Mr. EduTech Consulting Firm

The big question facing you is this: Are you too old for Harvard Business School? Because you are currently 32 with more than eight years of full-time work experience you fall well outside the typical Harvard MBA student. And you would be 33 when you matriculate with nine years of work experience. How rare is it for someone that old to get into HBS? Well, the last time the school revealed this information it showed that just 12 members of a class of 935 students had nine years of experience. The clear sweet spot are candidates aged 26 and 27, with four to five years of work experience. Obviously, these numbers are also a reflection of the applicant pool. Fewer 30-something folks apply to HBS for an MBA. Nonetheless, there is the belief that Harvard wants to know it can shape you and your career and believes that it has the best chance to do so if you are 26 to 29 years of age. You have a terrific track record, however. It is admirable and impressive that you were selected among 100 out of 7,000 entries to be named in the Young Africa Leader Initiative (YALI) program. It is also helpfu that you are from Nigeria, a country that doesn’t send all that many students to HBS. But I do think your age will make it very difficult to get into Harvard. Your odds are much better at some other schools. For our readers, here is our story on the age of HBS students.
https://poetsandquants.com/2018/06/16/can-you-be-too-old-for-harvard-business-school/

The good: While international students generally face tougher odds than domestic ones at US M7 schools, the African continent is an underrepresented geographic within the international bucket. All stats equal, you’d have a much harder time coming from a better represented geographic demo like China or India. Still, your candidacy would be enhanced if you were a black American (a more underrepresented demo) than an international student from Africa. Your start up sounds legitimate both in financial terms ($1MM run rate) and social impact ones. All things equal, HBS and other tip-top schools want people who dream of changing their industry and the world for the better, rather than just making a pile of money. The raw outline of your edtech history and passions (your EE degree, teaching math, edtech founder) demonstrates the ambition to have impact in the world beyond your financial bottom line.

The bad: Schools like HBS use other institutions to vet their candidates for them (for instance, vetters could include top-tier global universities like Ivies or IIT or Peking or Fudan University or high-standards corporations such as Goldman Sachs or McKinsey). Right now, you don’t have much of that kind of vetting from a reputable third party as all of your work experience and education has been in Africa and not for global multinational companies with a presence there. What does help you immensely is that you went a top school in your region and did well there in arguably the most rigorous STEM field, EE. Your academic passions for STEM and your award from the US government also legitimize your academic potential. Perhaps the best 3rd party vetting a candidate can have is their GMAT/GRE score, and yours makes up for the lack of recognizable prestige signals on your application. Perhaps your biggest weakness, which can likely be spun as a feature rather than a bug if you present it the right way, is your age (32). Acceptances do appear to decline after 28 years of age, likely because AdComs think “why is this person looking to go to b-school NOW? Why not 5 years ago? Have they washed out of their intended path? Are they stagnating and looking for an “out”?” That’s not you, but you’ll still need to tacitly address your age and length of time since undergrad graduation (10 years?) in order to have a good shot. Know that the bar will be higher for older candidates, because they’ve had longer time to achieve greatness than the average age of accepted applicants (26-27). You should be able to clear that bar, as you are managing a cashflowing start-up and a whole team under you, but you need to sell yourself in the right way.

I’m pegging your odds at 35%, significantly higher than HBS’ average acceptance rate. If you apply well to all M7, I think there is a very good chance of acceptance into several (though obviously no guarantees). The more schools you apply to, the higher probability of success of getting into 1-2 of them. Once you get 2 acceptances, you can leverage one over the other for scholarships.