Wharton Welcomes its MBA Class of 2020
With students in the Wharton MBA Class of 2020 settling on campus, Deputy Vice Dean Maryellen Reilly took to the school’s MBA Admissions Blog to welcome the new class.
The Wharton MBA Class of 2020
Although application volume is down, the average GMAT score rose to the school’s previous record high of 732. This score matched the Wharton MBA Class of 2017.
“This class is an impressive collection of leaders from all walks of life, backgrounds, nationalities, industry experiences, and ambitions,” Reilly writes. “These newest members of the Wharton community bring with them a wide-range of perspectives to enrich their shared experiences both in and outside of the classroom.”
Application volume fell by 6.7 percent, dropping from 6,692 to 6,245. But here Wharton is in good company.
It is difficult to find a leading U.S. school reporting that applications were increasing measurably year over year. The vast majority are sharing that numbers are decreasing, or at best remaining steady.
Perhaps one of the biggest shifts between last year’s class and this year’s is the uptick in humanities undergrads, increasing to 45 percent from 41 percent. Students with STEM backgrounds make up another 29 percent of the class, trailing those in business, at 26 percent.
Around 33 percent of the incoming class is international, increasing from 32 percent last year. Although students this year hail from 80 different countries, compared to just 65 one year ago. U.S. students of color make up another third of this year’s class, not changing from last year.
There are 862 students in the Class of 2020, one shy of the previous class. The percentage of female students slipped one point, to 43 percent.
In terms of prior work experience, former consultants outnumber all others by a considerable margin, making up 27 percent of the class, up from 26 percent last year. The next-largest group, at 13 percent, comes from private equity/venture capital, with 10 percent of tech students following closely.
For the whole view of the Class of 2020, check out the Wharton profile here. As well, get familiar with the school’s MBA programs here.
This article has been edited and republished with permissions from our sister site, Clear Admit.
Northwestern Kellogg MBA Class of 2020: 46 Percent Women, 27 Percent U.S. Minorities
Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management announced today that women will make up 46 percent of the incoming two-year, full-time MBA Class of 2020. That’s a four-percentage point jump over last year and a record high for the school. U.S. minorities are also up—comprising 27 percent of this year’s first-year students, as compared to 25 percent last year. Meanwhile, average GMAT (732) and GPA (3.6) were identical to last year. Class size also remained constant at 478.
“I am very, very thrilled with the diversity of the class,” Melissa Rapp, Kellogg Director of Admissions for full-time MBA and MSMS programs, told Clear Admit. “And not just because of the percentages but also the quality of candidates across the board,” she said. International students will make up 34 percent of the incoming class, drawn from 46 countries around the globe, a modest one-percentage point decline amid soft overall international applicant volume to U.S. schools.
Rapp pledged that she and her team will keep striving to attract the most diverse classes possible. “I firmly believe that diversity in the classroom leads to better learning and a more impactful experience for every student who is here,” she said.
Steady State Elsewhere Is Great
For the past six years Kellogg’s average GMAT score has been on the rise, climbing from 708 in 2012 to 732 last year. Rapp said she is not at all concerned to have it remain static at 732 this year. “That our average GMAT and GPA have stayed the same shows that we continue to attract a really outstanding pool of applicants year after year,” she said.
Average undergraduate GPA also didn’t budge—coming in at 3.6 for now the third year running. As for what applicants studied while in college, 50 percent of this year’s incoming class majored in business or economics, up from 49 percent last year and 45 percent the year before that. STEM majors fell slightly to 29 percent, down from 30 percent the year before. Humanities majors both this year and last made up the remaining 26 percent.
Varied Professional Experience
In terms of pre-MBA work experience, approximately one in four incoming Kellogg students—24 percent—come from consulting, down from 27 percent last year. Another 19 percent come from the financial services industry, also a slight decrease from last year’s 20 percent.
Up this year? Students who have worked in tech/communications grew from 12 to 13 percent. “I think the changes that we see in our class really reflect the changes that we see in the business world,” Rapp said. “There are more people from tech, which is not surprising for anyone since there is more tech in the world than there ever has been.” Students with government/education/nonprofit experience also increased, from 7 to 9 percent.
Overall Rapp is pleased to see Kellogg continuing to attract a wide range of students from across functions and industries. “The variety continues to be very strong both in terms of our incoming students and our outgoing graduates,” she added. “Again, those differences and that diversity is what makes the Kellogg experience so strong.”
Kellogg’s Efforts to Support Women May Off
By far the biggest news today is that Kellogg has come closer than ever before to gender parity with its newest incoming class. USC Marshall School of Business made headlines last month by becoming the first leading business school to cross the 50/50 mark—women will make up 52 percent of the Marshall Class of 2020, a staggering 20-percentage-point jump over last year. At UT Austin’s McCombs School, which has also shared a preliminary Class of 2020 profile, the percentage of women slipped year over year, from 40 to 38 percent. And at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, which welcomed it new Class of 2020 students to campus last week, women make up 33 percent, a five-point gain over last year.
