A Recommendation Revolution Is Underway in MBA Admissions: What You Need to Know
I’m busy, you’re busy, your boss is most definitely busy. Indeed, publications ranging from Men’s Health to the Atlantic, the Washington Post to Forbes are all reporting that “busyness“ has become the new status symbol for our times. Which is part of what makes asking someone to write you a letter of recommendation for business school so daunting. Now, try telling that person that you actually need five different letters for five different schools. Oy vey.
As uncomfortable a spot as it puts applicants in—it’s no better for recommenders. Even your most vociferous supporter is going to wonder what in the world she’s gotten herself into when she realizes that helping you in your pursuit of acceptance to business school means taking time away from work or play or family or whatever else to labor over leadership assessment grids, each a little different from the one before, and write 10 slightly different answers to 10 slightly different questions. Here’s hoping that your top-choice school doesn’t happen to be the last one she gets around to…
Good news. The graduate management education industry recognizes the strain that letters of recommendation put on applicants and recommenders alike and has been wrestling with ways to make the process easier for everyone involved. To this end, the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) established a committee made up of admissions representatives from dozens of leading business schools to brainstorm about ways to lessen the burden while still collecting the third-party assessments of candidates that are so critical to the MBA application process.
GMAC Pilots Common MBA Letter of Recommendation
As an outgrowth of that committee’s work, GMAC last year piloted a common MBA letter of recommendation (LOR) that schools can choose to incorporate into their applications to reduce the burden placed on applicants and recommenders alike.
“The Common Letter of Recommendation (LOR) effort is intended to save you and recommenders valuable time by providing a single set of recommendation questions for each participating school,” reads the GMAC website. “This allows your recommenders to use the same answers for multiple letter submissions, alleviating the workload of having to answer different questions for each school multiple times. You benefit because it makes the ask for several different letters to be written on your behalf much easier.”
Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, NYU Stern School of Business, and Michigan’s Ross School of Business were among the first schools to pilot the Common LOR last year. In addition to a single set of open-ended essay questions, the pilot Common LOR also included a leadership assessment grid inviting recommenders to rate applicants on 16 “competencies and character traits” grouped into four main categories of achievement, influence, personal qualities and academic ability.
“At Johnson, we saw the Common LoR as a clear opportunity to improve the admissions process for candidates and their recommenders in a way that would also add value to our own assessment of applicants,” Judi Byers, Johnson executive director of admissions & financial aid, told Clear Admit. “A thorough and consistent review is important to us and the grid provides a straightforward base of insights that can be assessed and compared reliably while the accompanying letter adds meaningful detail and context,” she added.
Soojin Kwon, managing director of full-time MBA admissions and program at Ross, sees applicants and recommenders as the main beneficiaries of the Common LOR and is pleased that more schools are coming on board. “As more schools adopt it, applicants won’t have to feel like they’re burdening their recommender with completing multiple rec letters with different questions and ratings grids,” she told Clear Admit. “This year, more than a dozen of the top 20 schools are using it.”
Ross was also among the schools to first pilot the Common LOR last year, and Kwon served as part of the GMAC committee that helped craft it.
Common Questions Easy to Agree on, Common Leadership Grid Not
“What we found in using the Common LOR this year past year was that the questions gave us helpful insights into applicants, particularly on the important area of constructive feedback. The questions, however, were fairly similar to what we and other schools were using before, so it was easy for the AdCom to use it,” she notes.
Those questions are as follow:
- Please provide a brief description of your interaction with the applicant and, if applicable, the applicant’s role in your organization. (50 words)
- How does the performance of the applicant compare to that of other well-qualified individuals in similar roles? (E.g. what are the applicant’s principal strengths?) (500 words)
- Describe the most important piece of constructive feedback you have given the applicant. Please detail the circumstances and the applicant’s response. (500 words)
- Is there anything else we should know? (Optional)
“The rating grid was quite different from what we’d used in the past,” Kwon continued. “It was also the most difficult part for the GMAC advisory group to develop and get agreement upon. The group worked this past year to revise and simplify the grid so that AdComs could get more meaningful insights from it.”
This year, the 16 competencies and character traits from the original grid have been distilled to 12, with specific questions about analytical thinking and information seeking omitted. Johnson and Ross have both incorporated the revised leadership grid into the LOR distributed to applicants as part of their applications, as have most other schools that have this year decided to incorporate both the grid and open-ended essay question portions of the form. UT’s McCombs School of Business and Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business, notably, still seem to feature the earlier version of the leadership grid in their application, the one that calls on recommenders to assesses applicants on 16 competencies and traits.
