After 22 Years Of Silence, The Top-Ranked Admissions Consultancy Finally Talks Numbers – And They’re Huge

For 22 years, mbaMission has watched competitors boast about admissions results the firm considered impossible to verify, and said nothing about its own. This season, for the first time ever, it broke that silence – and even its own leadership seems a little stunned by what came out.

The headline figures: 441 clients admitted this cycle, 940 total acceptances and more than $23 million in scholarships. Dig one layer down and the M7 numbers get even more eye-popping – 592 of those acceptances came from the seven schools that make up business education’s most exclusive club, including 116 at Harvard Business School, 47 at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and 102 at Wharton. Fourteen mbaMission clients got into all three.

And the firm – which has spent six years atop Poets&Quants’ global ranking of MBA admissions firms – says the numbers are still climbing. Waitlist movement, Round 3 decisions and deferred-admission results are still rolling in, meaning the final tally for the 2025-2026 cycle will likely be higher still.

See Poets&Quants 2026 ranking of MBA admissions firms here. 

WHY NOW? mbaMISSION FOUNDER EXPLAINS THE ABOUT-FACE

So why release any of this at all, after more than two decades of staying quiet? According to the firm’s founder and President Jeremy Shinewald, it comes down to two things – competitors getting louder, and the numbers finally becoming verifiable.

“We never really wanted to be out there boasting – that’s not our brand,” Shinewald tells Poets&Quants. “But we felt like, if others can be out there boasting with inferior results, we should at least be explaining superior ones.” For most of the industry’s history, he says, claims like these were essentially unprovable, and mbaMission didn’t want to be lumped in with firms making numbers up. Now, he says, the firm can produce a list of names and email addresses that can be cross-checked against LinkedIn profiles – an outside body has effectively made the data auditable. “It’s finally somewhat verifiable,” he says. “And so we’re finally talking about this.”

The scale of the data only makes sense in the context of mbaMission’s history. The firm has now been operating for 22 years, and Shinewald says its alumni base has grown large enough that it has filled more than a full class – roughly 940 students – at every one of the M7 schools. At Harvard alone, with its 13 sections per cohort, he estimates mbaMission clients now account for close to two full classes. “We can proudly see them as leaders of major companies now,” he says, adding that founders and CEOs regularly turn up in his LinkedIn feed years after he helped get them admitted.

DEVI VALLABHANENI’S BEST HARVARD CYCLE EVER

Of all the numbers in the release, few are more striking than this one: consultant Devi Vallabhaneni worked with 54 clients who gained admission to Harvard Business School this cycle – many of them on interview preparation as part of a broader mbaMission team effort, with other consultants handling the application itself.

It is, by her own account, the best cycle she has had. “Definitely one of the highest,” Vallabhaneni says, noting she has typically trended in the high 40s to low 50s in past years. She is quick to deflect credit, attributing some of it to the type of applicant who seeks her out. A Harvard MBA and CPA who served on the HBS Admissions Board for several years as an interviewer, Vallabhaneni says she tends to attract a self-selected pool of high-caliber candidates, particularly those pursuing joint degrees.

But ask her how she actually gets people into a school built around the case method, where storytelling and demonstrated leadership carry enormous weight, and a clear methodology emerges. “Their stories have to make sense, first of all,” she says. The first test isn’t whether an applicant has done impressive things – it’s whether they can explain those things to someone outside their own industry. “Can somebody who doesn’t work with you day to day understand the depth of your experiences? That’s the first thing we have to address.”

THE MISTAKE EVERYONE MAKES: TELLING HARVARD EVERYTHING

After 22 years in the business, Vallabhaneni says the mistakes have become entirely predictable – and the biggest one is assuming more is better. Applicants want to walk her through their entire project plan, in all its technical detail, rather than stepping back to identify what actually matters. “How do you prioritize? What is the most important part of this story?” she says. “They want to tell me everything.”

The second recurring issue is structural. Many applicants know the STAR method – situation, task, action, result – but skip the “S.” They jump straight into what they did without ever connecting it to a larger problem their company or team was facing. The fix, Vallabhaneni says, is reframing: not “my boss told me to do this,” but tying that task to something bigger, like a company-wide push to grow revenue by 20 percent.

That kind of context, she says, is what convinces an admissions committee that an applicant’s story is big enough – and deep enough – for Harvard.

KATY LEWIS: 9 TRIPLE THREATS & 18 INTO HARVARD

If Vallabhaneni’s HBS numbers stand out for their volume, consultant Katy Lewis’s stand out for their concentration at the very top. Nine of her clients this cycle received acceptances to two or three of Harvard, Stanford and Wharton – well above her typical run rate of five or six dual or triple admits per year. Eighteen of her clients got into Harvard alone, a number she says “stuck out a little bit more than usual.”

Lewis, a Harvard JD/MBA who also worked in admissions at Stanford, offers a statistical theory for the jump: total applications to Harvard and Stanford were down slightly this cycle, which may have widened the door.

She’s careful not to overstate it – when you’re dealing with eight or nine thousand applicants per school, she says, plenty of excellent candidates simply don’t get noticed in one pool and do in another.

“There’s a little bit of a lottery at these top schools,” she says, half-joking that admissions could run just as well “if he just threw darts at the applications.”

