Business school admission officials and consultants are closely following a federal trial in Boston that accuses Harvard University of discriminating against Asian-American applicants to the school. Even though the trial concerns only undergraduate admissions at Harvard, observers believe that aspects of the secretive selection process are common in admission decisions in many elite, highly selective MBA programs, from the use of “Dean’s Lists” that favor connected candidates to the cultivation of big donors through favorable admission decisions for their children.
The trial—which began Oct. 15 and is expected to conclude on Friday to four weeks long—has already brought to light emails suggesting that Harvard favors applicants connected to families who either contribute to school fundraising or are likely to do so, the existence of a ”Dean’s Interest List,” a special and confidential list of applicants who benefit from a higher acceptance rate and are often related to or of interest to top donors.
In the earliest part of the trial, one of the most powerful and influential decision makers at Harvard, longtime Dean of Admissions William Fitzsimmons, testified over several days. During his testimony, lawyers introduced a 2013 email written by former Dean of the Harvard Kennedy School David T. Ellwood who thanked Fitzsimmons for helping admit a student whose relatives had apparently “already committed to a building.” In another, Associate Vice President for Alumni Affairs and Development Roger P. Cheever ’67 noted that accepting an unnamed applicant could “conceivably” lead to the donation of “an art collection.”
SUIT ALLEGES THAT HARVARD REJECTED ASIAN-AMERICANS IN FAVOR OF LESS QUALIFIED
The lawsuit, brought by anti-affirmative action advocacy group Students for Fair Admissions in 2014, charges that the college rejects deserving Asian-American applicants in favor of less qualified applicants of other races, a charge Harvard denies. Yet, an analysis by The Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, of data released during the trial revealed that from 1995 to 2013, Asian-American applicants earned the highest average SAT score of any racial group that applied to the school, but had the lowest acceptance rate of any racial group. Their charges are not all that dissimilar to the fact that Indian and Chinese MBA candidates face tougher odds of admission at elite U.S. business school than others because they are over-represented in applicant pools (see Indian & Chinese MBA Applicants Face Much Higher Rejection Rates).
Another analysis of Harvard’s admission decisions over six years by a Duke University economist and expert in admissions found a “systematic” pattern in which African American and Hispanic applicants have a higher probability of admission largely due to what Harvard calls “personal scores” that weigh non-academic measures of evaluation.
Those rather vague personal ratings, common in admission decisions of MBA applicants, range from highly subjective assessments of character traits and backgrounds that lead admission officials to score candidates on a scale of one to four, with one indicating an applicant has “truly outstanding qualities of character” to four, which reflects the judgment that a candidate has “questionable or worrisome qualities of character.” Court documents show that Harvard admission officiers have called some applicants “bland or somewhat negative and immature,” among other things.
‘HOW THE SAUSAGE GETS MADE IS ALWAYS GRIM’
Overall, the economist found that 86% of recruited athletes were admitted, 33.6% of legacy students were admitted, 42.2% of applicants on the Dean or Director’s List were admitted, and 46.7% of children of faculty or staff were admitted—even though the overall acceptance rate at Harvard this past year is just 4.7%, with only 2,024 of nearly 43,000 applicants gaining an admit.
“I remain torn between feeling like it is about time this stuff came to light and going, ‘look, how the sausage gets made is always grim, what do you expect?,’” says Adam Hoff, an MBA admissions consultant and principal with Amerasia Consulting Group. “It sucks that connected people get a leg up, but this is how the world works. We see laws passed because lobbyists buy elected officials, so why wouldn’t colleges admit students who are connected to the people who pay for the buildings? It is grim and often gross, but it is naive to think it would be any different. And to be perfectly honest, now that one of our two political parties is scaring away foreign students, many private colleges will have to rely on donors more than ever.”
David White of Menlo Coaching agrees that it is silly to think that business school admissions don’t take into account the potential of gifts from applicants who come from wealthy or connected families. “It is fascinating to see the discussion of things like the ‘Dean’s Interest List’ and the interaction between the development office and the admissions office. It won’t surprise you that there are similar processes at the MBA level.”