Researchers at Columbia Business School Address MBA Gender Gap
Over the last few years, top business schools across the world have worked toward gender parity in their MBA programs—with considerable progress. Many MBA programs now admit more than 30 percent women, and a growing number of leading schools top the 40-percent mark. But amid these strides, another problem has emerged: an academic performance gap between male and female students. Recently, researchers at Columbia Business School (CBS) dug into the gender performance gap issue to understand why it happens and how to fix it.
After completing multiple empirical studies, including a survey of MBA students and a review of performance data, the researchers found that both students’ background and their behavior in class have the biggest impact on the gender performance gap. Further, the researchers found that the performance difference was most evident in technically focused classes, such as accounting and finance, and less so in socially oriented courses, such as leadership and marketing.
According to Michael Morris, CBS Leadership Professor and one of the study’s authors, the findings shed “new light” on the gender performance gap at top business schools. “But more importantly, they offer business school leaders directions for policies to effectively redress the grade gap,” he continued in a press release.
The researchers found that one of the main reasons behind the performance gap in technically oriented classes was the students’ background. After examining reported interests in both admissions applications and career counseling inventories, the researchers found that female students are more inclined toward the “poet” interest profile, while male students are more inclined toward the “quant.” For top MBA programs, this means that from the first day of class, male and female students come in with different interests, aptitudes, and experiences that will need to be addressed in order to break gender norms.
Gender norms were also a problem when it came to behavior in the MBA program. Researchers found that female students were typically less assertive, which hindered their learning in technical courses.
“Our research shows that female students far too often hold back and hesitate to ask the kinds of questions that would help them better master technical concepts and procedures, perhaps because it is inconsistent with the established gender norms linking men with technical ability. This has a profound effect on their overall achievement in MBA classes,” said author Aaron Wallen, Executive Director of the Management Division at Columbia’s School of Professional Studies and a former CBS lecturer.
To truly close the gender gap does not simply mean enrolling 50 percent female students, the researchers noted. Instead, top MBA programs also need to do the following three things:
- Sponsor programs that bring in more technically oriented female candidates.
- Conduct outreach to STEM undergraduate programs.
- Reduce required work experience to enroll younger students.
They also recommended including a training program for both faculty and students to teach them the skills for eliciting and managing participation in the classroom and other work settings.
To learn more about the research study—authored by CBS Professors Wallen, Morris, and Jackson G. Lu and INSEAD Professor Beth A. Devine—click here.
This article has been edited and republished with permissions from Clear Admit.
Building a Career after Graduation: Columbia Business School
Huzzah! You made it through the b-school ringer! Now ready for the fun part? Finding a job!
Do Women Entrepreneurs Get Less VC Funding? Wharton and Columbia Researchers Find a Large Gender Gap
Over the last few years, there has been a lot of talk about more women in business. From the promotion of organizations like the Forté Foundation—which seeks to enhance women in business—to CNBC claiming “the Golden Age for women entrepreneurs has finally begun,” enterprising women seem to be everywhere. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that the deck is stacked in their favor. In fact, researchers from Columbia Business School and The Wharton School found the opposite was true.
The Gender Gap in Startup Funding
In a paper published in the Academy of Management Journal titled, “We Ask Men to Win & Women Not to Lose: Closing the Gender Gap in Startup Funding,” researchers looked at how women fared compared to men when they were trying to get funding for their startups.
After reviewing footage from the TechCrunch Disrupt startup competition, the researchers found that women were asked entirely different types of questions about their companies compared to their male counterparts. Men received more questions about their project’s potential for growth, while women received questions on the opposite end, about their potential risks and losses. This difference in questioning had a measurable impact on the funding each startup received.
The research paper, written by Dana Kanze (a Columbia Business School Ph.D. student), Laura Huang (a Wharton School Professor), Mark A. Conley (a Columbia Psychology Ph.D.), and E. Tory Higgins (a Columbia Psychology Professor), sought to delve into the enormous gender gap revealed in venture capital funding. According to the paper, only 2 percent of VC funding goes to women entrepreneurs in spite of the fact that women own 38 percent of U.S. businesses and represent 7 percent of venture capital firms.
One of the keys to this drastic difference in funding was how VCs—both male and female—framed funding questions for women-created businesses. Kanze explained the thought process in a Forbes article.
“According to the psychological theory of regulatory focus, investors adopted what’s called a promotion orientation when quizzing male entrepreneurs, which means they focused on hopes, achievements, advancement, and ideals,” Kanze said. “Conversely, when questioning female entrepreneurs, they embraced a prevention orientation, which is concerned with safety, responsibility, security, and vigilance.”
Inside the Research
To study how this difference in questioning impacted women and men entrepreneurs, the research team reviewed the Q&A sessions of 189 startup entrepreneurs—12 percent of whom were women—held by 140 prominent venture capitalists—40 percent of whom were women. Using software to analyze each session, researchers discovered that 67 percent of questions posted to men were promotion-oriented while 66 percent of questions posted to women were prevention-oriented.
