<p>I know you have all heard about this topic 1000 times on cc, but I think I have a little different spin on it. I know all schools like to see 2-6 years of prior work experience, before applying to the MBA program, but what schools in the top 30 are the most lenient on this requirement. On their websites all the schools have a standard response- "although not required, we recommend applicants have 2-6 years of work experience."</p>
<p>No school worth going to would accept anyone but the most impressively prepared entrepreneur straight out of college.</p>
<p>The MBA just isn't intended to be an academic degree. It's for those in the business world. The value you get out of an MBA is proportional to how valuable your pre-MBA work experience is.</p>
<p>I've sat in on an HBS class during college day. The students are CONSTANTLY talking and sharing relevant details from their past work experience, with things like "when I was helping my dad to run his energy company, we had to face the same operational problem, and...", etc. They really are drawing on their past work, and it makes a difference in what value the rest of the class gets out of having them as a classmate.</p>
<p>It also makes a difference in what value you can get when recruited. The best jobs are going to want an MBA who has had relevant experience prior to going to business school. Having gone through the recruiting cycle for a management consulting firm, I have stood there and watched as senior managers and partners whittled down a list of Wharton and HBS and CBS resumes, mostly because half of those applying had no prior experience in management consulting. Those who made the cut without it were truly mind-blowingly extraordinary, such that we'd have been total morons not to give them an interview. Without relevant experience towards what you want to do, the MBA may not help very much at all.</p>
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The MBA just isn't intended to be an academic degree. It's for those in the business world. The value you get out of an MBA is proportional to how valuable your pre-MBA work experience is.
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Without relevant experience towards what you want to do, the MBA may not help very much at all.
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<p>Well, I don't know if I would go to that extreme. Let's be perfectly honest here. Most college graduates, even from the top schools, are not going to get truly great jobs right out of college. In fact, most of them are going to get jobs that are quite mediocre. I agree that going to a top MBA program right out of undergrad ((if you are one of the very tiny few who can get in) is clearly not as useful as going after you've developed strong work experience. But that's not really a fair comparison. Going to a top MBA program is going to be a far more worthwhile experience for most people than whatever other choices they had available to them right out of undergrad. </p>
<p>I also agree that without any work experience, you're not going to be on par with the other graduating MBA's as far as recruiting goes. But again, that's not really a fair comparison. The REAL comparison is, again, between yourself with a top MBA (but no work experience) and your peers who have been working for 2 years, but don't have an MBA. Again, I would say that the former is far far better off than most of the latter. To take your example - sure, I agree that the guy with the MBA but no experience will not have an easy time getting into a top management consulting firm. But the guy with just 2 years of industry experience (but no MBA) has basically ZERO chance of getting into management experience, unless that person, of course, now gets his MBA. </p>
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firm, I have stood there and watched as senior managers and partners whittled down a list of Wharton and HBS and CBS resumes, mostly because half of those applying had no prior experience in management consulting.
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<p>Not to call you out, but to be honest, I find this story rather unbelievable, given that the large number of MBA's I know who have gotten into top management consulting firms (McKinsey, Bain, BCG, etc.) with precisely zero prior experience. As a case in point, consider the MIT LFM program (the dual MS engineering + MBA program). Practically none of the LFM graduates have prior consulting experience - most of them are former engineers, because the LFM program caters to engineers (you have to have a technical undergrad degree and at least 2 years of manufacturing/operations/engineering experience to even apply to LFM). And none of them, by the structure of the LFM program, can get consulting experience during the program, as their summer internships are pre-arranged by LFM to always be operations internships at LFM-partner companies, none of which are consulting firms. Yet every year, A LOT of LFM graduates head off to consulting (especially to McKinsey), despite the fact that practically none of them have any prior consulting experience. Nor would I say that LFM graduates are 'mind-blowingly extraordinary' - in fact, a lot of LFM students chose the program because they, frankly, couldn't get into HBS. Yet the number of LFM graduates heading off to consulting is so large as to become quite controversial within the program: many of the LFM partner companies complain vociferously about how far too many LFM graduates turn down job offers from them because they'd rather work for consulting firms, and hence these partner companies ask (justifiably) why they even bother to be partner companies. </p>
