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Haas is great. It's a solid top-10 program and will take you pretty much anywhere you'd like to go.
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<p>There's the problem. I don't think there's such a thing as solid top 10 b-schools. There are top b-schools, I mean top MBA programs but a top 10 b-schools? Where they?</p>
<p>HAAS is a great school...period. Ranking is a matter of perception. I dont get stuck on it too much cause thene i end up in a 'damned if i do, damned if i don't' position. You get into harvard, one rank says stanford is better, you get into stanford, the other rank says harvard is better.</p>
<p>Don't get tied up..</p>
<p>Anyways... HAAS part-time fully paid looks good. Now I just have to see if they accept me!</p>
<p>What do you guys think? 710 gmat, 3.75 mechanical engineering, from University of Texas Austin. 3 years of experience.</p>
<p>You should get in.</p>
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Today, statistics would show us that Haas is considered a top b-school and can now be compared (in prestige, quality and standard) with the very best MBA schools you can find anywhere in the world including H/S/W.
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<p>Look. I don't believe there's really such a thing as the best b-school because best is relative to anyone's taste.
I disagree. There is most definitely an objective "best". For example, one can't claim that the San Francisco 49ers is the "best" team in the NFL because they have great colors in red and gold, a great tradition with Joe Montana, Jerry Rice, etc., and a superb location. One has to look at the team's players and how they perform on the field -- and by using this objective metric, it's pretty obvious that that the Niners aren't the best. Not even close.
Similarly, a quick way to judge a b-school is by where its graduates go. No, not by who recruits there (because there are always companies/firms that show up on campus but end up not taking anyone) or what your neighbors in your home country think of it. Look at the percentage of grads that go into the ultra selective companies/industries... over the last several years, it's been PE/VC and HFs. How does Haas compare to H/S/W? Hell, how many of those shops actually come to campus to recruit??? </p>
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For example, Wharton is an excellent b-school but it’s not my “cup of tea”, thus it does not make sense for me if I go there. However, I do believe that there's such a thing as a top MBA program, and obviously, the schools you mentioned are all top b-schools. Stanford is not really different from Columbia and Wharton just like Wharton is not any different from Harvard or Kellogg and Kellogg is not different from Chicago and Haas and Haas is not any different from Sloan, Yale, and Tuck and so on. </p>
<p>To say Harvard is the best is a relative judgement – that’s a personal opinion, more or less. HBS could be the best b-school for you but not entirely the best for some. Oftentimes, b-school aspirants look for niche (innovation of Haas, Entrepreneurship of Stanford, Marketing for Kellogg, Finance for Wharton, General Management for Harvard, etc), fit, location (I prefer the perfect weather of Norcal than the frosty East Coast), family orientation (dad went there, legacy, etc), cost and reputation based on his personal orientation.
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What you're describing is closer to personal fit. Using the football analogy again, one should be able to separate personal affinity for a team from an objective observation of its excellence. My liking for the Niners as my hometown team with great tradition does not (and should not) preclude me from acknowledging that here and now, the best team is NOT the 49ers but rather the Pats, Colts, or Cowboys. And yet the Niners are still my team -- for personal reasons. Similarly, the personal reasons for why Haas is the school for you shouldn't blind you to some of its few shortfalls... especially relative to the Pats/Colts/Cowboys of the b-school world.</p>
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As to your comment that I’ve convinced myself…, it was actually my colleagues who convinced me to apply to Haas.
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Again, I fully agree that Haas is a top school. However, it just doesn't offer the same amount of opportunities as some other select schools -- especially compared to H/S/W.</p>
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I’ve also done my part in establishing the fact the Haas is as good as any of the top b-schools in the planet.
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Assuming that the metric for measuring a b-school's quality is its ability to place its graduates in highly competitive/selective industries/firms, I would say that you have not established anything to that effect.
