MIT’s Sloan School vs. Harvard Business School

MIT Sloan

Thereā€™s no doubt that MITā€™s Sloan School of Management and the Harvard Business Schools offer two of the finest and most prestigious MBAs in the world. Theyā€™re both in greater Boston, with MIT in Cambridge and HBS in Boston; they both have a general management approach; and both are fortunate to attract the worldā€™s best students and faculty.

The flagship program at both schools is the full-time, two-year MBA. Harvard has been more protective of its MBA degree than MIT which offers a variety of other graduate-degree granting programs in business, including an Executive MBA.

MIT also has a dual degree program in which 50 students a year work toward both an MBA as well as an MS in science and engineering. Thereā€™s also a masterĀ  of science in management studies, a one-year degree done in partnership with a select group of international schools. And there is a one year Master of Finance degree in which incoming students arrive in the sumer for a turbo finance class. This year, MIT has enrolled an entire cohort of 60 students in that program.

Hereā€™s how these wo excellent schools compare with each other:

Geography: No difference here at all. Both schools are in Boston, one of the worldā€™s most dynamic and inviting cities. It is both an academic Disneyland and a city of working class folks. Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, is just minutes away from Harvard. So is world-class arts and culture of all kinds. The winter months can be tough, with lots of cold and snow.

Size: MITā€™s entering class of just under 400 students is less than half that of the Harvard Business School of more than 900. But itā€™s still considerably larger than Dartmouth whre the target class size is 240. Nonetheless, the scale of the MIT program is a big difference from Harvard where itā€™s far easier to get lost in the crowd. Total full-time MBA enrollment at MIT is only 792, versus Harvardā€™s 1,837.

Culture: While itā€™s a myth that competition is cut-throat among students at Harvard, itā€™s also true that the HBS environment is more competitive and intense. Size helps to breed some of this competitiveness among students, but so does the dominance of the case study method of teaching (see below) and the grading system. MIT is another story. Case studies are no more important than lectures or team projects, and the smallish size of the student body makes it far more likely that everyone in the class knows everyone else. ā€œWeā€™re a small school, and itā€™s all about the culture and the community here,ā€ says Debbie Berechman, executive director of MBA programs at Sloan. ā€œItā€™s an environment of ideas and innovation. The culture is collaborative, innovative, and energetic. Having a positive impact is one of our values. People are very much focused on the future and on opportunities. Itā€™s very laidback and accessible, very ideas-based.ā€

Facilities: Harvard Business School is like a university onto itself with 33 separate buildings on 40 acres of property along the Charles River. HBS 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. At MIT, five core buildings make up the Sloan School on the east campus of the institute. A new 250,000 square foot building, dubbed E-62 for its location on the east side of the campus, will officially open. Itā€™s a world class, modern four-floor structure with new classrooms, study rooms, and a 200-seat dining hall. The Sloan School, unlike Harvard, does not have its own library, but rather shares it with the university.

Teaching Methods: At MIT, thereā€™s a bit of everything: lectures, simulations, action-learning projects, and case studies. ā€œItā€™s an evenly distributed pie chart across all of them,ā€ says Berechman. ā€œThe core to a large extent is lectures and cases and simulations. There is a team project in the organizational processes class, and there is a communications lab as part of communications.ā€ 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.Ā In contrast, there is no forced grading curve at MIT as there is at Harvard. Faculty individually decide how to grade in each class and many feel that there is significant grade inflation. Oddly, MIT has a 5.0 grading scale (students need a 4.0 to graduate).

Program Focus: Unlike Harvard where the core curriculum takes up the first year of the program, MIT has a one semester core with just five classes and the option of one elective. There are no waivers, regardless of your level of experience or your background in any of the core subjects. The incoming class at MIT is divided into six cohorts which are then carved into ten teams that are meant to be as diverse as possible. At Harvard, the incoming class is divided into sections of 90 students each who go through the core classes together as well.

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