<p>But putting the idiosyncracies of the LFM program, the bottom line is this. There are PLENTY of people who get into top management consulting firms who have zero prior consulting experience. LFM is just one example.</p>
<p>I thought that the work experience pre-MBA didn't necessarily have to be in the field that you wanted your job to be in post-MBA. I thought MBA candidates came from a variety of professions, and that is what makes the MBA program diverse. And I think Sakky is right about college grads not having the greatest of jobs right after graduation. I graduated a year ago and I don't have an awesome job right now, I didn't go to some Ivy league or prestigious undergrad school, so my job right now is mediocre at best. It kind of sucks to hear Denzera say that unless I get some great job in the business world before getting an MBA that my MBA will be useless. I don't like hearing things like that and I don't think it is always true.</p>
<p>Thanks for the advice everyone, but does anyone have hard statistics showing who admits the most straight out of undergrad?</p>
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thought that the work experience pre-MBA didn't necessarily have to be in the field that you wanted your job to be in post-MBA
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<p>Of course not. In fact, much of the reason for getting an MBA in the first place is to change careers. That's how people who have never done things like management consulting or investment banking before manage to get in. Granted, many of them use the intra-MBA summer internship to get in. But not always - again, look at the LFM graduates. Almost all of them are former engineers or tech managers, all of them must take an operations internship as required by the program, and still a large chunk of them end up going to consulting or, to a lesser extent, investment banking.</p>
<p>Look, the bottom line is this. I completely agree with Denzera that it is extremely difficult to get into a top MBA program right out of undergrad, and those rare few that do so are all invariably highly special circumstances. But it's a different question as to whether it would be valuable for you to go, if you are the one of the rare few who does get in. After all, like I said, getting a top MBA program right out of undergrad may be less valuable than doing so after you've accumulated strong work experience, but it's still almost certainly more valuable than most jobs you can get right out of undergrad.</p>
<p>Without starting another thread, I will ask this question on this one. With work experience, do schools want you to have worked a variety of jobs over the years? Would it be ok if you worked the same job for like 5 years and over that time you gained responsibility in your position?</p>
<p>They prefer you stay at the same company (working up the ladder).</p>
<p>chris4984, upward career progression is looked upon very favorably. </p>
<p>If you are a job hopper (which is fine too), you just need to explain your career plan and how MBA will fit into the overall picture. E.g. someone who has worked in 5-10 startups has an eventual goal of joining a VC firm post MBA.</p>
<p>Would schools frown upon someone who worked the same job for a couple of years without really moving up the ladder?</p>
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Without starting another thread, I will ask this question on this one. With work experience, do schools want you to have worked a variety of jobs over the years? Would it be ok if you worked the same job for like 5 years and over that time you gained responsibility in your position?
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<p>It's difficult to generalize, because it depends on a large number of factors. Furthermore, each school looks for different things. </p>
<p>The general (if unsatisfying) answer is that you want to have proven that you have management potential, and that you understand a variety of business contexts. That can be satisfied by just staying in one company, provided that you have seen many things in that company, or by hopping around (presuming that you weren't doing so beause you just got fired all the time). </p>
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someone who has worked in 5-10 startups has an eventual goal of joining a VC firm post MBA.
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<p>Well, frankly, being a startup guy doesn't really help that much if you want to become a VC (unless you make it big). The generally accepted path to getting into VC is investment banking or some other such high finance job.</p>
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Would schools frown upon someone who worked the same job for a couple of years without really moving up the ladder?
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<p>Again, it's difficult to generalize, because there are many jobs in which you are not really expected to move up. For example, the vast majority of investment banking or consulting analysts don't really move up - after their 2-3 year stint, most of them are kicked out of the firm (whereupon most of them will get their MBA's). Yet consulting and Ibanking are obviously 2 of the most popular paths to getting into B-school.</p>
<p>To address sakky:
[quote]
Not to call you out, but to be honest, I find this story rather unbelievable, given that the large number of MBA's I know who have gotten into top management consulting firms (McKinsey, Bain, BCG, etc.) with precisely zero prior experience. As a case in point, consider the MIT LFM program (the dual MS engineering + MBA program).
