<p>The admission rates for most business schools is almost twice that for medical schools and much higher than that for law schools. Why is that? </p>
<p>Do they tend to not get a lot of applicants, or is it a self-selecting pool?</p>
<p>I guess less people go for MBAs.</p>
<p>^^ is not true. Competitiveness probably goes like this</p>
<h1>1 Medical</h1>
<h1>2 Business</h1>
<h1>3 Law</h1>
<p>The fact that top b-schools have higher acceptance rate is due to the difference in application process. For Med/Law, there’s a pretty generic application process for all schools. You need a generic letter of recommendation, generic statement of purpose, GPA, MCAT/LSAT. For business school application, you need school specific information. This is more taxing on the applicant and the recommender.Furthermore, b-school application process is much more expensive, especially including traveling+lodging for interviews.</p>
<p>As a result, b-school applicants apply for 3-5 schools, whereas law-school applicants apply to 10+ schools. </p>
<p>Also, whereas you can apply to law school straight out of college, you need work experience for business school. After 3-5 years, people may have settled into a routine and forgo schooling.</p>
<p>If you look at the yield (matriculating students/admitted students) of top b-school vs top law-school, you can see the difference.</p>
<p>liu, so do B-schools tend to have higher yeilds? Btw, I’m really impressed with your knowledge on this. Are you a B-school admissions officer?</p>
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<p>I don’t know about that, especially relative to the med-school application process. It’s not uncommon for premeds to apply to upwards of 25 med-schools within the primary round at a cost of $160 for the first school and $31 for each additional school, and then (hopefully) a set of secondary round applications costing between $25-100 per school. Then you have to pay travel costs for the on-campus med-school interviews that you have hopefully been invited to. </p>
<p>In contrast, many B-schools do not require on-campus interviews, but either run alternate interviews via traveling adcom officers or through local alumni in most major metro areas. To be sure, if you live in the boonies, you may have to travel for an interview, but relatively few B-school applicants live in such locations, for that’s not where the types of jobs conducive towards B-school admission tend to be located. For example, I can think of numerous people in California who were admitted to top non-Californian B-schools, and not a single one of them had to pay for lodging for interviews - the greatest expense being perhaps a few hours of gas to drive to the interview location.</p>
<p>There is no way to work as a doctor unless you go to med school. There is very, very little chance to work meaningfully in law unless you go to law school. Business school, at top schools, can be a feeder program for certain kinds of jobs/companies, but it is no guarantee. And it is not a gateway for business the way law and medical school are. I’d venture that the average IQ for top med/law school admittees is significantly higher than that of business schools. Does that mean IQ does not correlate so well with business success?</p>
<p>Looking at the picture above, do the math.</p>
<p>One reason is simply the number of each type of school.</p>
<p>@liu, want to explain why you say what I said isn’t true, but then support my comment in your post when you say more people forgo business school?</p>
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<p>Presumably you’d make an apples to apples comparison and compare the top med / law students to the top b-schools rather than b-schools in general.</p>
<p>But what about EQ? I’d venture to say that if the top med / law school grads have, on average, higher IQs – which is debatable at any rate – its just as easy to argue that top b-school grads have higher EQs. Which I’d argue trumps having marginally higher IQs since you really only need a certain level of intelligence to succeed in any field – and assuming we are talking about the cream of the crop, its an easy assumption to make that the requisite intelligent exists in the specific sampling of people we are talking about (grads / students of the elite programs).</p>
<p>IMO IQs and standardized tests (while they serve their limited purposes) give you less than half the picture. Intangibles – things like leadership, ability to communicate, ability to empathize, ability to get people to empathize with you (and have them see things your way), ability to think out of the box, ability to work efficiently, constructively in a team structure, ability to negotiate, ability to organize, ability to simplify things – these are skills which cannot be readily measured by a standardized test – and yet these are critical skills not only in the corporate world, but in life in general. These kinds of skills which help you move up the corporate ladder are the same core skills which help you navigate the real world (e.g. when you need to think quickly on your feet, cut a better bargain for yourself or convince the cute girl at the bar to give you her number). </p>
<p>Give me those kinds of real world skills over proficiency with a slide ruler any day. Of course, if you’re lucky, its always a nice hedge if you have both.</p>
<p>Prestige: I’d actually go so far as to say anybody getting into a top 30 med school and a top 15 law surpassing in terms of IQ those in top 5-10 business schools. But I’ve met apparently stupid people in top 5 med schools as well as top business schools. And that goes perhaps to another point – savvy, EQ, whatever you want to say – aren’t indicated by IQ. I’d agree. And EQ, and temperament, are far greater predictors of success in business in general, at least beyond a minimum threshold IQ. However, if someone doesn’t have a reasonably good understanding for instance of organic chemistry, they aren’t getting into med school full-stop. I think the IQ cut-off for med school is the highest, then law school, then business school. I don’t have stats, but I think it’s as I’ve said and I’d bet the stats bear me out.</p>
<p>BedHead, I wouldn’t necessarily disagree with your assertions, even if you do stretch them a tad. The issue here is how truly useful “IQ” is as a meaningful metric for “intelligence” much less success later on in life.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html[/url]”>http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html</a></p>
<p>Prestige: I worked in a fairly high-end consulting firm for awhile where, I discovered, I was among the smarter of the bunch. Fact is, though, my “dumber” colleagues were often more competent in what we did. Some people don’t realize how much temperament plays a role in suitability for a lot of things. I work with a guy that is a brilliant professor, MIT undergrad, Berkeley PhD, the real deal. He is amazing in his chosen field, and he would certainly be smart enough to get in and go to vet school (which is harder to get into than med school), but the last thing I’d want is his woolly head operating on my dog.</p>
<p>After (what seems) countless years in the finance industry (i-banking, PE and hedge fund) i’ve come to the conclusion that if “success” is measured by how quickly you rise the corporate ladder and / or the number of opportunities that come knocking on your door (and by extension opportunities to make $$$) –> i’d much rather be lucky, well liked and / or well connected (have a strong network) than be flat-out brilliant intellectually. The world is chock full of broke geniuses. As mentioned before, you absolutely do need a certain level of smarts to “swim with the sharks” to be sure, but after that, your ability to connect with others (EQ) is not only highly underrated, IMO its absolutely essential to leveraging all of your opportunities to the fullest potential (vs. sheer IQ).</p>
<p>In fact, in almost an anti-Darwinian way, if you are “too smart” or perhaps more importantly perceived to be too smart, this can be detrimental within the corporate environment. For instance, if you are not aligned with the right people, don’t have a strong mentor / backer, you may very well be perceived as a threat (by peers and bosses) to the point that you can find yourself becoming marginalized / shut out of opportunities to showcase your talent (which probably explains why the Bill Gates / Steve Jobs of the world are naturally more suited to being entrepreneurs / their own bosses rather than an office stiff). The point is simply that being blessed with a strong CPU doesn’t necessarily mean you are going to go through life using sheer brainpower power to “brute force” your way to the top.</p>
<p>the_prestige, exactly.</p>
<p>Bedhead, you also have to consider that plenty of 780 GMAT holders get rejected by B-schools because they don’t care about IQ beyond a certain cutoff. My guess is far more 99.9th percentile GMAT HBS apps get rejected than 99.9th percentile LSAT HLS apps. </p>
<p>B-schools could go a long way to increase their average IQ’s if they wanted to, but that’s not what they’re looking for.</p>