‘MBA ADMISSIONS MAY BE LESS AFFECTED DUE TO THE INFLUENCE OF WORK & IMPACT’
Linda Abraham, founder of Accepted.com, a leading admissions consulting firm, believes it’s difficult to interpret the implications of the trial on MBA admission decisions before an actual verdict. Still, she believes graduate admissions may be less affected. While again it is hard to talk about the implications of the trial without a verdict, I think MBA admissions may be less affected because of the influence of work experience and the importance of leadership and impact. “High school students simply can’t have the impact that college graduates with four or more years of work experience,” she says. “Those ‘soft,’ subjective criteria becomes a necessary, legitimate distinguishing factor for students applying to programs that intend to prepare them to be leaders. And as I heard (former Harvard Business School Managing Director of Admissions) Dee Leopold say many times, ‘Harvard wants to develop leaders, not create them.’ Most top MBA programs would agree.”
In any case, Abraham adds, ethnicity plays a role in admissions at Harvard University and by extension at most elite universities. It almost has to do so if the schools value ethnic diversity, among other forms of diversity that they seek. So while there may no longer be a ‘numerus clausus’ as existed for Jews in the U.S. into the 1950’s and in Canada until later, and elite universities don’t have the racial and gender segregation that existed 100 years ago, they can’t have diversity if they don’t have a way to measure it. They also can’t have ethnically diverse classes if they ignore ethnicity altogether as long as different groups perform differently on the classic measures of academic ability.”
Most admission consultants defend the use of a wide variety of measures by business schools decide who to admit and who to reject, rather than a more narrow look at undergraduate transcripts and a GMAT or GRE standarized test score. “MBA programs build a diverse class not only in terms of ethnic backgrounds, but also by industry, function, areas of expertise, and more,” argues White. “This directly improves the quality of the program, not least of all because MBA grads have to lead diverse workforces and market products to diverse customer groups. Schools would fight hard to keep their ability to balance the class across these dimensions vs. having everything reduced to a formula to calculate merit.”
Dillon House is where Harvard Business School makes all of its admission decisions.
‘BUILDING A CLASS AT HBS IS MORE DEFINED’
Sandy Kreisberg, founder of HBSGuru.com and a leading reader of admission tea leaves at Harvard Business School, notes that “the one big difference between college and HBS is that the expectation of ‘fairness’ for HBS is less–it’s a business school! For instance, one factor for them, if you are employed by your family business, is how big is the business. They also have work history of each applicant as a super important part of the mix, and all work situations are not equal. And while both schools claim to ‘build’ a class and not admit a person per se, building a class at HBS is more defined, in addition to gender, race, and grades, it also includes industry and some unpublished hierarchy within industries, in many cases.”
Judith S. Hodara, a co-founder and director of Fortuna Admissions, has an unusual perspective. For years, she was involved in the selection process for both undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania for seven years and then at Wharton for MBA candidates for nearly ten years from 2000 to 2010. “How MBA files are read by admissions officers are quite different from officers for undergraduate programs, where usually school groups ( think Stuyvesant for example) are read regionally as a group, so that students can be reviewed in relation to one another given that they have all come from the same high school,” she explains. “Those are incredibly tough undergraduate pools; because academically and future path-wise, the profiles can appear to be similar, and the individual characteristics may also appear in extra curricular activities too. It’s just harder for those applicants to stand out from amongst their peers.
“For MBA applicants, there are more points of data in addition to the academic and extra curricular profile; on average, three to five years of work experience and professional growth plus essays that reflect that additional growth and maturity. In addition, there is usually not a regional or industry reader for the whole subset of the pool, which means that there is not as systematic ( if you can actually use that word) approach. As a result, its hard to take the undergrad process and lay it over graduate admissions because of this- its more like apples and oranges. Certainly the outside interest groups including alumni and donors do come into play. I would add to this that relationships with banks and consulting firms can matter as well. After all, MBA graduates are looking for positions in these same firms when they graduate, so it behooves both parts of that equation to have positive interactions) as it grows the pools on both ends.
‘AT WHARTON, WE WOULD HAVE ADMITTED AN ENTIRE CLASS OF BANKERS & CONSULTANTS’
Judith Silverman Hodara – a co-founder and director at MBA admissions coaching firm Fortuna Admissions
“While I was at Wharton,” adds Hodara, “we could have admitted an entire class of bankers or consultants, but then they would be learning only from bankers and consultants, and not opening themselves up to different paths and ways of thinking. We were thoughtful as a committee (and it’s not an exact science by any means) of taking those kinds of ideas into account; and that the makeup of cohorts, clusters and learning teams at Wharton and many other M7 schools reflect that approach.”
