The Top MBA Admission Consulting Firms Of 2024

Maybe it was living through a pandemic or seeing their parents struggle during the Great Recession in 2007-2009. But today’s prospective MBA candidates are as demanding as ever.

Just ask Stacy Blackman, founder and CEO of the MBA admissions consulting firm that bears her name. “MBA applicants today are resourceful, discriminating, and purposeful,” she says. “Top-MBA-seeking applicants hail from Gen Z; they are high performers with impressive accomplishments professionally and academically, eager to define their legacy and make their mark on the world.”

They are also discerning customer. So when an MBA applicant engages an admissions consultant, often paying well in excess of $10K for the privilege, they want to insure there’s a strong return on investment.  So which MBA admission consulting firms do the best job in assisting their clients land an admit from a top business school?

FOUR YEARS IN A ROW: mbaMISSION

For the fourth consecutive year, mbaMission earns the top crown for the most favorably reviewed large MBA admissions consulting firm in the world (see table below). mbaMission rose to the top yet again based on 166 positive verified client reviews, an overall client satisfaction score of 9.86 on a ten-point scale, with 20 of the firm’s consultants getting reviewed. Rival Fortuna Admissions came in second, followed by Stacy Blackman Consulting. Fortuna nearly matched mbaMission’s client satisfaction score of 9.84 with 129 reviews. Stacy Blackman’s consultants racked up 86 favorable reviews and a satisfaction score of 9.83. Menlo Coaching and Vantage Point, which claims a Top 10 MBA program success rate for clients that is three times above average admit rates, round out the top five.

In the medium-sized category, Stratus Admissions Consulting took first place, with an eye-popping 9.99 client satisfaction rate and 39 positive assessments. They are up there with Career Protocol and Gatehouse Admissions.

Among the five small boutique firms, Personal MBA Coach won out. Behind the firm are Admissions Gateway, Sam Weeks Consulting, MBA Prep School and Admitify.com.

The firm list is a complement to our recently published list of the most positively reviewed MBA admission consultants of 2024.

AN EXTENSIVE ANALYSIS BASED ON VERIFIED CLIENT REVIEWS

The analysis is based on independently verified client reviews at Poets&Quants from September 1 2022 to August 31, 2023. During that timeframe, clients wrote 1,215 assessments of their experience with 210 admission consultants at 65 different firms. To date, the Poets&Quants‘ consulting directory now boasts a total of 606 MBA counselors, up from 567 a year earlier, at 148 separate firms, with more than 8,500 reviews. It is the most comprehensive repository of MBA admission coaches and customer reviews available anywhere in the world.

Each firm, of course, brings a unique culture and approach in making a business out of helping applicants put their best foot forward. Fortuna Admissions has built a firm based on hiring what it calls “a dream team” of former business school admission consultants from such elite business schools as INSEAD and Wharton. In the past year, Fortuna’s clients secured more than $12 million in scholarships, says co-founder Matt Symonds. “It is so rewarding to witness the successful outcomes of their hard work, and the joy of seeing them achieve their B-school dreams never fades,” he says.

“Applying to business school is a big step,” adds Symonds, “and it makes such a difference to work with people who believe in you from day one. It has been a sparkling year for Fortuna clients, and we have rarely seen so many admits to HBS and Stanford, including a remarkable number of dual admits. That has led to some great discussions about which school to choose, and Palo Alto often comes out on top.”

Stacy Blackman, a Kellogg MBA graduate, has been in business over 20 years, building a successful firm with more than two dozen former admissions committee members from every top MBA program, the highest number of any firm (Bragging Rights: This MBA Admissions Consulting Firm Boasts The Most Former M7 Adcoms). The firm’s consultants work with no more than eight clients per application round in what it calls a “low-volume model.”

Blackman notes that her team has worked on the inside of the MBA admissions kitchen and has an unusual advantage in coaching applicants. “I have seen how they make the sausage,” shares Meg, a former Adcom consultant on the team. “We know what the process is once the application comes in and how the population is sliced and diced. We can speak to how many people are going to read their files and what that first review pass looks like. Our team consults with each other daily to tap into that well of Adcom experience. We have a lot of firepower. If there’s a question I have about a person who is applying to Harvard I can put it out to the entire group and get three to five responses within half an hour and they are all coming from people who have worked in admissions at M7 schools.”

WORKING FOR A CLIENT FOR TWO WEEKS FOR FREE

Again at the top of the large firm list, however, is mbaMission. Exactly 20 years ago this month, Jeremy Shinewald had it. After earning his MBA degree from the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia, he spent a year in a typical MBA job, working at the Royal Bank of Canada. Shinewald recalls giving his notice on July 15 of 2004 and staying an extra week at the bank’s request.