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Well, first of all I assure you that this actually happened. I'd be happy to share the particulars of my experiences via PM, but I doubt that's necessary. Instead, I'd like to try and explain the discrepancy here:</p>
<p>The firm (which I have since left) is a small, fairly prestigious MC firm on the Vault Top 50 who, while fast-growing and popular, is not that big and certainly does not have the recruiting infrastructure of a Big 4. The MBA schools it recruited at last year were: HBS, Wharton, CBS, Stanford GSB, INSEAD, and Yale SOM. They probably made a total of 15 Associate offers, ~3 per school, out of an average of 30-40 resumes per school. At some places we sent only one person (13 interview slots), at wharton we sent 3 (39 slots). But the bottom line is, our time constraints mandated being extremely judgmental because the ROI on marginal manager/partner time here was very low.</p>
<p>In that context, whittling 40 CBS resumes down to 26 interview slots, when everyone at CBS was highly qualified and clearly had good management background and potential, got to be a somewhat harsh process. The same wouldn't be true of McKinsey because they can afford to interview anyone they want. But at the smaller top firms, this can be true. What I'm saying is, for the firms with the resources to recruit at LFM and places of that caliber, they probably have the ability to take flyers on people without prior MC experience. But boutiques can and will be more picky.</p>
<p>Take Private Equity, for example. The big PE firms have two tiers of hires: the candidates who have prior PE experience, who are heavily recruited, and then the leftover spots go between "everyone else" and there's tremendous pressure and competition there, even by the standards of HBS and similar places. I have this straight from a partner at starlight capital. In that example, and in others slightly less so, there is tremendous advantage and value to having experience in your target industry prior to getting your MBA.</p>
<p>For less rabidly-competitive industries, it's probably perfectly reasonable to switch from factory operations pre-MBA to marketing post-MBA and find a fine job along those lines. You just aren't getting a partner-track position at Carlyle.</p>
<p>sakky,</p>
<p>We shouldn't be worried about what you get 2 years out of undergrad as much as the NPV of the investment in an MBA. Who cares if the MBA gets you a higher paying job in the short-run if the long-run NPV is less overall?</p>
<p><a href="http://www.rollins.edu%5B/url%5D">www.rollins.edu</a></p>
<p>Their MBA isn't top 50, but is pretty well known in the region and it's designed for people who have no work experience.</p>
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We shouldn't be worried about what you get 2 years out of undergrad as much as the NPV of the investment in an MBA. Who cares if the MBA gets you a higher paying job in the short-run if the long-run NPV is less overall?
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</p>
<p>But would the MBA give you a lower overall long-run NPV if you got the MBA early? Given any reasonable discount rate, I would find it highly unlikely that an "early" MBA would result in lower gains, because NPV calculations obviously dictate that you want to accelerate the gains that you make because later gains matter less. </p>
<p>I think we should also be cognizant of the fact that MBA admissions are somewhat fickle. Just because you get admitted to an MBA program in one year doesn't mean that you'll get admitted to that same program again the following year, even though you've picked up more experience. For example, I know a guy who got admitted to some top MBA programs, but chose not to take them (and foolishly didn't defer his admissions) because his job was going well and he wanted to keep working. When he applied again the following year, he didn't get into some of the ones he had been admitted to previously. {Granted, he did get admitted to some other schools that rejected him the first time, so it all worked out}. But the point is, if you're one of the rare few that can get admitted to HBS right out of undergrad, and you don't take it, you can't assume that you'll get admitted in the future, even though you'll presumably be a better candidate because you'll have more experience. There's a lot of uncertainty and fickleness regarding the MBA admissions process. For example, I know a person who got into elite programs like MIT LFM, HBS, Stanford, and Wharton Exec-MBA but got rejected (not even wait-listed, but outright rejected) by programs like Yale (check the rankings if you don't understand why that's so odd). </p>
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Well, first of all I assure you that this actually happened. I'd be happy to share the particulars of my experiences via PM, but I doubt that's necessary. Instead, I'd like to try and explain the discrepancy here:</p>
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Look, nobody is denying that there is an advantage and value to having experience in your target industry prior to getting your MBA.