Like Hodara, Hoff at Amerasia also had been involved in undergraduate admission decisions at Pepperdine University, his alma mater, earlier in his career. He acknowledges that explaining many admission decisions in undergraduate or graduate admissions is virtually impossible. His work at Pepperdine in reviewing over 1,000 applicant files a year, he concedes, “wasn’t anywhere near Harvard’s microscopic acceptance rate and it was still difficult to fully explain and justify all decisions. You are going off a mix of what the university wants in terms of an overall direction, combined with statistical pressure (rankings, diversity, filling certain majors) and various mandates (athletic recruits, performing arts, religious affiliation in the case of a religiously-affiliated school), all while dealing with completely uneven demographics in the applicant pool.”
At his liberal arts college, over two-thirds of the applicants were white females. “Would it benefit anyone at the college to have a class that was 70% white female?,” he asks. “It wasn’t fair to some of the amazing candidates who got denied, but it also wouldn’t have been fair to put them in that environment. where they pay $50,000 a year to be around only people who are just like them. I see the same thing now at the MBA level with the more ‘over subscribed’ demos. It doesn’t feel fair when you go case by case, but I also don’t think you can turn the schools into villains merely for trying to create a diverse environment.”
‘ANY GOOD COUNSELOR ALREADY KNEW THE ‘TRADE SECRETS COMING TO LIGHT’
Hoff says most admission counselors are hardly surprised by the “trade secrets coming to light” in the trial. “Any good counselor already knew all of this, without a trial bringing Harvard’s formula into the public space,” he maintains. “I already teach my clients who are in competitive demos to stand out by being more human, not more impressive. Readers who get hit with wave after wave of accomplished candidates are even more likely to jump at someone interesting or funny or honest or unique or whatever the case may be.
“I would guess that many candidates who get dinged and can’t believe it often doubled down on what was already clear to a reader from jump – that they are impressive, accomplished, driven, and so forth. The key is to take your life’s work, let it speak for itself, and then say something completely different and that grabs a reader in a new way. This is how you wind up with admissions officers squirming, trying to explain how and why they took Applicant A over Applicant B when they aren’t even really sure. So much it is more of a gut reaction and wanting, as a file reader, to find a new way in besides just ‘wow, exceptional!’
“Of course, at the end of the day, some of it is just pure bad luck. I am sure I got cases wrong when I was an admissions officer and there are plenty of clients each year now who I feel get robbed and were just plain unlucky. But when you pursue schools with a microscopic acceptance rate and a subjective admissions process, you are inviting that.”
ONE PREDICTED CHANGE: LESS OF A PAPER TRAIL
Jeremy Shinewald, founder of mbaMission, one of the largest MBA admission consulting oufits, believes the disclosures from the Harvard will change at least one thing: internal communications about applicants from admission officials, deans and faculty. “In a lot of business school ethics classes, they talk about the ‘Wall Street Journal’ test – don’t do anything that you wouldn’t want seen on the front page of the Journal,” he says. “I have to imagine that a lot of admissions officers, now seeing another office’s communications made public, are at a minimum thinking carefully about what they are writing about specific applicants.
“I imagine that children of influential individuals and donors at all schools, not just Harvard, will yield less of a paper trail, though the reality is that influence will never be eliminated – there is too much self interest in cultivating donors. Meantime, generalizations about applicants are probably going to be emailed about less, but again I don’t think much will change in terms of the admissions process itself, just the way it is communicated.”
Whatever the outcome of the trial, the decision is likely to wind its way toward the U.S. Supreme Court. But already, there are signs that it has had an impact at Harvard. Newly revised guidelines for admission officials at Harvard for the Class of 2023 explicitly prohibits the consideration of a candidate’s race when assigning scores for personal traits, according to The Harvard Crimson.
DON’T MISS: INDIAN & CHINESE MBA APPLICANTS FACE HIGHER REJECTION RATES or STANFORD MBA’S GATEKEEPER ON A ‘HEARTBREAKING” GSB MYTH
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