“It’s really pretty exciting,” said Rapp of Kellogg’s 46 percent women. She credits the gains in female enrollment in part to the vision and leadership of outgoing Kellogg Dean Sally Blount, who served as dean from 2010 until she stepped this past spring.
Kellogg has also called on its current female students, including members of the Kellogg’s student-led Women’s Business Association (WBA), to take part in admissions outreach activities in hopes that they can forge meaningful connections with prospective female candidates early in their exploration process.
Melissa Rapp, Kellogg Director of Admissions for the full-time MBA and MSMS programs.
New this year, the school also convened its inaugural Global Women’s Summit in May. More than 1,200 women participated “live”—with 800 at Kellogg’s Global Hub in Evanston and the rest via extension events in London, Hong Kong, New York, Boston, San Francisco, Miami, Seattle, and Chicago hosted by companies including Amazon, Microsoft, and Starbucks. Over the course of the two-day event, the #KelloggWomen hashtag was trending in Chicago and generated 2.7 million overall impressions. “The breadth of engagement the summit allowed for provided a really nice bridge from prospectives to current students to our alumnae population,” Rapp said.
Kellogg also this year hosted its third-annual Women’s Leadership Seminar, a unique five-week lineup for second-year MBA students combining lectures, workshops, networking events, and alumni panels on recruiting issues women face. “The goal is to ensure that our high-potential women are equipped to pursue and navigate careers that have deep personal and professional meaning,” Rapp said.
“This combination of everything from lunch and learns to seminars to summits really helps the women here know that Kellogg understands the unique situation they are in and the challenges they will face on their journey to become impactful leaders and is proactively talking about that and helping them navigate that.”
Those Kellogg women, it seems, have been doing a good job of helping prospective female applicants see Kellogg as a place they want to be, too.
This article has been edited and republished with permissions from our sister site, Clear Admit.
Inside the History-Making Full-Time MBA Class of 2020 at USC Marshall
Announced at the end of July, the incoming full-time MBA Class of 2020 at the USC Marshall School of Business is making headlines across the country. Graduating exactly 100 years after the business school’s first cohort, the USC Marshall MBA Class of 2020 has made history as the first cohort at a top-ranked business school to feature more women than men.
Even without history-making demographics, the new 2020 cohort is a diverse group. Two-hundred and twenty one of the 2017 applicants were accepted, making an acceptance rate of 28 percent. The students come from a wide variety of backgrounds, and though the majority (25 percent) had an undergraduate major of business/commerce, also present are students with undergraduate degrees in engineering/computer science (18 percent), the humanities (17 percent), and economics (16 percent). At an average age of 28 years, the new USC students have an average of five years of work experience.
A look at the academic profile of the typical USC student reveals the programs competitive nature and commitment to rigorous academics. On average, incoming students had an undergraduate GPA of 3.50 and a GMAT score of 705.
In addition to gender, diversity represents itself in the 2020 cohort through the 30 percent of international students, representing 31 different countries around the world, including Iran, Israel, Ethiopia, Egypt and Pakistan, to name a few. About 21 percent of students from the United States are also made up of underrepresented minority groups.
Of course, the school’s achieving of gender parity is probably the most notable thing about this incoming class. Women have always been an underrepresented group within business and business schools—according to the AACSB, between 2012 and 2017 the number of women working towards full-time MBA degrees was below 38 percent. This reveals a huge contrast for women MBAs versus those in other graduate degree programs, where women make up over 50 percent of most graduate classes.
An overall look at the USC Marshall MBA Class of 2020 already reveals the ways more women in a program can have a broader impact on the school and the student’s future careers. “This year’s applicant pool was the strongest in our program’s history,” commented assistant dean and full-time MBA director at Marshall, Evan Bouffides. “They brought the highest GMAT score and the highest average GPA. The women in particular were extraordinarily well prepared.”
There may be a number of reasons why the number of women in MBA programs has historically remained low. Different studies have looked at factors like the time it takes to complete an MBA degree, work experience required, and the overall return on investment. Reasons may also reflect the gender pay gap, which makes the return on investment significantly lower for women, who studies show could make anywhere from 3 percent to 36 percent less than their male counterparts.
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Thankfully, schools like USC understand the benefits that women MBA graduates can add both to the school and workforce. Over recent years, the university has taken purposeful measures to increase gender diversity among applicants, such as programming focused on women. The investment of creating diversity at business schools mirrors an overall focus on diversity throughout the business world, which means that schools like Marshall can get ahead of the game in creating a diverse and appealing talent pool for employers.
“With more than 50 percent of our 2020 class women, it gives us a talent pipeline that employers are hungry to tap into as they go about increasing the diversity of their executive staffs,” said Mark Brostoff, Assistant Dean and Graduate Career Services Director at Marshal. “Recruiters are very happy with this great news.”