In the end, the study found that this difference in questioning led to a huge difference in VC funding. Among comparable companies, the research team found that businesses that were asked prevention-oriented questions raised (on average) $2.3 million in funds in 2017, while their promotion-focused counterparts raised $16.8 million—nearly seven times more.
“In fact, for every additional prevention question asked of an entrepreneur, the startup raised a staggering $3.8 million less, on average,” Kanze told Forbes. She continued, saying, “Controlling for factors that may influence funding outcomes—like measures of startups’ capital needs, quality, and age, as well as entrepreneurs’ past experience—we discovered that the prevalence of prevention questions completely explained the relationship between entrepreneur gender and startup funding.”
However, there was some good news. For female entrepreneurs who received prevention-focused questions but responded with promotion-type answers, they were able to raise $7.9 million, versus $563,000. This suggests that regardless of how VCs phrase their questions, entrepreneurs can recover much of their funding potential if they answer in the positive.
To test their findings, the research team conducted an experiment that recreated the TechCrunch Disrupt conditions with 194 VCs—30 percent of whom were women—and 106 entrepreneurs—47 percent of whom were women. After removing startup specific details, the team asked the VCs to allocate $400,000 to their chosen entrepreneur.
According to the Kanze in a Harvard Business Review article, the team found that: “Angel investors allocated an average of $81,113 to startups in the prevention question, promotion answer condition—1.6 times larger than the $52,369 average allocated to those in the prevention question, prevention answer condition. Similarly, ordinary investors gave an average of $96,321 to the prevention question, promotion answer condition—1.7 times larger than the $55,377 average given to the prevention question, prevention answer condition.”
Speaking with Professor Laura Huang
To gain additional insight into the results of the research paper, we spoke with Professor Laura Huang at the Wharton School. Here’s what she has to say.
- What was the most surprising result that came out of your study?
“It was surprising that both men and women investors were equally as likely to ask prevention-focused questions to women, as opposed to promotion-focused. It wasn’t that men were the only ones biased, but that both genders were equally as likely to be biased.”
- Do you have any advice for female entrepreneurs looking to raise venture capital?
“Stop it in its tracks. When you see something like this happening, stop it immediately and redirect the response so that you’re making yourself on equal footing. Don’t allow that train of thought to go through where you’re getting asked prevention-focused questions and investors are focused on the risk. Answer the question that’s asked but redirect your response toward possibilities and success.”
- How do you think VC funding can change for the future to close the gender gap?
“Part of it is an awareness on the investors’ side. It’s also up to the entrepreneurs to redirect each question toward the right focus. A lot of this gap is implicit. Investors don’t realize they’re asking prevention-focused questions of women; they just automatically ask certain questions to each gender. Awareness around the tendency toward prevention-focused questions for women entrepreneurs and a focus on redirection toward promotion is key.”
Metro News & Notes: The Business of Improv, Souring on Wall Street, and More
Good morning and happy Friday!
Here are a few stories you may have missed from the week that was …
How Improv Methods from Comedy Can Lift Business Performance | Knowledge@Wharton
There aren’t many part-time comedians and business school professors, but Bob Kulhan doesn’t fit the norm. An adjunct professor at both Duke University and the Columbia Business School, Kulhan is the founder and CEO of Business Improv and co-author of the new book “Yes And”: The Art of Business Improvisation. Speaking on the Knowledge@Wharton podcast about his new work, Kulhan talks about his improv-upbringing in the Chicago comedy scene and how it can be applied in a business setting.
When discussing those in business who struggle to think on the fly, Kulhan notes, “There are all sorts of biases that keep us from just communicating with people and keeping an open mind. What we look for in improvisation is a postponement in judgment and the critical thinking to another side so that we can take in and absorb the offers and opportunities that are being presented to us.”
The concept of “Yes And” (the building block of improv comedy structure), Kulhan notes, can help build individual development, which then helps build team development. “When great minds and intelligent people are sharing thoughts … the collective consciousness of the group will outweigh that of any individual,” he says.
Check out the Knowledge@Wharton podcast today.
A Record Percentage of MBAs Don’t Want to Work on Wall Street | Bloomberg
Training the Street, a New York City-based finance training firm, affirmed what many had already begun to suspect: Wall Street jobs are becoming less appealing.
The new survey data found that MBA graduates would like to work at the largest “bulge bracket banks” at the lowest rates in eight years—right after the peak of the economic recession. Scott Rostan, Founder and CEO of Training The Street, said in a release, “Banks are still a dominant hiring force for MBAs and continue to attract top talent, but working for larger, established companies off of Wall Street is becoming more attractive to MBAs as they offer a different type of lifestyle.”
