The web site Poets & Quants published an interesting story today about the incoming class at Wharton, based on exhaustive online research. It has some important insights into how business schools operate, but may not go far enough to prove its main thesis: that Wharton has a bias that favors applicants from prestigious undergraduate institutions and top companies. (More on this later.) But I urge you to read it in order to make up your own mind.
When describing each new incoming class, b-schools typically report a few statistics in the aggregate (average GMAT scores, for example) and not much else. But in fact much more extensive information, such as the employment and undergraduate histories of students, is hidden in plain sight, on social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, if anyone took the trouble to collect it.
P&Q, the business school web site launched a year ago by former Businessweek.com editor John Byrne, did. It combed through the Facebook page for the Wharton Class of 2013 and identified more than 600 of its 845 members, or more than 70 percent. It then tracked their undergraduate educational backgrounds and their pre-MBA employers. As a journalistic exercise this is, I think, unprecedented. By mapping the origins of almost an entire class at a single school P&Q intends to show how schools like Wharton–schools that accept applicants from elite institutions and produce graduates destined for the highest echelons of corporate power–serve to perpetuate privilege rather than level the economic playing field.
Read the full article: Wharton: Preserve of Privilege?