Wharton Pokes Fun At Rival Business Schools

The father is angry and adamant with his two unemployed MBA sons. They just graduated from Harvard Business School and Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business yet seem completely uninterested in landing jobs.

“Look, why don’t I give you access to your trust fun money now and get the hell out of my house,” he tells his two sons.

Of course, it’s all in good fun, part of the annual Wharton Follies show that played three live performances in front of the student body and faculty in late February.

The MBA students at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School take satirical aim at Chicago Booth, MIT Sloan, Harvard and Stanford in the 39th annual Wharton Follies. The school’s MBAs gleefully portray MIT Sloanies as nerds, HBS and Stanford MBA candidates as arrogant trust fund babies, and Boothies as students who go to Chicago only to disappear from the world.

Among the new video skits is one based on a Jimmy Kimmel’s “Celebrities Reading Mean Tweets” in which Wharton professors read real examples of silly, irreverent and ‘mean’ reviews they received from students. The faculty, in particular, was said to love this video (see below).

There’s also a business school version of Pitbull’s “International Love” that describes the more adolescent aspects of business school life, a treatment of some of the stereotypical behaviors of business school students taken to the extreme, a nostalgic look at aspects of Wharton shown in a reverse, and a series of movie trailers that poke fun at other business schools.

In that latter segment, a Chicago Booth segment opens with a young professional saying, “I just want to apologize to my mom, my dad, and my one other friend. It was my decision and I’m scared, so scared. I got into Booth.”

“Oh, that’s great,” responds the mother. “What kind of booth? Like at Applebee’s?”

“No mom, the business school in Chicago.”

“Oh, you mean Kellogg?”

As the narrator of the skit points out later, in a play on the line that the University of Chicago is the place where fun goes to die, “Millions of tuition dollars have been spent yet no happy Booth students have ever been found.”