<p>MBA candidates cme from a variety of backgrounds; however, you are expected to have some business and management experience. Your job background doesn’t really reflect that; not only that, but it looks a bit haphazard. So I think admissions committees will wonder why you want an MBA now when none of your previous experience has worked towards business management. I don’t think anyone will deny that a teacher knows how to work independently, but the question is - do you have enough business background to be able to learn the material, and why do you want an MBA anyway?</p>
<p>At a top 7 program, this will come into question and I don’t think you’re competitive. If you wrote an outstanding admissions essay on how your previous background is linked together in some planful way (true or not) and how they have influenced you to want to go into business, preferably some kind of business related to education, then you may be able to parley it.</p>
<p>I think once you get into business school you won’t necessarily have a hard time with networking, but you might with recruiting. Employers are going to prefer someone with past experience in a related industry. You might be able to find management or administration jobs in education.</p>
<p>If you look at the top programs, yes, they are biased towards traditional applicants. Every business school has a class profile, and most of them show where their students come from. At Columbia, fully 67% of their class comes from finance, consulting, private equity, real estate and marketing. At HBS 56% come from consulting, consumer products, financial services and private equity (and some of that marketing is rolled into other areas since they categorize theirs differently). At Stanford, 78% come from private equity, consumer products and consulting. Wharton does have an unusually high percentage of people from the education/nonprofit world and from other industries, but at other business schools it’s similar - usually 70-80%+ of the class comes from traditional business industries.</p>
<p>And even those in non-traditional industries probably have business experience within those. So those in education might be coming from educational administration or operations (e.g., working in the human resource department or office of development in a university is technically in the education sector). Those from the healthcare field are probably healthcare administrators in hospitals or clinics. Nonprofits are often run just like businesses, so many from that sector may be business managers. So on and so forth.</p>
<p>And yes, it’s likely to be worse at top schools, because they have more leverage to attract the best and brightest in business. To think from their perspective: why take a teacher/librarian when they can take the VP of the development office who raised $1 million for the school last year? Business schools make money from producing results; that VP is much more likely to get hired by, say, Accenture or McKinsey to do education consulting at $140,000, which makes their hired-after-graduation rate and their average salary higher, thus attracting more students.</p>
<p>However, lower-ranked business schools can’t attract the top talent, so they often move to the next tier of applicants.</p>
<p>I think that whether you need to go to a top 25 school depends on what you want to do and where you want to go. I think that in most cases an MBA from a top school is really the only way to go; but if you plan to stay located where you are regionally or are in a specialized sector, going to a lower-ranked business school could still work. For example, someone who’s planning to stay in Georgia (or the the Southeast more generally) for some time (5-10 years) could go to UGA’s Terry College of Business and probably do very well in the Atlanta area, and Southeast U.S. more generally. Someone in the tech sector could go to Georgia Tech’s Scheller school and do well, too.</p>