Lifetime Achievement Award In MBA Admissions: Dawna Clarke At UVA Darden

Dawna Clarke, senior assistant dean for admissions at the Darden School of Business

“I want someone who leads admissions with heart.”

When Dean Scott Beardsley of the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business said those words, he may have had little inking that the person on the receiving end of the conversation was all heart, someone who brought the immense power of empathy to a job that essentially requires one to reject people.

At that moment, over a four-hour interview at Beardsley’s summer getaway in Maine, Dawna Clarke knew she wanted the job to return to Darden again to head up admissions. Years earlier, she had spent 15 years interviewing and assessing candidates for Darden’s MBA program. She left Darden to lead MBA admissions at Dartmouth Tuck where she and her team consistently scored at or near the top of business schools at which applicants singled out schools that got to know them best through the application process.

‘HEY, I CAN DO THIS! THIS IS RIGHT IN MY WHEELHOUSE’

The Dean’s words resonated with Clark for two reasons. “First, I thought it said something about Scott and what he values in a leader,” recalls Clarke. “I also thought, ‘Hey, I can do this! This is right in my wheelhouse.’ The application process can be a highly stressful experience. There’s plenty of opportunity to interact with and execute policies that show empathy, respect and care for the applicant experience.”

Yet another unexpected development would fuel her decision to pack her belongings in Hanover, New Hampshire, and move south when the dean called to formally offer her the job in late August of 2017. Two weeks earlier, Clarke had been outraged when hundreds of white supremacists descended on the college town in a violent “Unite the Right” rally that resulted in one death and more than a dozen injured. “It was an event that was not indicative of the progressive vibe here,” she says.

The widespread publicity over the rally would cause many prospective applicants, especially international and minority candidates, to perceive Charlottesville as an unwelcoming place. Suddenly, Darden was not only in need of a new admissions chief; the school needed an experienced leader to navigate what would inevitably become an admissions crisis.

‘WE WANT YOU TO COME BACK HOME’

When Beardsley made his job offer, he told her, “We want you to come back home.”

“Darden and Charlottesville had been my work home for 15 years, so he couldn’t have used more meaningful words,” recalls Clarke.

Throughout a nearly 40-year career in admissions, she has been the final decision maker on more than 70,000 applicants, the overwhelming majority of them MBA-bound hopefuls. Clarke has scoured application files for hundreds of thousands of candidates and interviewed anxious candidates at four different institutions: UVA Darden, Dartmouth Tuck, UNC Chapel Hill, and Allegheny College, her alma mater.

Beardsley, who estimates that Clarke has had a hand in admitting more than half of Darden’s 19,000 living alumni, says that bringing back Clarke was “one of the best decisions I have made” in the nine years he has served as Darden’s dean. He recalls that Clarke’s name immediately surfaced when he told colleagues he wanted to hire “the best admissions person in the country.”

As the senior assistant dean of admissions at Darden, Clarke oversees the recruitment strategy for admission to the full-time MBA as well as the school’s Executive MBA, its Global Executive MBA, a part-time MBA program in the Washington, D.C., area, and a master’s in business analytics program. Last year alone, Darden hosted some 560 admission events, not including podcasts and a prolific video blog she started soon after arriving at Darden seven years ago on Oct. 17th.

OUR FIRST LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD IN ADMISSIONS: DAWNA CLARKE

Dawna Clarke, executive director of admissions at Darden

More importantly, she has brought a warm heart and unparalleled compassion to an often mysterious and anxiety-ridden journey for many. Her openness, enthusiasm, and attentiveness to others embody her joy in being the quintessential people person. One of the first officials to make standardized tests optional, Clarke has challenged the widely held assumption that a GMAT or GRE test score is a prerequisite to evaluate a business school candidate. Some 19% of this year’s incoming MBA class were granted a test waiver. She helped to smartly navigate the application slide due to the Charlottesville rally along with the disruptions from the pandemic which led to the recruitment of a January term cohort. She has brought much-needed transparency to MBA admissions through more accommodating accessibility and open information sharing.

For her extraordinary empathy, innovative leadership, and strategic acumen, Poets&Quants is awarding its first Lifetime Achievement Award in Business School Admissions to Dawna Clarke. No other high-ranking admissions official at any major business school has served as long as Clarke, or with the distinction of maintaining and cultivating a team with little to no turnover in a field where careers are more often than not transient. Her closest admissions colleague in service, Yale School of Management’s Bruce DelMonico, has been in admissions for only half of her career: some 20 years versus nearly 40. Throughout her long career, moreover, Clarke has been among the most effective ambassadors for both MBA education in general and for the business schools lucky enough to employ her.

“Dawna’s superpower as a leader lies in her keen ability to recognize the unique strengths of each team member and place them in roles where they can truly excel,” observes Katherine Alford, a director of admissions for Darden’s Future Year Scholars Program. “Her team feels confident that she genuinely cares about their well-being, which empowers them to perform at their highest level. She brings a tremendous amount of empathy, care, and compassion, and this is what makes her stand out.”

Her messaging to applicants who know they are facing tough odds of gaining an acceptance is comforting. “My favorite advice that Dawna shares with prospective students is to approach the application process with joy and to view it as an opportunity to celebrate all they have accomplished,” says Stephen ‘Brett’ Twitty, managing director of admissions. “To me, this is such a Dawna thing to say. It’s just so warm and positive. What is more Dawna Clarke than to encourage MBA applicants – a group likely feeling nervous, uncertain, vulnerable – to be joyful and proud of everything they’ve already accomplished? The MBA application process can feel daunting, and it can be easy for prospective students to lose sight of their many talents and gifts. Dawna’s advice is so perfect, and it captures what makes her special not just an admissions professional but also as a human.”

If anything, Clarke acknowledges that the job of selection has become more thorny than ever. “Having done this for almost 40 years, the last seven have been the most complicated for a variety of reasons,” she explains. Whether it is the high cost of graduate education or the inevitable pressure to recruit increasingly diverse student cohorts after the U.S. Supreme Court banned race-conscious admissions, the job has become more challenging than ever. Since Clarke first started recruiting and evaluating MBA candidates in the mid-1980s, the two-year residential MBA has become a mature product, with would-be candidates having a vast array of other options, from accelerated or online MBA programs to the explosive growth of shorter, more specialized graduate degrees in business.

MBA ADMISSIONS HAVE BECOME FAR MORE COMPLICATED IN RECENT YEARS

And then there are the politics of immigration that have led one country after another, from Australia and New Zealand to Canada and the United Kingdom, to impose or to consider visa restrictions on international students. “When Trump was elected, there was a precipitous decline in international apps,” she notes. “There is a buzz out there that international applicants are now waiting for round two to see the results of the election because of concern that they could be asked to leave the country as students. I can’t think of another presidential election that influenced application flow. It has gotten much more complex.”

This year, applications to Darden’s MBA program rose 18%, allowing the school to enroll a class of 355 first-year MBAs. More impressively, however, are the school’s results since Clarke arrived back. Due largely to the market’s overall decline in domestic applications, 54% of the top 20 MBA programs did not fill their fall classes of 2022. An even higher percentage failed to fill all their seats for the entering class of 2023. That is not the case at Darden which has been able to meet its full-time MBA targets for the past seven admission cycles.