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<p>Look, let's be perfectly honest here. The vast majority of people are simply not going to get plum jobs in consulting or finance right after undergrad. In fact, they're not going to get plum jobs of any sort. Most of them, frankly, are going to get jobs that are mediocre. </p>
<p>Now, of course, one could argue that those few people who can get into a top MBA program right out of undergrad are likely to have also gotten plum job offers. I would certainly agree that the odds for them are significantly higher. But not guaranteed. I can go talk to the few HBS students around who came in straight out of undergrad, and I think I will find that, if they're being honest, that some of them didn't actually get any truly good job offers. </p>
<p>So while it's surely nice and convenient to say that somebody should accumulate prior consulting analyst experience if he wants to get a post-MBA consulting associate job, that just begs the question - what if he can't get that experience because he can't get the offer? Should he just go kill himself? If a guy wants to be a consulting associate, he has to figure out the best way to get there out of whatever choices he has. Not any theoretical choices he has, but the * actual * choice set that he has. If a guy can get into a top MBA program right out of undergrad, but can't get a top consulting analyst offer, I think it's fairly clear that that guy should take the MBA program. That's a heck of a lot better than hanging out in 2 years in some mediocre job and then getting the MBA. </p>
<p>Heck, even if the guy CAN get a top job offer right after undergrad, I still would say that taking a top MBA admission (if you can get it) would be better. Like I said, MIT LFM'ers seem to have little problem in getting into top consulting jobs despite the fact that, purely by definition, practically none of them have any prior consulting experience. In fact, it's become so prevalent for LFM students to run off to consulting that it's caused serious controvery within the program. Similarly, if you look at the regular Sloan MBA's, as well as the HBS MBS's, you will find PLENTY of students who are changing careers into consulting. For example, you can find plenty of students at both schools who are former investment bankers who found out they hated banking and are using their MBA to switch to consulting, and have successfully transitioned their way into top consultancies such as McKinsey, BCG, Bain, etc. with, at most, just a summer internship's worth of consulting experience. </p>
<p>Hence, the tradeoff seems to be between accelerating your career by several years in return for a reduced chance of getting the job in the industry you want. Frankly, that seems to be a pretty darn good trade. </p>
<p>Now, on to the specifics.</p>
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[quote]
</p>
<p>The firm (which I have since left) is a small, fairly prestigious MC firm on the Vault Top 50 who, while fast-growing and popular, is not that big and certainly does not have the recruiting infrastructure of a Big 4. The MBA schools it recruited at last year were: HBS, Wharton, CBS, Stanford GSB, INSEAD, and Yale SOM. They probably made a total of 15 Associate offers, ~3 per school, out of an average of 30-40 resumes per school. At some places we sent only one person (13 interview slots), at wharton we sent 3 (39 slots). But the bottom line is, our time constraints mandated being extremely judgmental because the ROI on marginal manager/partner time here was very low.
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</p>
<p>Well, first of all, that's the major difference in the story. Your firm, I think you will agree, is not as prominent as firms such as McKinsey, Bain, BCG, and the like, and those are the firms that most people who want to get into consulting prefer to go to. Hence, not to be overly harsh, but the particulars of your firm, frankly, don't matter very much to most people at the top MBA programs who are shooting for consulting, because they're aiming for the top firms. Hence, your firm is probably then seen only as a 'backup firm' by those guys, if they're just not good enough to get an offer from the top guys. Again, I'm not trying to insult your firm, but I think you know that what I'm saying is true. </p>
<p>
[quote]
In that context, whittling 40 CBS resumes down to 26 interview slots, when everyone at CBS was highly qualified and clearly had good management background and potential, got to be a somewhat harsh process. The same wouldn't be true of McKinsey because they can afford to interview anyone they want. But at the smaller top firms, this can be true. What I'm saying is, for the firms with the resources to recruit at LFM and places of that caliber, they probably have the ability to take flyers on people without prior MC experience. But boutiques can and will be more picky.
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<p>Again, not to sound like a broken record, but it seems to me that the majority of people would rather work for McKinsey or other top firms than one of the boutiques. This is also born out by the various surveys of MBA employer desireability that consistently show that the major consulting firms are always near the top in desirability - and rarely (if ever) get beaten out by a boutique consultancy. </p>
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Take Private Equity, for example. The big PE firms have two tiers of hires: the candidates who have prior PE experience, who are heavily recruited, and then the leftover spots go between "everyone else" and there's tremendous pressure and competition there, even by the standards of HBS and similar places. I have this straight from a partner at starlight capital. In that example, and in others slightly less so, there is tremendous advantage and value to having experience in your target industry prior to getting your MBA.
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<p>Again, of course! Nobody denies that prior experience in your target industry is helpful. But the real question is, what if you can't get it? This is especially true in the case of something like private equity - the vast vast vast majority of people who want private equity experience won't get it. Your analysis seems to be based on the assumption that somebody who can get into an MBA can always just choose to instead pick up experience in their target industry. But this is not always the case. In fact, for industries like PE, I would say that it's rarely the case.</p>
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[quote]
But would the MBA give you a lower overall long-run NPV if you got the MBA early? Given any reasonable discount rate, I would find it highly unlikely that an "early" MBA would result in lower gains, because NPV calculations obviously dictate that you want to accelerate the gains that you make because later gains matter less.
