Poets and Quants

U.S. News puts Harvard Business School (above) in a direct tie for first with Stanford.

The most obvious similarities between Dartmouth Tuck School of Business and the Harvard Business School is that they are both in New England, offer a general management approach to the MBA, teach largely on the basis of case study, boast some of the best classroom teachers in business education, and have access to the world’s leading and most prestigious employers of MBAs. They differ in another important aspect as well: both institutions are almost completely focused on full-time MBA education. There’s no part-time MBA program, no Executive MBA program, and no business undergraduates to distract the core mission of delivering the best possible full-time, two-year MBA experience. So the faculty, with the exception of their executive education work, isn’t pulled in as many directions as they are at other B-schools.

Top Ten Reasons to Go to Dartmouth?

1. You didn’t get into Harvard, but were lucky enough to get into Tuck, one of the five best MBA programs in the world.
2. The MBA alumni network is arguably the best and most supportive of any business school.
3. You want a premium MBA experience at a school that is completely focused on the full-time, two-year MBA and not a host of other programs that detract from it.
4. You thrive in smaller, intimate settings.
5. You prefer a highly collaborative and supportive student culture.
6. You want to create important and enduring relationships with fellow students.
7. You want to create important and lasting relationships with faculty.
8. You want a general management perspective.
9. You like small towns and tend to dislike big cities.
10. You adore the outdoors.

Top Ten Reasons to Go to Harvard?

1. It’s number one. And if you’re from the U.S. or outside the U.S., you’ll never have to explain why you went there.
2. It’s number one for lots of reasons: incomparable resources, prestige scale, the status of its alums, and the very best faculty most attuned to real business, not merely academic research.
3. You want a premium MBA experience at a school that is completely focused on the full-time, two-year MBA and not a host of other programs that detract from it.
4. You thrive in a large environment and don’t mind being a small fish in a bigger pond.
5. You think the case method of teaching is the greatest invention ever discovered in education.
6. You want an MBA with a general management perspective.
7. You like the idea of competing with people in and outside the classroom for attention, grades, internships, and jobs.
8. You don’t mind living up to extremely high expectations that are inevitable the moment you say you have a Harvard MBA.
9. You dislike small towns and enjoy major yet manageable cities.
10. You love Boston or want to live in Boston and root for the Boston Red Sox.

There’s a world of difference between these two excellent graduate schools of business. Most notably:

Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business. Photo by John A. Byrne

Geography: Both schools are in the northeastern corner of the U.S. known as New England, but the difference between Hanover, New Hampshire, and Boston, Mass., is a world apart. Hanover is the quintessential New England college town. It’s quaint, picture perfect after a fresh snowfall, and fairly isolated. You fly here into a tiny airport in West Lebanon, tsix miles south of Hanover. When the weather turns bad, you face a white-knuckle flight onto the short landing strip that’s carved into a mountainside. Sleepy Hanover rolls up the sidewalks pretty early, with little variety in restaurants and bars.  The Canoe Club, on Main St. in Hanover is pretty much it. Boston is a two-hour drive from the Tuck School and is one of the world’s most dynamic and inviting cities. Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, is just minutes awa from Harvardy. So is world-class arts and culture of all kinds. But the winter months can be just as brutal in Boston as it can be in Hanover.

Size: With a target class size of 240 students, the Tuck School serves up an “intimate scale” MBA program with one of the smallest total MBA entrollments of any elite school. It’s the difference between being in a core class with 50 fellow students versus 90 at Harvard: it’s easier to get “air time” in a class at Tuck without being a hog and it’s more likely your professor knows everyone in the class. When 50% of your grades are based on class participation, that’s a more comforting fact. The small size of the place certainly assures that every student knows each other. In fact, it’s almost close to impossible for someone not to have had a fellow student in a class or a club. “It’s like the old TV program ‘Cheers,’” says Tuck Professor Paul Argenti, who has also taught at Harvard. “Everybody knows your name. You can mold an incredible world when you take in only 240 students a class.” On the other hand, everybody knows your business. At Harvard, you can more easily pick and choose the groups you want to attached yourself to. Total full-time MBA enrollment at Tuck is only 510, versus Harvard’s 1,837.

Culture: The size and location of Dartmouth create a fairly unique culture and one that is very different from Harvard. While it’s a myth that competition is cut-throat among students at Harvard, it’s also true that the HBS environment is more competitive and less collaborative than Tuck. In fact, a few years ago, some recruiters told faculty here that Tuckies were too nice and respectful of each other. Tuck profs have since notched up the competitiveness in the classroom. Still, it’s nothing like Harvard. The bonding that occurs at the Tuck School among students is second-to-none due to its size, the fact that most first-years reside on its compact B-school campus, and because of Hanover itself (there aren’t many places to disappear). Very close relationships are formed between students and faculty at Tuck for the same reasons. Tuckies are decidedly an outdoorsy bunch: in the winter, students are likely to engage in ice hockey matches, skiing, and ice skating; in the summer, they’re off hiking on Mount Moosilauke on the edge of the White Mountains National Forest, rowing and canoeing on the Connecticut River, or playing rugby and squash. Harvard’s culture is not nearly as tight-knit or outdoorsy.

