MBA Insider: Admissions Q&A May 11, 2009, 2:56PM EST

Stanford: Admissions Q&A

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Derrick Bolton
Stanford University

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It's also going to be LEED platinum, so it's really exciting in terms of its commitment to reduced energy use and to sustainability principles. We can't wait to have it open.

How is the economic crisis affecting the process of getting jobs?
Broadly, I think students are a bit more stressed out as they go through the process. It often takes longer to find that one opportunity that's the right one. I think a lot of times students have to be more resilient and persistent in pursuing opportunities. That's probably a good thing; it is very consistent with what our career management center advises. Their goal is to build career self reliance, to focus on the skill sets that will help students not just in the first job out of business school but also throughout their careers. In a lot of ways, it's actually been, not a blessing, but it's given the career management center support for the things they've always said.

A lot of business schools are having trouble with internship hiring in this economy. Do you have any sense of how it will hold up this year for Stanford?
I've heard nothing different on internships relative to prior years. I think companies tend to pull back on full-time hiring before they pull back on internships, and I think so many of them recognize that an internship is essential to building a long-term talent pool. The students who are looking for internships now won't be looking for full-time jobs until late 2010, so I think the internships have been relatively less affected.

As Stanford moves ahead, what is the biggest challenge it faces?
There's a challenge for MBA programs in general, which is ensuring that the pool of candidates is selecting an MBA for the right reasons. I think [we] schools have done ourselves a real disservice on this front. If you look at students who are applying to medical school or law school, they're applying for the education. There's certainly a credential element there, but when you talk to those students and look at the publications from those schools, they're about the education. Business schools have in the last couple of decades gone astray and really put too much emphasis on the post-school benefits and not enough on what transpires while you're there. I think our industry overall has made a really big mistake of overemphasizing those ancillary benefits. Applicants have interpreted that as being the reason you go to school. That's probably the thing I worry about the most at Stanford. How do I make sure that we're picking people who and want to take this [education] and make themselves better people, managers, and leaders, in support of our society? I really think we've got to do some soul searching, as business schools, about the messages we've been sending out.

How do you combat the perception of business schools as the means to a high-paying career?
There are a lot of little things we can do. At Stanford, we recognized a while back that there are great people who should be pursuing business school who frankly would have pursued an MBA a generation ago. They're not looking at it now because of the stigma, because of the perception of what an MBA is. We need to do a better job of conveying the real benefits of this education.

We can start by talking more to people while they're in college. We've done a lot more outreach on college campuses to influence the students there before they hit major inflection points in their careers when they jump off to law school or policy school instead of looking at business school. We decided to take the GRE [scores, in addition to GMAT scores.] Let's say we're able to encourage students for whom the GMAT might have been a barrier, and who are looking at nonbusiness programs, to consider an MBA. I think that will make a difference. Honestly, I think you'll see a lot of schools coming out of the economic malaise that we're in now by really looking inward and trying to assess whether they've put an emphasis on the broader role that businesses play. I think that's something that Stanford has done for a long time. It will help Stanford when other schools start to realize and convey that businesses are not just economic institutions but also social institutions that have responsibilities that extend beyond the income statement and balance sheet. The kind of scrutiny that organizations are going to put business schools under in the next months and years is going to have a really positive effect.