Bloomberg writer Julie Verhage notes that interest in finance is not necessarily disappearing, however. “Other employment options hit record levels of preference this year,” Verhage notes. “Top choices included consulting firms at 20 percent, corporate development at a Fortune 2000 company at 13 percent and boutique banks at 12 percent.”
Find out more about the survey here.
AI Creeps Into the Work of MBA Career Advisers | Financial Times
The AI revolution may be a little less Terminator 2 (so far) than people might have expected, but it’s still changing the MBA game. In a new piece from the Financial Times, writer Jonathan Moules examines several of the world’s top business schools utilizing AI advantages for students, including Vmock, a helpful student résumé assistant created by grads from the Chicago Booth School of Business and Northwestern Kellogg School of Management.
“More than 100 higher education institutions, including 17 of the top 20 business schools on the FT MBA ranking list, pay an annual subscription for Vmock’s software,” Moules writes. The cost to use the program is a modest fee of $19.95, with over one million résumés already uploaded.
Like Vmock, much of the AI-infused technology used in business schools was “born out of a frustration the founders felt as MBA students themselves.” Moules’ sources insist that the infusion of tech will not replace the hands-on help of career advisers, but I doubt many of them are ready for Terminator 2 world either.
Top Scholarships at Columbia Business School
Earning an MBA from Columbia Business School (CBS) is an incredible opportunity. It is no secret that CBS offers an enviable education, but it is also located in the heart of New York City, where MBA students will be surrounded by opportunities and industry giants. Of course, being in the fastest-paced, most populous city in the United States comes at a price. Literally. New York is listed as number one on Investopedia’s Top 10 Most Expensive Cities in the U.S. Luckily, CBS offers a wealth of scholarships to make grad school in the city more manageable.
Merit-Based Scholarships
Merit-based scholarships are an excellent option for motivated students with impressive undergraduate GPAs and work experience. Also, if students do not receive a fellowship in their first year, they will have another opportunity in their second year.
• Forté Foundation Scholarship: The Forté Foundation offers scholarships to outstanding women through their Forte Fellows program. The fellowship exists to encourage larger numbers of women to pursue an MBA education. There is no application information required from students at CBS, as nominees are selected by the school’s director of admissions. Forté Fellows receive multiple benefits, including participation in the MBA Women Leadership and Financial Services FAST Track Conferences. Students in the program are also included in the Forté Fellow resume book, which is distributed to Forté Sponsor companies like J.P. Morgan and IBM Global Business Services.
• Toigo Fellowship: CBS is one of the Robert Toigo Foundation’s featured MBA programs. The Toigo Foundation’s mission is to encourage diversity in finance, so this fellowship is available to under-represented groups. Driven minority students will be eligible for consideration. Fellows attend a weekend summer session to prepare them for business school. During this session, students are assigned mentors to guide them throughout school and their careers.
• Columbia Fellows Program: Columbia Fellows is available only for the first year of the program. The scholarship includes a partial- or full-tuition award for applicants who have shown the creativity and initiative to be true leaders in business.
• Board of Overseers China & India Fellowships: This fellowship is available to students from China and India. Scholarships are awarded by the Board of Overseers, which is comprised of industry giants across a variety of fields.
• Meyer Feldberg Distinguished Fellowship Program: This fellowship is extremely competitive and is granted to students who have shown outstanding leadership skills and academic initiative. Students applying must demonstrate an impressive track record in areas like entrepreneurship and social ventures. Fellows are given full tuition and lifelong membership in the prestigious network of award recipients and donors.
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• R.C. Kopf Fellowships: The R.C. Kopf Fellowship is granted to students with an interest in international business. Italian, French, British and U.S. citizens can all earn the Kopf Fellowship. Applicants should be accomplished in academia, but also exhibit personal and professional behavior that makes them an asset to the community.
• Gerardo Werthein Scholarship: This scholarship is specifically for MBA students who have lived or studied in Argentina and who are interested in returning to work in Argentina. The scholarship is granted based on financial need.
• Ela Lemelbaum Scholarship: Israeli students are eligible to receive the Ela Lemelbaum Scholarship, which provides tuition support options for both first and second years of study. Preference goes to students who have studied at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. This scholarship is renewable during the second year.
Other Scholarship Opportunities
CBS also offers a variety of need-based scholarships to students, which may yield tuition support ranging from $7,500 to $30,000. Need-based scholarships are based on every aspect of a student’s assets. About 50 perfect of applicants are granted need-based awards. These scholarships are automatically renewed during a student’s second year. There is a rigorous four-part application process. Students may also seek out and apply for external scholarships.
