Hult: A Powerhouse Or A Pariah?

Hult International Business School

‘IT’S BASICALLY UP TO YOU TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE RESOURCES’

A “small minority” of students have trouble with the English language, Rasmussen says. “They’re doing all the reading and they’re doing all the exercises, they’re just not as participatory,” Rasmussen says.

Hult students and alumni are reluctant to levy serious criticism at the school because, as one alumnus tells Poets&Quants, they are “married to” Hult. Even so, what they do say on the record is telling enough.

Thomas Sanchez, a Hult MBA student set to graduate from the Boston campus in August 2014, says the school provides a high-quality education and good career-entry services, but students must work hard to reap the benefits. “It’s basically up to you if you take advantage of the resources or you don’t,” says Sanchez, 27, who came to Hult from six years in management for 3M in Mexico, scored 600 on the GMAT, and received a scholarship amounting to about 30% of his tuition. “They do give you personalized attention, if students take advantage of it.”

SOME STUDENTS HAD GMAT SCORES AS LOW AS 450

Nebojsa Radovic, 29, who graduated last year with a Master’s in International Marketing, describes his Hult education as “good but not great” compared to top schools, though he believes Hult is working on improving. “I learned what I wanted to learn. I learned about the way you do business in the United States, how entrepreneurship works in the United States. Business schools are in the end all about a network that you get.” Some Hult students had relatively low GMAT scores, but having to work on teams with students of varying abilities provided important real-world skills, Radovic says.

Kilean Watson, coming to the end of his Hult MBA, believes part of the challenge for Hult is its recruitment practices. “Recruiters over-promise on stuff that Hult cannot necessarily deliver,” he says. And, he adds, recruiters fail to weed out applicants who were not suitable. “It turned out that a big chunk of the MBA group were under-prepared for such a program,” Watson says.

Philip Hult admits the school has some poor students. “You will always have a top end of the class and a bottom end of the class at any school. As the school has grown, the number of bad students, even if the percentage is still five per cent, the actual numbers increase. What is crucial is that that difference between the top and bottom doesn’t grow too great. When we talk to students, they will always say, ‘I wish the bottom five per cent of the class wasn’t here.'”

This is the second of a two-part series on Hult International Business School. The first part ran yesterday under the headline “The Story Behind The Remarkable Growth Of The World’s Largest Graduate School Of Business.”

DON’T MISS: THE STORY BEHIND THE REMARKABLE GROWTH OF THE WORLD’S LARGEST GRADUATE BUSINESS SCHOOL