Finding the Right Business School

Graham Richmond, co-founder of MBA admissions consultant Clear Admit, offers tips on how to find the "best fit" business school

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Graham Richmond
Co-founder
Clear Admit

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BusinessWeek recently hosted its third online MBA Expo, an information-gathering session for potential business school applicants. BusinessWeek business schools editor Phil Mintz explored the Expo's theme of finding a best-fit business school with several admissions directors from top business schools, as well as with a private admissions consultant. Here's an edited transcript of BusinessWeek's discussion with Graham Richmond, co-founder of Clear Admit, an MBA admissions consulting firm.

We're talking today about finding the "best fit" business school. I guess, as with clothing, there are plenty of styles of business school to choose from, but not everything fits everyone equally. What's the first thing you ask someone when you're trying to help them pick a business school that's right for them?

We ask our clients dozens of questions to help them identify the best set of target schools, but I think a really great starting point is just to ask someone what it is that they hope to do after business school and perhaps where they envision doing it. The reason for this is programs are tailored in many cases to specific fields, as well as to regions of the world when it comes to career placement.

Beyond that, obviously I always want to talk with applicants about the learning environments that schools offer as well as teaching methods, location. In fact, location is something that's often overlooked. Applicants can get hyper-focused on things like rankings or prestige instead of actually thinking about how they would go through the MBA curriculum and which school is going to be the best fit.

And what are some of the wrong reasons for picking a business school? What makes a bad fit?

I guess I hinted at this in my last response, but I think sometimes people focus too much on just the rankings or their desire to spend a couple of years in a certain city. I've had people say they'd love to go to Los Angeles for a couple of years, and they haven't really thought about, well, which programs are there and are those programs appropriate?

The other thing is sometimes people say, well, this person next to me at work attended that school and seems like it was good for them, so it must be good for me. Even little things, like once someone has their offers from a set of schools, they might choose a school because School X gave them $10,000 more in scholarship money than School Y, and that's obviously a consideration, but sometimes you don't want to let that be the driving force in a major life decision.

I also think that a lot of applicants fail to get beneath the surface of the school-produced marketing materials or rankings and sometimes those don't offer applicants a full picture, and so I think I would be wrong to base selection solely on those criteria.

I always encourage applicants to engage with current students, review independent data, and try to get beneath the surface. So just to give you an example, someone considering Harvard Business School, I think it's really important that they get a sense for what the case method is all about, since that's the predominant method of instruction in that program.

Similarly, if you're going to apply to at Tuck Dartmouth, you may want to go to Hanover and see what it's like to be a member of a really small MBA community that's close-knit. Just seeing these things firsthand can be really helpful.

So definitely, digging beneath the surface is a critical factor in making the right choice for business school.