There’s an interesting story today on the b-school web site Poets & Quants (started by former Bloomberg Businessweek editor John Byrne) about the increasingly cozy relationship between for-hire admissions consultants and admissions staffs at top MBA programs. The article estimates that as many as a third of the applicants to top 10 business schools now use consultants to improve their chances for acceptance, paying anywhere from $5,000 to $10,000 each.
How cozy is cozy? The story details an event at Harvard Business School last spring when 50 consultants visited the campus as part of a three-day conference. They met with deans and admissions officers at MIT, Dartmouth, Yale, and Duke. Columbia, New York University, Michigan and INSEAD even evaluated three candidate profiles for the group.
Just a few short years ago, all this would have been unthinkable. Admissions officers viewed consultants with distrust, and some schools made them officially off-limits for applicants. The spit and polish, they said, made it difficult to discern the applicant’s strengths and weaknesses. And if you couldn’t afford a consultant? Well, then you were just out of luck.
Read the full article: MBA Admissions Consultants vs. Business Schools