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</p>
<p>I agree with this of course, but I'm saying that many candidates without work experience aren't going to be getting into top 10-15 MBA programs anyway. They're more likely to get into lesser-known programs.</p>
<p>It's my experience, based on what I've read in the literature and seen with friends and colleagues, that MBAs from lesser-known programs aren't usually known for having high returns necessarily consummate with their cost. In that case, the NPV is generally not very high on the investment, and you may be better off with a few years of work.</p>
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I agree with this of course, but I'm saying that many candidates without work experience aren't going to be getting into top 10-15 MBA programs anyway. They're more likely to get into lesser-known programs.
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<p>Ah, but that's not quite what I'm talking about. I am saying that if you are one of the rare few who does manage to get into such a program right out of undergrad, it's hard for me to see too many situations where you should not take it. Only if you had a truly plum job waiting for you (which most people don't have), and even then it's rather debateable.</p>
<p>In that case, I agree completely with you (which I assume you already knew :))</p>
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If a guy can get into a top MBA program right out of undergrad, but can't get a top consulting analyst offer, I think it's fairly clear that that guy should take the MBA program.
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sure, nobody's arguing the other side of that though, you're arguing a strawman. What I'm trying to caution people about is the idea that, by virtue of attending a top MBA program, they will somehow be granted the opportunities that escaped them coming out of undergrad. I think they increase the overall odds of getting options they want by taking a good-but-not-fantastic job opportunity for 2 years and then getting their MBA.</p>
<p>If you're the kind of superstar who can get into HBS straight out of undergrad, it's unlikely that any of us have any meaningful advice to offer such a person. So we might as well pretend that they don't exist - and if you're that special, god bless ya. Nobody posting for advice on a message board on the interwebs is going to be in that category, so we should stop talking about that group as a meaningful part of the discussion. Continuing to argue about it is just intellectual masturbation.</p>
<p>Of course, this thread asks about schools which don't insist on work experience. I still stand by my statement, that no school worth going to would accept anyone but the most obvious superstar coming straight out of undergrad.</p>
<p>(will address other points in another post, just to avoid megaposts)</p>
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Well, first of all, that's the major difference in the story. Your firm, I think you will agree, is not as prominent as firms such as McKinsey, Bain, BCG, and the like, and those are the firms that most people who want to get into consulting prefer to go to. Hence, not to be overly harsh, but the particulars of your firm, frankly, don't matter very much to most people at the top MBA programs who are shooting for consulting, because they're aiming for the top firms. Hence, your firm is probably then seen only as a 'backup firm' by those guys, if they're just not good enough to get an offer from the top guys. Again, I'm not trying to insult your firm, but I think you know that what I'm saying is true.
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I think that is true for a large number of firms, but not for ours. At the risk of allowing you to guess my former employer (and please don't try), they used to be a very big name, right up there with McK, BCG & Bain, and shut their doors after poor cashflow management in 2001. They're now reconstituted with many of the original key partners, and have pretty amazing profitability. Several students at HBS, CBS, Wharton, etc accepted our offer because, as a small firm, it's clear that they can make partner in only a couple of years, and achieve "Fah-Q" money much faster than the stately progression at a Booz Allen. Our firm offers a more attractive risk/reward profile. So while your characterization may be partly true, I don't think it's completely true - we still have a decent selling point and aren't merely picking up leftovers.</p>
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Again, of course! Nobody denies that prior experience in your target industry is helpful. But the real question is, what if you can't get it? This is especially true in the case of something like private equity - the vast vast vast majority of people who want private equity experience won't get it. Your analysis seems to be based on the assumption that somebody who can get into an MBA can always just choose to instead pick up experience in their target industry. But this is not always the case. In fact, for industries like PE, I would say that it's rarely the case.
[/quote]
The question is, how to get the most out of your MBA. And for most people, the biggest boost to their careers comes from using it as a stepping-stone in their previous industry, typically consulting or finance. I'm not just saying that it's "helpful", but that it is a major determinant in the value question of whether to get your MBA or not. </p>
<p>I think a lot of posters on this forum assume that, if you can, by hook or by crook, gain admission to a top MBA school, everything is all roses from that point forward. My whole point with my post is that, aside from the superstars who can get in without work exp after college, the value you get from getting your MBA increases with a few more years' experience. And furthermore, the closer you can get to your target industry with those years' experience, the better odds you will have of making it into that industry. </p>
<p>(obviously there are caveats, like how there's a limit to the # of years you want to be in the workforce before getting an MBA, diminishing returns etc... but as a general statement I think this is true).</p>