A New Trend? Wharton Adds An MBA Essay

A NEW TREND IN THE APPLICANT POOL: MORE CANDIDATES FROM THE TECH SECTOR

Asked about trends in the latest applicant pool, Reilly says that “one of the most notable ones was an increase in applications from candidates working in tech roles. That is something we have been seeing on the outbound side for years. Now we are starting to see that on the inbound side. The firms are seeing value in the MBA as well as saying, ‘Hey wait a minute, we are getting all these folks later in their careers. What if we started to send more of our people to business school?’ We are talking to some of the bigger established tech firms and seeing more of their people now come through the door. Companies are seeing a lot of value in MBA training, particularly around scale. When you think about how to grow an enterprise — whether a startup or an established company — they are increasingly looking at MBAs for that scalability.”

Last year, only 6% of Wharton’s incoming students had backgrounds in technology, the Internet or e-commerce, roughly the same percentage as investment management. Some 23% boasted work experience in consulting, while the largest single sector background was finance, representing 34% of the entering MBA students.

Reilly adds that Wharton had another successful year with the proportion of women in its applicant pool. “We have put a lot of effort into attracting women over the last ten years,” she says. “We have really been focused on it, and we are starting to be seen as a destination for women, as a place to find a community where they can lead and contribute. The numbers there held up really nicely.”

There were no significant changes to the international student pool this past year, and roughly 10% of this year’s applicants applied to Wharton with a score from the Graduate Record Examination instead of a GMAT. “That has been fairly stable for us,” Reilly says.

FINAL NUMBERS ON CLASS OF 2018 STILL BEING GATHERED

In the 2014-2015 admissions cycle, Wharton admitted 1,302 candidates out of 6,590 applicants, for an acceptance rate of 19.8%. The enrolled class of 861 boasted a new record average GMAT score of 732, up four points from 728 a year earlier. Some 43% of last year’s entering class was composed of women, while 32% hailed from countries outside the U.S. Given the 1% increase in the applicant pool this past year, there should be no significant changes to those year-earlier figures.

Final numbers, of course, aren’t yet in on admits and enrolled students for this recently completed season. “It’s that time of year when the book is barely closed on last year and we are already into the next year,” explains Reilly, who was preparing for an event today for her senior team in career management.

Though Wharton has been a pioneer in offering online MOOC courses in business, including specalizations or series of sequenced courses in such disciplines as TK, Reilly says admissions is not giving preferential treatment to candidates based on competition of those MOOCs. “It’s still early days,” she says. “We haven’t seen a lot of it. It’s something we do look favorably upon because it’s a way for a student with a non-traditonal backround to say, ‘I really like professor X or subject Y.’ But I hesitate to say that it’s a decision factor for us because it’s too soon and too small a sample set.”

BESIDES NEW ESSAY REQUIREMENT, NO OTHER CHANGES IN ADMISSIONS EXPECTED

It was only two years ago that Wharton began requiring candidates to complete just a single 500-word essay for its 2014-2015 application. In making that change, Wharton joined a large number of highly selective schools that had been making it easier for prospective students to apply to their MBA programs, including Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business and Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business. Only a couple years before, during the 2012-2013 admissions season, Wharton had required three essays.

Reilly says that Wharton plans no other changes in its admissions approach this year. Interviews — conducted by staff and students — will be by invitation only, after a review of an application by the admissions staff. Reilly says the school will maintain its unusual team-based discussion interview in which invited applicants interact with four to five fellow MBA applicants in a team setting for about 35 minutes. The discussion, based on a prompt, is followed by a brief individual conversation with a member of the admissions team.

Only a little more than a year ago, Wharton had named Frank DeVecchis its new director of MBA admissions. DeVecchis, who reports directly to Reilly, joined Wharton in late 2009 as associate director of the Wharton Fund. Over his previous five-plus years at Wharton, he had held a variety of administrative jobs, including director of global immersion programs at Wharton to his most recent job as director of MBA academic operations.

Reilly says that DeVecchis’ first year in admissions has been successful. “He is terrific,” she says. “At Wharton, he started out in external affairs and then ran academic advising on the program side. So he has a really good grasp of who we are and what we offer.”

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