GMAT Test Prep Company Profile Series: Manhattan GMAT

~ A CLEAR ADMIT EXCLUSIVE ~

Moving right along in our GMAT test prep company profile series, we’ll look today at Manhattan GMAT, a company founded on the principle that effective test preparation for the GMAT exam comes down to having the very best instructors available.

Manhattan GMAT was founded in 2000 by Zeke Vanderhoek, a Yale graduate who at the time was a teacher with Teach for America in New York City’s Morningside Heights neighborhood. To make ends meet, he did some tutoring on the side and quickly found himself besieged by requests for GMAT prep.

Vanderhoek discovered that there was a real need for test prep services among people who are trying for very top scores, 700 and above, and he soon found himself tutoring many finance and consulting types in New York City. The business grew by word-of-mouth referrals, and Vanderhoek and his teachers developed such a following that many of the big banks such as Goldman Sachs and Bank of America came to use Manhattan GMAT to train their analysts.

The company began expanding to other cities, initially Los Angeles and Boston, and today serves more than 15 markets throughout the United States and Canada. Vanderhoek, who has moved on to launch his own charter school in New York’s Washington Heights, tapped one of Manhattan GMAT’s star instructors, Andrew Yang, to join the management team and, ultimately, to become the company’s CEO. A transcript of our conversation with Yang follows.

Clear Admit: How many GMAT tutors do you have? Who are they? What are their qualifications? What markets do they serve?

Andrew Yang: We have about 82 instructors today in the United States and Canada. Candidates need to have fulfilled two key requirements. They need to have gotten a 99th percentile score on the real GMAT and they need to have had prior teaching experience for at least a couple of years. As you can imagine, since we were founded by a teacher, we think of teaching as a very special and required skill set.

The third thing is the audition. All of our candidates have to go through a multi-stage, multi-hour teaching audition. First, they have to audition online with one of our instructor trainers for about an hour or so. About 50 percent of candidates don’t make it past the online stage. If they are rated highly enough during this initial audition, we fly them to New York to teach in front of a panel for between two and three hours. Of those that come to New York to audition, we take about one in five. Finally, after they get a job offer, they still have to undergo a 100+hour training program, including assessments, before they’re allowed to see a student.

So you can imagine the sort of people that end up being hired for this job. They come to New York to meet with us, but we reject up to 80 percent of those we see, 90 percent if you include the people who originally applied. We invest a lot in many candidates that we will never end up hiring. In fact, that’s one of the primary ways that I spend my week, because if you have to see five or six candidates for every one you hire, you have to see a lot of people. The bottom line is that we are extraordinarily picky. We turn down some very talented people, and the people that we do hire represent the best of the best. We think our primary value add is the instructor, and that’s where we invest our time and energy. We even post all of our instructors’ bios online so that students can get a sense of who will be teaching them.

CA: Describe the type of candidate you feel would be best served by Manhattan GMAT’s approach to GMAT prep? What sets Manhattan GMAT apart from other test prep companies?

AY: Typically the students who are best suited for Manhattan GMAT are students who are realistically shooting for top-tier programs and a score in the 700 range or, at a minimum, in the mid- to high-600 range. In terms of what sets us apart, more than anything else it is the instructors we enlist. Accompanying the instructors is the fact that our curriculum is much more demanding. The course is a lot of work and designed for people with very ambitious score goals.

We are very content-based. We think that because the GMAT is adaptive, most of the tricks break down at a certain level of difficulty. The GMAT is a content-based test that requires solid skill development.

CA: How did the Manhattan GMAT curriculum and offerings evolve?

AY: We have always had a content-based focus. That was the niche that Zeke found himself serving, and so one of the toughest decisions that we make is what content to emphasize throughout the course. That’s because our instructors are always coming up with new ways to teach concepts.

