A Head Start on an MBA
Just five years ago, Jared Finegold was a San Diego high-school senior, living with his parents and nurturing vague dreams of working in business. Yet when he leaves the University of Pennsylvania next month, he'll start at a yearly salary that many people never achieve in a lifetime, much less at 22 -- a cool six figures, he says.
Finegold's good fortune stems from his decision to stay around for a year after his undergraduate chums departed and get his MBA at the university's Wharton School, where he's one of 15 "submatriculants" -- especially apt students admitted directly from the undergraduate business program into business school.
Not that long ago, fresh faces like Finegold's were the norm in B-school classrooms. Indeed, as recently as 1982 more than a quarter of students who took the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT) -- a prerequisite for getting into B-school -- were 23 or younger. Over the next couple of decades, though, MBA admissions directors -- at the behest of corporate recruiters -- ratcheted up the age and on-the-job skill requirements of the students they accepted.
HOLDOUTS. Many B-schools still balk at bringing young, inexperienced students into the fold, fearing they'll dumb down class discussion and be a hard sell to recruiting companies. Limiting classes to students with three to five years on the job creates "a much richer, stimulating environment," says Blythe Sweeney, a spokesperson for Arizona State University. "We pride ourselves on our work experience."
She won't get any argument from schools such as MIT, Michigan, New York University, and Berkeley. And this year, of course, there's also the crush of applications from all the experienced applicants who've been rousted out of dot-coms and other jobs. "We're having a hard time even getting through the applications we have," says Kembrel Jones, MBA program director at Emory University's Goizueta School in Atlanta.
Nonetheless, a few schools have stuck with the trend to admit younger students, which began as the tech boom of the late '90s thinned applicant pools. The University of Chicago and Harvard Business School began encouraging fresh-faced candidates to apply -- and have continued to do so even though a sluggish economy has made job searches harder for MBAs (see BW, 3/25/02, "Even Hot B-School Grads Face a Chilly Market"). Several schools go one step further: Like Wharton, Indiana, Purdue, Ohio State, and Washington University in St. Louis, all allow undergraduates to submatriculate directly into the MBA program.
SOMETHING TO PROVE. Typically, these schools won't let just anybody into a "submat program". They're looking for undergrads with a minimum 3.7 grade-point average, a GMAT score that at least matches the average for the entering MBA class -- and one or more summer internships. Finegold was a Dean's List student as a business undergrad at Penn and will graduate with honors. During the past couple of summers, he worked as an investment-banking intern at Merrill Lynch in New York and with Credit Suisse First Boston's Palo Alto (Calif.) tech group.
So in his junior year, Finegold applied for Wharton's fast-track program, and after being accepted he spent what normally would have been his senior year of college taking his first-year MBA classes. "Initially, you definitely feel like you have to prove yourself in the classroom," says Finegold, who concentrated in finance and management. But he says he "felt a huge advantage in recruiting, having gone through the process three years in a row."
Evidently his new employer, a Wall Street financial-services firm, didn't see any drawbacks in paying Finegold, who was nine the last time the U.S. had a recession, its going rate for new MBAs. In fact, high-octane industries such as investment banking and consulting -- in which 80-hour work weeks are the rule more than the exception -- often seek the energetic overachieving set, who are drawn by big bucks and tend to arrive unburdened by spouses and children. Perhaps they "don't mind working a zillion hours a week," says Wharton Admissions Director Rosemaria Martinelli.
HAZING OF THE GREEN. UBS Warburg is another investment bank that likes what it sees in Wharton's submatriculants. Anand Davis, head of UBS's U.S. MBA recruiting, says the bank usually prefers a few years of seasoning for its investment banking associates. But of the five Wharton MBAs to whom it offered positions this year, three were submats.
"We put them up against the other MBAs, and [the submatriculants] came out ranked higher," Davis says -- based on measures such as aptitude, personality, and ambition. It also couldn't have hurt that Ken Moelis, a Wharton submatriculant in '81, is the head of the firm's U.S. investment bank.
In a down year for MBA hiring, many submats may be at a disadvantage. Jeff Hazlett, who graduates this spring with an MBA after five years at Purdue, has found that "some companies won't even look at you." Still, Hazlett, 24, has managed to turn previous summer internships with IBM into a full-time position with Big Blue as a cost analyst. Chuck Johnson, Purdue's director of professional Master's programs, adds that submatriculants "tend to take more analyst positions," as corporations remain skittish about placing green grads in charge of other employees.
That's why it's unlikely that MBA programs will fill their ranks with youngsters any time soon, says Maury Hanigan, CEO of New York-based Hanigan Consulting Group, which advises large companies on campus recruiting issues. "There's tremendous dissent in the ranks when a 26-year-old walks into work and tells people how to do their job," she adds. Jeanne Wilt, Michigan's assistant dean for admissions and career development, says the head start may even be detrimental to career progress: "They start at lower salaries with fewer opportunities."
