Our Most Popular Stories Of 2016

4) The 2016 Ding Report: Why Great Applicants Are Often Rejected

This one falls under people can’t get enough of those sad stories. You can reduce the world of elite MBA admissions to four numbers:

8,653. 7,414. 5,288. 3,631.

Random? Not really. Those figures reflect the number of MBA applicants that were rejected last year by Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, and MIT Sloan, respectively.

In fact, 22 out of the Top 25 highest ranked U.S. MBA programs each turned down for admission more than 1,000 candidates last year, 14 of them dinged more than 2,000 applicants each. Those Top 25 MBA programs sent out 67,628 ding letters in 2015.

More astounding than the number of rejected candidates is the remarkable quality of those applicants. Many have GMATs above 700, putting them in the top 11% of all test takers. Many have GPAs of 3.5 plus, often from some of the world’s best universities. And many boast already lucrative jobs, leadership experience in nonprofits and clubs, and track records of success. We profile some of them and explain how in the world they couldn’t get into their schools of choice. Read more.

5) The Stereotype-Defying MBAs In The Class of 2018

This fall, thousands of top professionals streamed back to campus to position themselves for the next big step-—whether that is switching careers or gaining the knowledge necessary for move up the ladder of success. Who are these students, really? What motivates them to pick certain MBA programs? What advice would they give prospective students? To answer these and other questions, Poets&Quants invited over 40 leading full-time MBA programs to participate in our annual “Meet the Class of…” series. Looking at their incoming 2018 class (or 2017 class for one-year programs), we asked these schools to share up to 12 first-year students who epitomize their program’s goals and spirit. Our objective was simple: We wanted to dispel the stereotypes by getting to know the students themselves. More than that, we hoped that readers could see themselves through these students, to erase any reservations they may have about pursuing an MBA, one of the most valuable degrees in the world.

After reviewing nearly 300 profiles thus far, one theme emerges. Business school is truly a great melting pot, with this year’s first years hailing from locales as diverse as Bucaramanga (Colombia), Tirana (Albania), Accra (Ghana), and Dhaka (Bangladesh). As undergrads, these incoming MBA students majored in such traditional staples as finance and engineering, along with more exotic disciplines that include anthropology and architecture. While many boast McKinsey, Google, Goldman Sachs, and Procter & Gamble on their resumes, others are deeply rooted in service, working in institutions ranging from Teach For America to the Navy SEALS. Read more.

6) Meet The Class Of 2018 At Chicago’s Booth School of Business

This year, we looked at the incoming MBA classes at nearly 50 different schools. But the most popular story of our “Meet The Class” series was our look at the new MBA cohort to hit the campus of the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, one of the hottest schools in recent years (see our entire series here). That story alone attracted more than 63,000 readers.

More than just an introduction to the latest students, these features provide a solid sense for how a school differentiates itself, the best strategies to gain admission, and how a school’s incoming class compares with rival schools. At Booth, the stereotype is that students are supposedly bookish quant jocks. While the Class of 2018 is unquestionably brainy, they are anything but stiffs. Victoria Yunger is an Israeli Ministry of Defense veteran who describes herself as “fashion blogger turned digital marketer, with a knack for details and long sentences.” MyKinseyite Anh Dang is destined to be the life of any party, calling herself “free and bold” and the one who loves “to do the unexpected, push my limit, test boundaries, drink and dance.” She’ll fit in well with Georgette Monika Mould, a Ghana native who’s “a humorous humanist with an optimistic outlook on life and a curious open mind.” Anjuli is someone you naturally follow. Not only is she always on the lookout for adventure, but she has a flair for turning “goals into projects, and projects into experiences.”While Randaccio’s resume may be intimidating, he comes with a major weakness: chicken wings.

At a Booth information session, Yunger was struck by the question, “Why are you here and not somewhere else?” She soon recognized that the Booth proposition was “a lifestyle of saying NO to autopilot.” In the 2018 class, You won’t find many Boothies running through the motions in their lives. Andrew Shigeo Janiszewski was a competitive skydiver and free-fall parachuting instructor in college. Dang holds the record for dancing salsa and sensual bachata — for eight hours straight! Shaily Jaisinghani, whose hobby is handwriting analysis, has already lived in India, China, the United States, New Zealand and Hong Kong. Of course, they haven’t lived charmed lives. Randaccio lost a coin toss that cost him Super Bowl tickets. Curt Ginder, who’s earning his MD along with his MBA, learned about the entertainment business the hard way: “I was a guest on CBS’s The Early Show as a high school senior. They cut out every last second of my camera time on the aired version.” Read more.

7) The Best One-Year MBA Programs In The U.S.

While accelerated MBA programs are common in Europe, they tend to be the exception in the U.S. However, an increasing number of would-be applicants to business school want to get the degree in a more compact way to lower both their opportunity costs and tuition expense. So many readers found our analysis of the best one-year programs extremely helpful.

These accelerated degrees certainly are not MBA-lites. Elite schools such as Kellogg, Cornell’s Johnson School of Management and Emory’s Goizueta Business School all have one-year offerings. Throw in Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business and four of Poets&Quants’ top 25 schools have a one-year option, which excludes the Stanford Graduate School of Business MSx program and the MIT Sloan Fellows Program. In total, 21 of the Poets&Quants’ top 100 MBA programs house a one-year MBA.

Those programs essentially leverage an elite undergraduate business degree for much of the core work, allowing students to almost immediately jump into gradate-level electives. “If you are not using the MBA as a tool to make a career change and are interested in staying in a similar or the same industry, then the one-year option becomes much more interesting,” says Matthew Merrick, the associate dean of MBA operations at Kellogg. Similarly, the Babson College one-year program is essentially an extension of a strong undergraduate business degree. “Our one-year program is structured for those who have an undergraduate business background, to leverage their existing academic foundation to complete the MBA in an accelerated format,” says Elizabeth Resker, the assistant director of graduate admissions at Babson. “Read more.