“I remember being so thrilled that the crushing boredom of banking was over,” laughs Shinewald. “I was doing it for all of the wrong reasons and everyone knew I was in the wrong place, including me. But as Philip Roth once said, ‘A Jewish man with parents live is a 15-year-old boy and will remain a 15-year-old boy until they die!’ I was there to please my parents.”

It was then that he became an entrepreneur, founding mbaMission. The early going was tough. To land an uncertain client, he even guaranteed to work for the applicant–an international candidate with a low GMAT score–for two full weeks without pay. “The client said to me, ‘I am a little skeptical. I don’t know if I want to work with you.’ I needed a client so I told him, ‘I am going to work for you for two weeks for free. At that point, you can pay me or not and there will be no hard feelings. I went in just hoping that I wouldn’t have to work for any one else in my life. I just wanted to be an independent entrepreneur.”

Head down, Shinewald gave it his all, working with the candidate on applications to three MBA programs at Dartmouth Tuck, Duke Fuqua, and Cornell Johnson. “I poured everything I could into him,” remembers Shinewald. “I wanted to show him that I was going to win him over. He got into all three schools and ended up going to Tuck. At the end of our engagement, he said, ‘I am going to refer all my friends to you.’ I said, ‘Thank you so much’. And he said. ‘I am not doing that as a favor to you. I am doing it for them.’ That stuck with me to this day. 20 years ago.”

‘MCKINSEY WOULDN’T BE THE DOMINANT CONSULTING FIRM IF IT HAD PART-TIME EMPLOYEES’

Today, mbaMission is arguably the world’s largest MBA admissions consulting firm, with 32 consultants, career coaches and support staffers. This year the firm also launched what is very likely the most comprehensive guide to MBA admissions ever attempted. Dubbed onTrack, it’s meant to be the ultimate sherpa for candidates on the grueling journey toward acceptance by highly selective MBA programs–at a tenth of the cost of an actual admissions consultant. The innovative product features 450 videos, dozens of learning modules and brainstorming exercises, 50 background and goal-specific lessons, 15 essay samples, eight resume examples, and 17 specific school modules.

In other words, Shinewald, who once wrote speeches for the Ambassador of Israel to the United States, is running the risk of cannibalizing his own business. “In the long run, I think it’s possible that it can cannibalize the consulting business,” he says. “But if someone is going to cannibalize our business, let it be me. Someone else could do it to us or we could do it to them.”

He isn’t losing sleep over that prospect, confident that he has built a solid foundation as a professional services firm. “It really has to do with enormous differences with the way our firm is set up, relative to other firms,” maintains Shinewald. “Most of the firms in this space are part-time firms. If an applicant aspires to go to McKinsey, I say, ‘Ok McKinsey has 10,000 full-time consultants. Imagine if they switched to a model where they had 40,000 part-time consultants. They wouldn’t be the dominant consulting firm that they are. Admissions consulting is no different. Most firms in this space use part-time individuals who are committed to another job. And when push comes to shove, they will be committed to that other job instead of the client.

‘WE EAT, SLEEP AND BREATHE MBA ADMISSIONS AND LIVE OUR CLIENTS OUTCOMES’

“At our firm,” he adds, “we have full-time professionals who eat, sleep and breathe MBA admissions and live their clients outcomes because it is not a hobby. It is a professional calling. That is a huge top layer differentiator and a lot flows down from that. On top of that, everyone in our firm is an MBA from a top program and that is a difference between us and a lot of other firms as well.”

Shinewald also has cultivated the culture and values of a prestige services firm. “We want people to feel that they are working for a top consulting or law firm, a firm that is delivering at the top of expectations.,” he says.

There are weekly consultant meetings every Tuesday, an annual conference to hone skills and continuous staff training. A five-person hiring team must agree on new consultant hires. Once employed by mbaMission, a new coach is put through a three-month curriculum, followed by a capstone exercise and a year-long mentorship with a senior consultant. “There are a variety of writing and editing exercises they have to do,” argues Shinewald. “You can’t just say, ‘I was an admissions director at Cornell eight years ago and now I am your consultant.’ That doesn’t mean anything. You have to have the skills. There are firms out there where if you went to Wharton, they make you their Wharton consultant. ‘Congratulations! You start Monday.’ That isn’t mbaMission”

Most Favorably Reviewed Large MBA Admissions Consulting Firms

Firm	Positive Reviews	Coaches with Testimonials	Average Client Satisfaction Score	Ratio of Testimonials to Reviewed Coaches
1. mbaMission	166	20	9.86	8.3
2. Fortuna Admissions	129	24	9.84	5.4
3. Stacy Blackman Consulting	86	30	9.83	2.9
4. Menlo Coaching	54	10	9.96	5.4
5. Vantage Point	38	12	9.85	3.2

Note: Large firms have more than 10 consultants and at least 35 assessments during the Sept. 1 2022 to August 31 2023 period of review

DON’T MISS: HOW TO SMARTLY USE OUR MBA ADMISSIONS CONSULTING DIRECTORY