Regardless, best of luck with your Haas application.</p>
<p>LA Raider, Haas is in northern CA, you said your job is in southern CA, how do you keep your job and go to Haas PT? Do you have a H1 visa?</p>
<p>cbreeze:
I think LA Raider is an American. I'm the one who's not.</p>
<p>1.) Haas is probably the 9-5 Steelers rather than the 4-10 Niners, I'd think.</p>
<p>2.) I do think CC's analogy has one thing exactly right: there may not be an objective "best", but there are objective "not bests." Last year, the Colts, Chargers, and Patriots were all very evenly matched -- you could make a solid argument that any of those three were the best. But, clearly, the Raiders were not.</p>
<p>(This year, of course, the Patriots are simply the best. But unless Harvard can trade a fourth-round draft pick for Randy Moss...)</p>
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Similarly, a quick way to judge a b-school is by where its graduates go. No, not by who recruits there (because there are always companies/firms that show up on campus but end up not taking anyone) or what your neighbors in your home country think of it. Look at the percentage of grads that go into the ultra selective companies/industries... over the last several years, it's been PE/VC and HFs. How does Haas compare to H/S/W? Hell, how many of those shops actually come to campus to recruit???
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</p>
<p>I understand your criterion is job placement. So, let me ask you this:
Are the firms that seek grads of Haas/Dartmouth/Yale/Sloan/Chicago/Columbia/Ross/Kellogg/Stern/Duke, to name some, are different from those firms that seek grads of S/H/W? </p>
<p>Now, let’s get this discussion a little bit more complicated and compare Stanford to Wharton. Based on your analogy/logic, which do you think is the better business school between the two?</p>
<p>I’m curious as to how you would try to grind one school and polish the other because as far as I can see, they’re both great b-schools to me and no one is better than the other. </p>
<p>Another exercise: Chicago vs Ross. Can you really say one is better than the other? The way I see it, they’re both great business schools and choosing Ross over Chicago would just be a matter of personal choice and personal preference.</p>
<p>Again, there are top MBA programs, but there is no BEST business school because best is relative.</p>
<p>bluedevilmike,</p>
<p>Try to fill in the blanks of your list then make a comparison. I'm sure you would look funny doing that. </p>
<p>It's really awkward to split the 4th and 5th in a list of schools that are all excellent. </p>
<p>Here are the excellent schools that offer excellent MBA program:</p>
<p>Chicago
Northwestern
Dartmouth
Duke
Yale
Michigan
Harvard
Wharton
Berkeley
Stanford
UCLA
NYU-Stern
UVa
Cornell
Columbia</p>
<p>So again, when it comes to splitting hairs it's very hard to do in a precise fashion. Are the Chargers better than the Patriots? Are the Colts better than the Chargers? Impossible to say.</p>
<p>Analogously, is Stanford better than Harvard? Are they both better than Wharton? These are unanswerable questions.</p>
<p>However, these three teams/schools are objectively better than the others.</p>
<p>I'm not at all familiar with business schools beyond the one of them that everybody in my family seems to go to. But the analogous rating system in law schools is generally considered:</p>
<p>Harvard/Stanford/Yale
Columbia/Chicago/NYU
Michigan/Virginia/Penn
Duke/Georgetown/Cornell/Berkeley/Northwestern</p>
<p>You can't say Harvard is better than Stanford, or that Columbia is better than Chicago -- but (in this scheme) Harvard Law is definitely better than Duke Law, and Chicago definitely has an edge over Georgetown. (More importantly, they're all excellent schools.)</p>
<p>Of course, there are definitely going to be areas in which one football team/b-school/law school has an edge over an overall better school/team.</p>
<p>(Sorry to keep mixing metaphors. I'd answer strictly using football but I don't know how well you know the NFL.)</p>
<p>A Supreme Court justice, I think, once put it this way:
How many hairs does it take to make a person bald? There's no reasonable way to answer this. Yet that doesn't mean there's no such thing as baldness. Some people are clearly bald. Some people are clearly not. The absence of a bright line doesn't imply the absence of a difference.</p>
<p>So with the warning that I know nothing about business schools, here's my best attempt:</p>