Facilities: The campus of Dartmouth’s Tuck School is a compellingly attractive mix of brick Georgian buildings and modern state-of-the-art brick and copper clad buildings. The Tuck campus is nicely compact: 11 connected buildings, most of them brand new or newly renovated. Stell Hall, with its beautiful cathedral ceiling, carved oak interior and welcoming fireplace, sits in contrast to the soaring glass atrium and massive granite hearth in the newly constructed Raether Hall. Both spaces–reflecting the old and the new–are among the most impressive faciliities of any business schools. Tuck’s three residence halls arguably make up the best MBA dormitory complex in the world. Harvard Business School, on the other hand, is like a university onto itself with 33 separate buildings on 40 acres of property along the Charles River. Harvard has its own state-of-the-art fitness center, a massive library, and a chapel. Strategy guru Michael Porter and his Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness even has his own building on campus. There is no other business school that can even remotely match Harvard for its expansive classrooms and study halls. Yet, there is something special at Dartmouth which gives Harvard a run for its money despite the difference in scale.

Teaching Methods: The case method is a core part of the curriculum at both Tuck and HBS. But at Harvard, the case study thoroughly dominates. Sure there are team projects, simulations and experiential learning in the mix, but it’s primary learning tool at Harvard is the case study. There are 30 cases in a course. The ten courses you’ll take at Harvard in the first year alone will require that you read 300 case studies. As a current HBS student who blogs under the non de plume “MilitarytoBusiness” explains, the average student in a 90-plus person class gains air time to comment on a case every other class. “That means that the professor determines half of your grade on an average of 15 comments over the period of three-to-five months. That’s not an incredibly deep well of information to help differentiate 94 highly talented students,” he says. That is the consequence of case studies in a 90-plus person class environment. Obviously, the system breeds a certain level of competition. If you’re at Tuck, a lot of the cases you’ll be taught were created at Harvard. If you’re at Harvard, pretty much none of the cases you’ll be taught are from Tuck. The more singificant difference may well be the increased accessibility of the faculty at Tuck given its size and location. Tuck boasts one of the lowest faculty-to-student ratios of any business school so profs have far more time here to spend with students than teachers do at most other schools. Faculty often have students over for dinner in their homes, something that is much less likely to occur at a big city school such as Columbia, Chicago, Harvard, or Wharton.

Program Focus: Both MBA programs have a general management focus. The biggest single difference is in the wealth of offerings at Harvard. With a full-time faculty of 228 versus Tuck’s 47, HBS offers an unusual breadth and diversity of courses. Harvard lists 130 electives in his course catalog, compared to 81 at Dartmouth. If you want to focus on a more narrow specialty, you’re more likely to be disappointed at Dartmouth. Tuck has just two electives in real estate, for example, while Harvard has six. If you’re interested in entrepreneurship, Harvard has 27 courses versus Tuck’s eight. So the sacrifice you pay at Tuck for the intimacy and bonding is that there are fewer options among electives.

On-Campus Recruiting: If you’re aiming for a top MBA job at McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley, the Harvard- or Dartmouth-punched MBA will easily get you in the door. Tuck attracts as many prestige MBA employers as Harvard. But your access to on-campus recruiters may be better because you won’t have to compete with hundreds of students for conversations during recruiting events or for slots on an interview schedule. If you’re wanting a job at a hot West Coast technology company, such as Google or Apple, however, you’re going to have to work at it. Google doesn’t recruit at Tuck and Apple does limited interviewing there.

Alumni Network: You can’t really go wrong by being part of either the Harvard or the Tuck alumni network. Obviously, no school can beat Harvard in the number of grads who hold CEO jobs at the largest public corporations. Still, close to 80% of Dartmouth’s alums reach C-suite level by their 20th year, while roughly half own their own businesses by that time. Over the years, BusinessWeek surveys of MBA graduates show that Harvard, Stanford and Dartmouth boast the strongest alumni networks of any business schools in the world. With 41,378 living MBA alums, Harvard’s network is larger, more diverse, and more global. The critical mass of that network cannot be overestimated. Dartmouth’s 8,600 living MBA alums are about a fifth of Harvard’s.Yet, you would be surprised at the deep commitment and cohesiveness of the Tuck alumni body.  For our money, this is the best MBA alumni network in the world. How can we make such a claim? We’ll quote that old cliche about how money speaks and talk is cheap. The proof is in the percentage of alums who routinely donate money to the school. Tuck leads all business schools by a huge margin, with an alumni participation rate of 66.7% in its most recent fund-raising campaign–and Tuck has had 60%-plus percent participation for the past 25 years. No other top business school, including Harvard, comes close to 50%, while the average of Tuck’s peer schools come in at less than 25%. Put another way, the Tuck participation rate is three times the average of the top 20 business schools. It demonstrates the alumni’s remarkable loyalty to and relationship with the school and its students. “If someone wants to go to San Diego and looks in our database and finds 20 alums there, he or she can get return emails from 19 of them in one day,” says Paul Danos, dean of the Tuck School. “There’s a comfort to have that network for the rest of your life.” As for where the alums are, at Harvard they are pretty much everywhere, given their numbers. Dartmouth counts just 848 alums in California, with the highest concentration in Massachusetts (1,332) and New York (967). Outside the U.S., the most alums are in Japan (143), the United Kingdom (116), Canada (51), and China (33).

