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For the past decade or so, youth has been a drawback for business school applicants. Reflecting the desires of the companies that hire their grads, most major schools required MBA students to have at least three years of work experience before enrolling -- and oftentimes more. In fact, the average work history for new students at Business Week's Top 25 schools is now 4.64 years.
Suddenly, that's becoming a problem. Limiting the field to people in their late 20s on up is slowing the growth of applications, even as B-schools become hungrier for recruits. It also makes it harder to attract women, who as they near 30 may be more interested in starting families than embarking on an exciting new life of 80-hour weeks.
So, some B-schools are hatching a new strategy: Get 'em while they're young. Starting with the batch of applications that arrive for the MBA class of 2003, programs such as the Wharton School and UCLA's Anderson School of Business will lower the age bar.
RECRUITING BATTLE.
In fact, at a meeting of admissions directors this weekend in Montreal, such schools will discuss the trend toward accepting younger applicants and the preparations for admitting students with as little as two years of quality work experience. As the economy soared during the 1990s, the number of U.S. applicants to business schools leveled off, while international MBA hopefuls flooded U.S. B-schools with applications. With fewer American students to choose from, U.S. schools are in a battle to recruit the best and brightest domestic candidates. "By mixing in more people with two-and-a-half and three years of experience, B-schools think they can find better students," says David Wilson, president of the Graduate Management Admissions Council.
Schools also want to enroll more women at a time when management education is increasingly criticized for the lack of progress in narrowing the gender gap. For the past decade, top B-schools have been stuck at 30% female enrollment, while other graduate programs, such as law and medicine, enroll nearly half of their classes with women. At UCLA's Anderson School, for example, women made up 36% of the class in 1986 -- and they averaged about four years' work experience. Since then, the percentage of women in the class has dropped to 27%.
The schools figure that if they admit younger students, they'll get more women before they have kids -- or end up on career paths where an MBA isn't a deemed a must. Linda Baldwin, director of admissions at the Anderson School, says that the schools' previous push for more work experience "probably conflicted seriously with some of the other options women had, such as marriage or children. The more we kept going out on that curve of work experience, the more we were preventing a sizable population from coming to B-school." She'll launch a new marketing campaign this year to enroll younger women -- and more minority students.
CENTERS FOR GREED?
Academics and industry leaders have been debating why fewer U.S. women have enrolled in management education since the early 1990s. New insights come from a May, 2000, study done by nonprofit women's group Catalyst, the University of Michigan's Business School, and Michigan's Center for the Education of Women. Entitled "Women and the MBA: Gateway to Opportunity," it notes that women have a negative perception of B-schools. They see them as instructing students in how to satisfy their greed, rather than places with a positive purpose. The authors interviewed 1,600 alumni of 12 schools who, interestingly enough, seldom mentioned the age at which B-schools admit students as a reason to stay away. Which raises the question: Why are B-schools trying to appeal to younger women if the data say that age isn't the issue?
One reason is that "we want to put more women in boardrooms," says Natalie Grinblatt, director of admissions and financial aid at Cornell University's Johnson School. "So we're looking for women who've had an impact on an organization early on." She adds: "I'm accepting more people with two to three years of work experience than I would have five years ago." That's in conflict with what has become a basic B-school tenet: The more experience an applicant has before starting an MBA, the higher the same person's salary will be after graduation. That will make the school look better and keep its all-important alumni happy.
But if schools aren't careful, lowering the bar could insult the very women they're trying to attract. Says Jeanne M. Wilt, assistant dean for admissions and career development at Michigan's Business School: "It would worry me if an admissions committee holds one standard for everyone else, but a different standard for women." She adds that since recruiters have been happy with the experience level of MBAs until now, anything that reduces their satisfaction could lead to "lower salaries for women and create a pay gap" vis-a-vis MBAs with more work experience. Michigan won't change admissions criteria this fall: It will "wait and see what happens," says Wilt, as other B-schools test the new model.
IMAGE SOFTENING.
If that model is a success, schools such as the University of Maryland could end up on the defensive. Indeed, Maryland actually raised the work-experience level of entrants to 5.1 years in 1999, and Dean Howard Frank told Business Week last January that the goal is to graduate students who can command higher salaries. Far from being deterred by the new tactics of some of his competitors, Frank says: "This is good for us, because it will make us more competitive. If schools want to increase their enrollment, they have to bring the standards down." Tough work requirement or not, Maryland's incoming class for next fall is 35% women.
Will lowering the work requirement boost applications, especially by women? It has at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia. Darden Dean Edward A. Snyder attributes an increase in the percentage of women in his program, from 23% to 29%, to the fact that the school now accepts students with only two or three years of work under their belts.
Intrigued by such stories, Michigan is creating a task force to determine what it should do year after next. Schools also are working to soften their image as breeding grounds for investment bankers and consultants. Some 10 schools, including MIT's Sloan School of Management, Stanford University, the Anderson School, Darden, and Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business will travel to three U.S. cities this fall to hold information sessions for potential applicants under age 25. How far can B-schools lower the average age of incoming students? "We're open to two years out of undergraduate," says Rosemaria Martinelli, director of admissions and financial aid at Wharton.
Simply admitting younger students is no panacea, however. Luring more women to MBA programs will require plenty of marketing -- plus a strong effort to improve the image of business education. Because in a hot economy, the trade-offs of investing in business school -- giving up two years' pay to win a pot at the end of the rainbow -- don't look as enticing as before.
By Mica Schneider in New York
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