<p>1.) Princeton. They're the best undergrad school, so they must have the best b-school, too.</p>
<p>2.) Harvard. It produced our most recent President.</p>
<p>3.) University of Phoenix. Their name sounds more familiar to me than anybody else's.</p>
<p>4.) Stanford. Smart kids, but seriously, who can study in such nice weather?</p>
<p>5.) Cornell. Being in New York is key to making business connections, and I bet Ithaca's a very nice suburb of Manhattan.</p>
<p>6.) Yale. Connecticut is where rich people live.</p>
<p>7.) Chicago/Penn/NYU. Would be ranked higher, but let's face it -- public schools just don't have the same resources that private ones do.</p>
<p>8.) Duke. No explanation needed.</p>
<p>9.) Berkeley. Your negotiation partners will all be high anyway, which is good practice for dealing with insensible people.</p>
<p>10.) Northwestern. Seattle location and proximity to Microsoft means it's the leader of tech hiring.</p>
<p>11.) Dartmouth? Who went to Dartmouth? Dartmouth sucks! You go to Dartmouth, Bing?</p>
<p>12.) Michigan. Too cold.</p>
<p>13.) Virginia. Too warm.</p>
<p>11.) (Retroactive) Hypothetical Michigan/Virgina exchange program. Just right.</p>
<p>14.) UCLA. University of Central Louisiana? What's there?</p>
<p>15.) Columbia. South American exposure will be a bonus to anybody hiring you, but make sure to keep away from drug cartels.</p>
<p>I assuming this is a joke.</p>
<p>I am on H1B Visa. I plan to commute to HAAS IF i get in. Thats a big IF</p>
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I plan to commute to HAAS IF i get in.
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From... Los Angeles?</p>
<p>Really, don't feel bad about "taking advantage of your employer." You're going after an opportunity that your employer offered to pay for. Your career's about you, and 98% of the time, YOU have to come first.</p>
<p>The commute from LA to SF is only a one-hour plane ride. Very doable if you're only doing it on weekends. WeekDAYS, not doable.</p>
<p>Princeton doesn't HAVE a business school.</p>
<p>NYU/Chicago/Penn are private schools. </p>
<p>Northwestern is in Chicago.</p>
<p>Columbia's on West 116th and Amsterdam in Manhattan</p>
<p>But I'll assume you're kidding bluedevilmike.</p>
<p>I am with dallas. It's not like we are talking about HS vs Golden State! You are talking about Anderson/Haas. You are gonna spend ~140K for H/S MBA (2 years) vs free tuition + savings off your pay during the next 2 years. That's like 180K difference? There's no guarantee you will make more by going to Harvard rather than UCLA, let alone getting a difference that somehow would lead you break even some day. You can invest that 180K and my guess is it's likely one will never get a break-even by picking H/S in your situation. It's just my wild guess though.</p>
<p>If my employer values my degree and compensates adequately, then there shouldn't be any problem. Hopefully they will.</p>
<p>LA to SF is a one hour plane ride. $80 roundtrip with jet blue (todays price), flying out of Ontario. I would do the weekend deal ofcourse. I think its very doable, and HAAS would definitely be worth it. </p>
<p>I would have to wait to see if HAAS, H/S, Anderson, UCLA accept to see what happens.</p>
<p>What kind of engineering? LOL! That sounds pretty good for an engineering company! ;) Are you applying as an international? I think that helps as schools these days LOVE to advertise how "global" they are.</p>
<p>Yeah I am International. The problem is, although the schools have a lot of internatinals, most of them are living in the US. That means, most likely, they have great GPA, great GMAT and dug a canal in Rwanda. I didn't dig any canal. I had a very normal upbringing. "describe a time when you contributed to society" ... erh.. i never did to be honest.... what did society ever give me??? i guess I will have to come up with something, but you get my point.</p>
<p>I work with a company in LA. The 'paying for MBA' was a special agreement with my HR. My company does not normally pay for MBA's. But i know Boeing and Chevron do.</p>
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Princeton doesn't HAVE a business school.</p>
<p>NYU/Chicago/Penn are private schools. </p>
<p>Northwestern is in Chicago.</p>
<p>Columbia's on West 116th and Amsterdam in Manhattan
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<p>Gee, I wonder how I could possibly have been so far off about so very many things...</p>