Top B-Schools Reject High Ranking MBA Aspirants

You may have high GMAT/GRE scores, excellent academic record, work experience, leadership qualities and much more but still get rejected by top Business schools. We examine the reasons for such failure, in some cases, even after repeat attempts, and how to overcome the situation.

Harvard Business School rejected 8,653 applications last year. Standford axed 7,414, Wharton 5,288 and MIT Sloan 3,631. While the schools may be getting applications by the shovelful, from fully qualified candidates that could be almost 80% in some cases, only a very small fraction get admission.

In the United States, the top 25 schools had rejected as many as 67,628 candidates in 2015. Several of the applicants had GMAT scores above 700, GPAs of 3.5 plus and held jobs with leadership experience in non-profit organizations or clubs with excellent track record.

While the layman would remain clueless about reasons for the rejection, admissions experts could provide answers or clues as to what would have gone wrong and point out sectors in need of improvement if planning to reapply in future after examining their profiles and relevant statistics.

The MBA admissions counselling service HBSGuru.com, charges $750 for a ‘ding report’ that analyses the statistics, essays and recommendations, pinpointing the shortcomings, to come up with suggestions for improvement. While recommending the action that need to be taken and strategies to be adopted, the report would also give an assessment of your chances in future to the point if you should continue to pursue it at all.

Sandy Kreisberg, HBSGuru.com founder refers to a 28-year-old American with 730 GMAT, Ivy League degree, work credentials in Google as well as a VC-funded startup, who was rejected by Harvard, Stanford, UC-Berkeley and MIT Sloan.

Kreisberg says the candidate’s moving from self-employed to Google then joining a start-up and needing to apply to B-school may not have impressed admission officials. His post MBA goal to move into clean tech without prior experience would also have scotched the chances.

In similar cases, moving from field to field without particular reason or good enough goals, failure to properly state the career goals and the like played a part in being handed out the rejection slip.