‘The Students Who Look Best On Paper Are Not Always The Ones Others Choose To Follow’

At Columbia Business School, a piece of long-standing MBA folklore has finally met hard data.

For decades, students have casually sorted each other into two camps: “poets” and “quants.” The former are the communicators – strong in leadership, persuasion, and people. The latter are the technicians – fluent in finance, accounting, and analytics. According to new research from Michael Morris, that divide is not just real – it defines two largely independent paths to success in business school.

And critically, only one of them reliably predicts leadership attainment.

A FOLK THEORY PUT TO THE TEST

Morris, a cultural psychologist, didn’t set out to debunk conventional MBA wisdom. In fact, he started from a place of respect for it.

“In cultural research, there’s the ethnographic tradition, where you try to look at the natives’ view constructs,” he tells Poets&Quants. “I’ve always thought their theory probably had some validity.”

That “native” theory – the poets-versus-quants distinction – had circulated informally among MBA students for years. But it had never been rigorously tested. What changed was Morris’ role inside Columbia, where he is the Chavkin-Chang Professor of Leadership in the Management Division, tasked with helping define and teach leadership across the school.

“I was constantly having to defend the importance of social intelligence to colleagues who were primarily technical experts,” he says.

That tension led to an unusually ambitious data effort. Working across admissions, student life, academics, and career services, Morris and his co-authors Aaron Wallen of Columbia’s School of Professional Studies and Zachariah Brown of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology assembled one of the most comprehensive datasets ever used to study MBA performance – far beyond the small, self-reported samples that dominate prior research.

“We had the opportunity to do something much richer than what’s typically found in the literature,” Morris says.

TWO TYPES OF ‘SMART’

What the data revealed was striking: MBA performance does not fall along a single spectrum of “smartness.” Instead, it splits cleanly into two dimensions.

Students who excel in quantitative courses tend to cluster together. So do those who excel in more social, discussion-driven courses like strategy and marketing. But the overlap between the two groups is surprisingly weak.

“There wasn’t a strong belief among the teachers that there were two kinds of smartness,” Morris says. “But we kept seeing it in the data.”

The finding helps explain a familiar classroom dynamic: the students who dominate finance and accounting are often not the same ones who shine in leadership discussions or team settings.

Faculty rarely see this directly, Morris notes, because they typically teach in only one domain.

“The accounting teachers see, ‘These are the smart kids.’ And the leadership faculty say, ‘These are the kids who get it.’ And it’s different kids.”

WHO BECOMES A LEADER – AND WHO DOESN’T

The most consequential finding comes when the researchers move beyond grades to look at leadership outcomes – club positions, peer evaluations, and informal influence.

Here, the divide becomes sharper.

Students who perform well in “poet” domains – communication, interpersonal skills, and verbal reasoning – are far more likely to be chosen as leaders by their peers. Those who excel in technical coursework, while often earning higher grades, are less likely to take on or be selected for leadership roles.

In other words, the traditional markers of academic excellence do not map neatly onto leadership emergence.

That gap raises uncomfortable questions for business schools that still rely heavily on GPA-based honors and quant-heavy admissions metrics.

“One recommendation is that the idea of a dean’s list, based on overall GPA – maybe that’s not what we should be emphasizing,” Morris says. “You’ve got real standouts in technical classes, and real standouts in leadership and strategy. Maybe we should be recognizing both.”

ADMISSIONS MYTHS DON’T HOLD UP

The study also takes aim at some of the most entrenched assumptions in MBA admissions.

Two in particular fail to hold up under scrutiny: that military veterans and former varsity athletes are especially likely to emerge as leaders in business school.

“There was a sense in the admissions office that these people were the natural leaders,” Morris says. “No sign of that.”

In the case of military students, Morris suspects the explanation may be counterintuitive.

“A lot of them have already done enough leadership,” he says. “They may be less interested in taking on those roles again.”

More fundamentally, the type of leadership required in MBA programs – especially in student clubs – is different from what those backgrounds prepare students for.

“You have to have influence without authority,” Morris explains. “You have to create ownership. That’s very different from environments where you can rely on formal hierarchy.”

The findings on athletes are similarly mixed. Female varsity athletes show a slight positive signal. Male athletes, if anything, trend slightly negative.

“The data just doesn’t support the assumption,” Morris says.

WHAT SCHOOLS SHOULD DO

If MBA success is truly multidimensional, Morris argues, schools need to rethink how they define and reward it.

Admissions offices already understand the need for balance – “like planning a dinner party,” as Morris puts it, where different personalities play different roles. The challenge is identifying that diversity more reliably.

“The question is, how do you find the right types of diversity?” he says.

That may require moving beyond traditional metrics and investing in deeper, ongoing analysis of student outcomes – something Morris believes business schools should be doing far more systematically.

“All business schools should check whether their admissions theories are accurate,” he says. “And then check 10 years later who’s succeeding in their careers.”

DOES IT HOLD BEYOND COLUMBIA?

The study is based on data from a single elite MBA program, raising questions about generalizability. Morris is cautious but confident.

“I can confidently generalize to similar institutions,” he says, pointing to peer schools like Wharton, Chicago Booth, and Stanford. “I would bet the results would turn out the same.”

Even beyond elite programs, he suspects the underlying pattern holds.

“This comes out again and again in theories of intelligence,” he says. “A social or empathizing dimension, and a systematizing dimension.”

THE NEXT FRONTIER: CAREERS

The biggest unanswered question may be what happens after graduation.

Do “poets” continue to dominate leadership roles in the workplace? Do “quants” catch up over time? Or do the two paths converge?

Those answers may soon be within reach.

“It used to be terribly difficult to follow MBAs over time,” Morris says. “Now you can scrape LinkedIn data and get a pretty good picture.”

What he wants to know next is simple – and potentially transformative:

“Does the student body president become a CEO?”

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