We started with courses and tutoring, and the vast majority of our students make use of one of those two offerings. But then we added the one-day workshops because some of our instructors were coming up with kernels of content that we thought applied only to a subset of our students. An example is our Advanced Quant workshop. Some of our instructors dreamed up some tough math problems and wanted to share how to solve them. We ultimately decided that might not be helpful for all students, and so we added the one-day workshops.

This test is hard and has a lot of material that you need to study if you want to do well, so we try to shy away from weekend intensive courses. The only class we offer is the two-week boot camp, which we honestly de-emphasize. We only offer it in New York. Pedagogically, we think that the ideal approach to studying for this test is to take a two- to three-month period, and we are hesitant to go along with the market and offer many crash courses. The market would love it and students would totally come and buy that stuff if we were to offer it, but we do our best not to offer things we don’t believe in.

CA: Anything new on the horizon? Expansion to new markets?

AY: We just finished updating our curriculum to reflect the new problems in the 12th edition of the Official Guide. We’re glad to have that already up and running.

Right now we are working on three new books that will come out later this year. The first is a Foundations of GMAT Math book, because we’ve found that some students would very much like a refresher of some of the basic math topics before taking the course. Also in response to this demand, we have a workshop that we’ve made available to any of our students for free to help them reacquaint themselves with some of the foundational math topics.

The second book – an advanced math book – is on the other end of the spectrum. Some of our instructors are math gurus or quant jocks, and they are always coming up with new approaches to that portion of the test. So we are coming out with this advanced math book in the winter that will provide these higher-level approaches for those who want them.

The third book is called the Official Guide Companion. The administrators of the GMAT have just updated the Official Guide for GMAT Review to the 12th edition, but students have found that the explanations in the official guides haven’t always been entirely clear or helpful. So in our Official Guide Companion we have written explanations for every GMAT Official Guide math problem that we think are clearer. Anyone who has trouble understanding the Official Guide can use ours as a companion.

Also coming out this fall, our tech guys are working on something that we think will be very exciting. We are working on an online tool that will also help our students prepare with the Official Guide by tracking their progress automatically. And we just made our flashcards available as a free web application on our site.

We also recently launched an LSAT sister company, called Atlas LSAT. We think the primary innovation for Manhattan GMAT, the reason why we can get five or six qualified candidates for any one we hire, is that we pay more than anyone else in the industry. We pay all of our GMAT instructors $100 an hour plus bonuses. We are committed to being at the top of the industry in terms of teacher compensation. A number of our instructors earn six-figure incomes teaching for us. And we are applying the same principle in the LSAT space.

Though we pay our instructors more, we charge what we think is the industry standard, which means we hover around Kaplan’s level. We can do this because we think that the best marketing is to have a happy student get the score that they are shooting for. We would much rather pay the teacher than pay for billboards on subway platforms.

We have experienced dramatic growth over the last number of years, and we are continuing to grow this year. We are expanding right now to Phoenix, San Diego, Denver and Ann Arbor, and our corporate client list is growing as well. Our current corporate clients include McKinsey, Google, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Bank of America, Boston Consulting Group and Deloitte.

CA: How does a student determine which level of test prep is best for him? Is the curriculum the same from one offering to the next?

AY: Our live online courses follow the exact same curriculum as the in-person course. They feature two instructors instead of one so one person can answer any questions that arise via chat. There are also guided self-study options for people who are in some sort of time crunch or who feel like they can just do it on their own. And then, of course, all of our stuff is for sale in the sense that you can buy all of our text books at Amazon or Barnes and Noble and use them independently. The next step up is to buy access to all our online materials. Basically, we believe in making our resources available at every level.

CA: Anything else to add?

AY: In closing, I think I would say what I say to most other people who are looking at various test prep options. And that is to ask around, find friends who have been through this process and see what their experiences were. Companies can say anything, but the people that you will really be able to trust are friends and contacts who have been through this process. So my advice is to do your homework and find people who can tell you what worked for them.

To learn more about Manhattan GMAT or access a full list of course offerings, locations and prices, click here.

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