On Age Discrimination In MBA Admissions and Rookie Hype

During our first light conversation, she made it very clear to me that she was ONLY considering Harvard and Stanford. And she was so convicted in her tone that I dared not utter the names of some other fantastic schools that I thought she might consider based on her goals.

Thing is, she isn’t even applying this year. She is a 1st or 2nd year consultant (currently on international assignment) who is gearing up to apply in 2013. She’s already taken the GMAT and scored a 50 on the math, and is being very hard on herself to break 42 on the verbal to even begin to be satisfied with her overall score (the poor thing would probably drink HEMLOCK if she got the measly 47/40 that I did; God bless her). And for all of her hard-driving ambition, she is one of the nicest and most gracious folks I’ve ever met at these events. People like her make it clear to me why these two schools will often have an average age a year younger than their peers.

And many of the career trajectories of these kind of folk is based on the environment in which they were raised. One of my recommenders is a Stanford GSB graduate. Their spouse is an HBS graduate. Now, if their kid chooses business as a profession, do you really think he’s going to wait until he’s 28 to get his MBA? And do you think he’ll be casting a “wide net” and be considering several well-respected programs like me, Mr. Public School guy from the GHETTO? Methinks not. Not with two wealthy, C-level executive parents with degrees from Harvard and Stanford (both schools also ask you if you have a parent, relative or spouse who is a student or alumnus). It’ll be as natural as it was for Ivanka Trump to march off to Wharton. And I don’t blame any of them. That’s life.

The Myth of Exhausted Potential

In all actuality, most of the commentary on why there are so few 30+ folks in prestige, full-time MBA programs makes sense to me. The only time that I really become peeved is when someone (usually NOT an ad-com member or consultant, to their credit) speaks of people over 30 as if our potential has been exhausted simply by being 5-10 years older than the rest of our would-be cohort.

The truth is that most people who ever achieve tremendous success do so in their 40s and 50s–not their twenties OR their 30s for that matter. Even when I look at the landscape in a place like Silicon Valley where there are tons of brilliant and amazingly successful young people, I still see more  Guy Kawasaki’s than Mark Zuckerbergs playing that game.

And even when we do see people become outrageously successful at very young ages (people like Zuck, Michael Dell, etc.), these people are typically not MBA types. They are technicians who have usually logged 10+ years of experience in their craft before “hitting it big”. They are just as experienced as a senior manager with 10-15 years of experience in the same industry.

By contrast, the kind of skills that one gleans from an MBA are rarely honed at age 6 like when Ray Lewis was playing Pop Warner football in my hometown or when Beyonce was entering talent shows while in elementary school. They are also rarely honed at 12 or 15, like Zuck programming at Phillips Exeter academy or when Mike Dell first began tinkering with computers–years before he ever gave a thought to forming their iconic companies.

I do believe, however, that the proliferation of exceptionally successful people at young ages has encouraged a notion that if someone hasn’t become wildly successful at a young age then their potential has been exhausted. That level of success A) is most likely to happen later in life and B) is more tied to personality than education, which is why most people who achieve it don’t have prestigious degrees.

What top MBA programs purport to produce, however–people who make a difference in the organizations they are apart of–is possible at any age. Those who apply to these schools have typically done it our entire lives and we will continue to do so whether we get in or not. I’ve never been one to chase success for the sake of success. I have been my most successful while doing things that I’ve enjoyed and believed mattered. And when you consider how much of success involves failing first, there is a lot of humility to be gained during the journey of most entrepreneurs that someone who wants success for the sake of success would never subject themselves to.

On Taking Risks

My last spec of fear on this subject is that someone like me might be penalized for having taken risks, despite the fact that many schools say that is the kind of person they look for. The funny thing about risk is that the same people who might frown after hearing about a big loss that you took as the result of risk would call you brilliant had everything worked out famously.

While I have consistently taken interdepartmental rotations and/or promotions of some sort in my career, I have also sacrificed promotions in order to put more time into what I loved to do. When I was an engineering supervisor some years ago, my district manager told me point blank that I was #1 on his list to be promoted and that the position was mine within 18 months if I only continued to perform and would check on my career development plan that I was willing to relocate.

At the time, I was running my first small internet company and was in the middle to revamping its revenue model. I knew that if I went after that promotion, I would have to shut my business down. Just vying for that promotion would have meant 12 hour work days for a year and a half. Then when I got the promotion, that would be my permanent work schedule.