Rankings: In the rankings, Harvard predictably performs better than Dartmouth. The P&Q rank–which factors into consideration all the major rankings weighted by their individual authority–puts Harvard at number one and Tuck at number five. The only major survey that gives Dartmouth a slight edge is Forbes which rates HBS at three, directly behind number two Tuck based solely on the return-on-investment grads have achieved after five years (Stanford is first). These are the up-to-date rankings from each ranking organization.

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Historical Rankings by BusinessWeek: Over a 22-year period and 11 biennial rankings, BusinessWeek has never put either of these two highly prestigious business schools at the head of the class. However, it will be little surprise to many to see that Harvard, with its largest graduating classes and greater number of recruiters, has definitely been ranked higher than Dartmouth over the years. HBS has generally come in at the number three spot, going as high as two twice and as low as number five on three different occasions. Dartmouth has had a more disappointing run in the BusinessWeek survey, ranking as low as 16th in 2000. In only three surveys has Dartmouth ranked at a single digit level: it came in at number three in the inaugural 1988 ranking and number six in 1990 and 1992. Since then, Dartmouth has been ranked 10th on four different occasions, and even worse, 11th, 12th, and 13th in three other ranking years. It’s worth remembering that BusinessWeek’s ranking measures customer satisfaction, specifically recent graduates and corporate recruiters. We believe the small size of Dartmouth’s graduating class hinders its performance in the BusinessWeek survey. Because fewer recruiters come to campus due to the smaller supply of MBAs, the school gets penalized in BW’s methodology. Harvard doesn’t escape methodology issues, either. Some recruiters downgrade the school for no other reason other than the price tag of its students. That’s generally why Harvard has never been number one in the BusinessWeek survey.

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Historical Rankings by The Financial Times: Unlike BusinessWeek’s rankings, The Financial Times includes business schools from all over the world. So the FT is ranking both Harvard  and Dartmouth against such places as London Business School, which ranked number one in this survey in 2010 and 2009, and INSEAD, which ranked fifth these last two years. Predictably, Harvard has done much better than Dartmouth in the 11 surveys charted below, ranking number one twice, second on five occasions, and third a trio of times. The lowest rank the FT has ever awarded Harvard was fifth place in 2008. Dartmouth, on the other hand, has never had a higher rank than 7 in 2005 and has been ranked as low as 15th twice and 13th on three occasions, including the past two consecutive years. Tuck’s showing in the Financial Times survey is a reflection of the methodology’s attempt to measure what the newspaper calls “the diversity and international reach” of the school. Among other things, the FT takes into account what it calls “international mobility,” “international experience,” and “international board,” factors that favor European schools where countries are not much larger than most states in the U.S.

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Admissions: Both HBS and Tuck are highly selective schools. Harvard sends offer letters to just 12.2% of its applicants, while Dartmouth accepts 18.8%. Harvard’s average GMAT score for the Class of 2011 is 719 versus an average of 712 for Dartmouth.

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Enrollment: Dartmouth’s class size is less than half that of Harvard, resulting in a more intimate and close-knit community environment. The numbers for women, international and minority students are for the Class of 2011.

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Poets & Quants: Though you might expect a lot more poets at Tuck, you’d be surprised to discover that students at Dartmouth with undergraduate degrees in the humanities are few: 26% versus Harvard’s 40% or Stanford’s 47%.  On the other hand, Tuck is much more open to enrolling business undergrads than Harvard. About 41% of Dartmouth’s Class of 2011 have business or economics undergraduate degrees, making them the biggest single chunk of the class, while only 26% have such degrees at Harvard.

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Jobs and Pay: Even these two elite business schools were impacted by the severe recession of 2009. Nearly a third of Dartmouth’s Class of 2009 didn’t have jobs when they graduated and nearly a quarter of Harvard MBAs were in the same boat. Grads from both schools fared much better three months after commencement, but these numbers are rare lows for the two of the best business schools in the world. Starting pay for Tuckies is third best, after only Stanford and Harvard. The estimates of median pay over a full career come from a study by PayScale done for BusinessWeek and do not include stock options or equity stakes by entrepreneurs. Harvard grads were first in this study, while Dartmouth grads came in fifth, behind HBS, Wharton, Columbia, and Stanford. The flow of grads into higher-paying finance careers at Wharton and Columbia help those schools on this measurement.