From the Battlefield to B-School

By Jane Porter

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Donovan Campbell was sobbing, his head sunk in his hands. He hadn't been planning to break down in front of his Harvard MBA class. His professor had just shown the World War II movie Twelve O'Clock High as part of a lesson on leadership, unleashing a torrent of emotion in the six-foot-three, square-jawed Marine Corps officer. With the movie on pause in the background, he found himself talking about the hardships of leading men in one of the bloodiest battles in Ramadia, Iraq—the angst, the tough decisions, the insomnia, the lonely burden of combat leadership. "Since the day I lost my first and only man in May of 2004, I hadn't cried once," Campbell writes in an e-mail from Kabul, where he's serving another tour of duty. "For some reason, right there in class it all hit me."

Campbell's decision to make the sometimes difficult transition to civilian life through business school is increasingly common for military men and women. Of the tens of thousands of officers leaving the armed forces each year, a growing number are finding their way to MBA programs, where schools and companies are eager to recruit these battle-tested leaders. Last year, 15,259, or 6%, of the people who took the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) required by most B-schools identified themselves as having military backgrounds, and applications by veterans are climbing at many schools. At the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, the number of military applicants rose 62% this year over last. Of the 40 military students enrolled, 38 served in Afghanistan or Iraq.

The increase is coming about in part because the pipeline from battlefield to B-school has become far more organized. The Graduate Management Admissions Council, which publishes the GMAT, has set up a test center on a base in the U.S. and soon will open one in Japan. B-schools, including those at Cornell, Harvard, and Rochester, are using people with military experience to recruit. Some schools are adding more scholarships, and Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs (GS) and JPMorgan (JPM) are holding networking events geared to veterans.

For many employers, the appeal of MBAs with military experience is simple: mature, highly disciplined employees with practical and tactical skills well above those of their civilian peers. Many in the military, meanwhile, see B-school as a bridge into civilian life. For Campbell it also meant a chance to spend more time with his family. The clincher in his decision to go to B-school was a conversation he had with Steve Reinemund, then-chairman and CEO of PepsiCo (PEP) and a family friend. Reinemund, a former Marine captain, told Campbell that his years at Darden gave him valuable time for his family. He urged him to think of B-school as a chance to spend more time with his wife, who was pregnant at the time, than he'd be able to if he went directly into a high-pressure job in the corporate world. Campbell, who spent his first two wedding anniversaries in Iraq, was convinced.

The challenges these officers overcome to get into B-school start with finding time to fill out applications and take the GMAT, many while on active duty. The Graduate Management Admissions Council's "Operation MBA," which identifies military-friendly B-schools that waive application fees, offer financial aid, or give one-year deferrals for military students in need, is trying to make that easier. A GMAT test center was opened in Fort Hood (Tex.) in January, and another is planned to open this year at Yokota Air Base in Japan. David Ball, an Army lieutenant who enrolled at Texas A&M's Mays Business School in 2007, filled out his last-minute applications while at Fort Hood and getting up at 6:00 a.m. every day to ready a battalion for deployment.