unscientifically, I’ve seen Kellogg play the most number of games with waitlists in terms of, like, they will call people up and be like, hey, you’re on the waitlist. Let’s chat with an admissions officer about you being on the waitlist. And then on that call, they’ll say something like, okay, if we give you the seat, will you take it? So basically, I have heard that they do this. I think all schools probably do this to some extent, but I’ve heard that Kellogg in particular does it. So I almost wonder in some ways if they use the waitlist in that way as a yield management tool.

[00:21:17.150] – Caroline

Yeah, it sounds like they probably do. They’re probably really struggling with that 38% there. That’s probably a massive target for them to get that up. And they’re probably, as you say, with people applying often to schools that are in geographic proximity. They’re probably losing out a lot to Booth.

[00:21:37.390] – John

Yeah.

[00:21:38.050] – Caroline

Even though they are quite different programs.

[00:21:41.330] – John

So check it out yourself. The world’s most popular MBA programs. Look it up at Poets and Quants. Really some fascinating data on all the top schools that clearly are among the most popular schools in the world. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. You’ve been listening to Business Casual, our weekly podcast.

The Economist Dis on MBAs: Is the Degree Still Worth It?
Business School News | General | P&Q Podcast "Business Casual"
The World’s Most Popular MBA Programs
Maria |
July 19, 2023

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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