Still, across her triple-admit clients, Lewis sees a consistent pattern – and it isn’t about pedigree.

THE ‘ARCHITECT OF YOUR OWN CAREER’ THEORY

What separates dual and triple admits from everyone else, Lewis says, isn’t résumé polish. Plenty of applicants check every conventional box – the right bank, the right private equity fund, the right school, one outside activity – without ever landing on the area where they actually want to lead.

The applicants who get into Harvard and Stanford, she says, have become “the architect of their own career.” Often that means they’ve worked six or seven years instead of the standard four, using that extra time to take a deliberate step – moving from a bank or consulting firm into a startup in the field they actually want to pursue.

That step, she says, proves to admissions committees that an applicant has found their direction “regardless of whether they go to business school.”

A GLOBAL, AND SURPRISINGLY UNEVEN, CLASS

This logic extends to the firm’s 14 clients admitted to all three of HBS, Stanford and Wharton. Vallabhaneni is unequivocal that there’s no separate version of an applicant tailored to each school. “There’s no Harvard version of you. There’s no Stanford version of you,” she says – the only tailoring comes from each school’s specific essay prompts, not from reverse-engineering a narrative to fit a stereotype. People who get into all three, she says, “max out their lives” across work, community and a long track record – not a single standout year, but a pattern built over time.

Beyond the M7 numbers, mbaMission’s released data paints a picture of a strikingly broad client base. This cycle’s admits collectively got into 41 different business schools, came from 203 different undergraduate institutions and 307 different companies, and represent 46 countries. Thirty-six of them are first-generation college students.

The most common undergraduate majors among admits were economics, finance, mechanical engineering and computer science, while the most common pre-MBA employers were Deloitte, McKinsey, Morgan Stanley and EY – a fairly predictable list of feeder schools and feeder firms, even as the broader pool of countries and institutions skews wide.

Then there’s the academic range, which is anything but predictable: undergraduate GPAs among this cycle’s admits ranged from 2.1 to 4.0, with an average of 3.62.

THE GPA FLOOR THAT ISN’T REALLY A FLOOR – AT LEAST NOT AT HARVARD

That 2.1 figure invites an obvious question, and Vallabhaneni is quick to clarify it: the low end of that range applies across mbaMission’s full M7 client base, not to Harvard specifically. At HBS, she says, that floor effectively no longer exists. “I think maybe in previous years, there’s probably one or two people with a below-3.0 that get into HBS. I think they have tightened that. It’s virtually impossible,” she says.

She describes working with a handful of clients in recent years whose post-college work experience was, in her words, phenomenal enough that it likely would have gotten them into Harvard on its own – if not for a sub-3.0 undergraduate GPA, often the product of circumstances well outside their control. “It’s so sad because a path in life is closed before you even embark on that path,” she says, while noting that a lower undergraduate GPA doesn’t preclude success elsewhere – just not at Harvard specifically.

It’s a sobering footnote to an otherwise celebratory data release, and a reminder that even in a cycle this strong, some doors close earlier than applicants realize.

FIRST-GEN STUDENTS: SAME COACHING, DIFFERENT STORIES

Of the 36 first-generation college students among this cycle’s admits, both Vallabhaneni and Lewis describe a coaching process that doesn’t fundamentally change based on that background – but does show up differently in the stories applicants tell.

Lewis says the impact “is still the same in terms of what they’ve done,” but that first-gen students often gravitate toward leadership roles tied to helping other first-generation students, building initiatives or mentorship structures that become central to their applications. 

“It drives a lot of their leadership,” she says, “versus ‘I’m a first-gen, therefore I need different coaching.’ The coaching is exactly the same, but it shows up in the types of stories.”

AN APPLICANT’S MARKET, ACCORDING TO THE FOUNDER

Zoom out from the individual numbers, and Jeremy Shinewald sees something bigger happening in the industry – and it isn’t necessarily good news for firms like his. He believes the just-completed cycle marks the start of a downturn in MBA applications generally, which made for an easier admissions cycle for mbaMission’s clients but a harder one for consulting firms competing for a shrinking applicant pool.

“It’s an easier cycle for your clients,” Shinewald says, predicting the trend could continue for several years. He points to broader anxiety about the value of an MBA amid economic uncertainty and the rise of artificial intelligence, noting a surge of interest in medical and law schools – professions seen as harder for AI to disrupt – while business school is viewed by some prospective applicants as having “a workaround.” 

For those willing to apply anyway, he argues, it’s an unusually applicant-friendly environment. “It’s not the most firm-friendly environment, but it’s an applicant-friendly environment,” he says.

THE PITCH

Shinewald closes with a defense of mbaMission’s underlying business model, framing it as the real explanation for results like these. Much of the rest of the admissions consulting industry, he says, operates on “the Uber model” – freelance consultants brought on with little training or institutional support, then quietly dropped if client feedback turns negative.

By contrast, he points to consultants like Lewis, who has been with the firm for 16 years, as evidence of what he calls “institutionalized expertise” – full-time staff, ongoing development and alignment across the organization.

“There’s a fundamental difference in the way we’re delivering our service,” Shinewald says, “and it’s proven over the long haul to be successful.”

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