Of course, at a lot of companies it may not matter. An MBA from a good school will still get many people onto the low rungs of Corporate America. And then, to climb higher, they have to prove that they can perform. The ones who can will most likely be successful, and the ones who can't won't -- no matter what their age
Finegold's good fortune stems from his decision to stay around for a year after his undergraduate chums departed and get his MBA at the university's Wharton School, where he's one of 15 "submatriculants" -- especially apt students admitted directly from the undergraduate business program into business school.
Not that long ago, fresh faces like Finegold's were the norm in B-school classrooms. Indeed, as recently as 1982 more than a quarter of students who took the Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT) -- a prerequisite for getting into B-school -- were 23 or younger. Over the next couple of decades, though, MBA admissions directors -- at the behest of corporate recruiters -- ratcheted up the age and on-the-job skill requirements of the students they accepted.
HOLDOUTS. Many B-schools still balk at bringing young, inexperienced students into the fold, fearing they'll dumb down class discussion and be a hard sell to recruiting companies. Limiting classes to students with three to five years on the job creates "a much richer, stimulating environment," says Blythe Sweeney, a spokesperson for Arizona State University. "We pride ourselves on our work experience."
She won't get any argument from schools such as MIT, Michigan, New York University, and Berkeley. And this year, of course, there's also the crush of applications from all the experienced applicants who've been rousted out of dot-coms and other jobs. "We're having a hard time even getting through the applications we have," says Kembrel Jones, MBA program director at Emory University's Goizueta School in Atlanta.
Nonetheless, a few schools have stuck with the trend to admit younger students, which began as the tech boom of the late '90s thinned applicant pools. The University of Chicago and Harvard Business School began encouraging fresh-faced candidates to apply -- and have continued to do so even though a sluggish economy has made job searches harder for MBAs (see BW, 3/25/02, "Even Hot B-School Grads Face a Chilly Market"). Several schools go one step further: Like Wharton, Indiana, Purdue, Ohio State, and Washington University in St. Louis, all allow undergraduates to submatriculate directly into the MBA program.
SOMETHING TO PROVE. Typically, these schools won't let just anybody into a "submat program". They're looking for undergrads with a minimum 3.7 grade-point average, a GMAT score that at least matches the average for the entering MBA class -- and one or more summer internships. Finegold was a Dean's List student as a business undergrad at Penn and will graduate with honors. During the past couple of summers, he worked as an investment-banking intern at Merrill Lynch in New York and with Credit Suisse First Boston's Palo Alto (Calif.) tech group.
So in his junior year, Finegold applied for Wharton's fast-track program, and after being accepted he spent what normally would have been his senior year of college taking his first-year MBA classes. "Initially, you definitely feel like you have to prove yourself in the classroom," says Finegold, who concentrated in finance and management. But he says he "felt a huge advantage in recruiting, having gone through the process three years in a row."
Evidently his new employer, a Wall Street financial-services firm, didn't see any drawbacks in paying Finegold, who was nine the last time the U.S. had a recession, its going rate for new MBAs. In fact, high-octane industries such as investment banking and consulting -- in which 80-hour work weeks are the rule more than the exception -- often seek the energetic overachieving set, who are drawn by big bucks and tend to arrive unburdened by spouses and children. Perhaps they "don't mind working a zillion hours a week," says Wharton Admissions Director Rosemaria Martinelli.
HAZING OF THE GREEN. UBS Warburg is another investment bank that likes what it sees in Wharton's submatriculants. Anand Davis, head of UBS's U.S. MBA recruiting, says the bank usually prefers a few years of seasoning for its investment banking associates. But of the five Wharton MBAs to whom it offered positions this year, three were submats.
"We put them up against the other MBAs, and [the submatriculants] came out ranked higher," Davis says -- based on measures such as aptitude, personality, and ambition. It also couldn't have hurt that Ken Moelis, a Wharton submatriculant in '81, is the head of the firm's U.S. investment bank.
In a down year for MBA hiring, many submats may be at a disadvantage. Jeff Hazlett, who graduates this spring with an MBA after five years at Purdue, has found that "some companies won't even look at you." Still, Hazlett, 24, has managed to turn previous summer internships with IBM into a full-time position with Big Blue as a cost analyst. Chuck Johnson, Purdue's director of professional Master's programs, adds that submatriculants "tend to take more analyst positions," as corporations remain skittish about placing green grads in charge of other employees.
That's why it's unlikely that MBA programs will fill their ranks with youngsters any time soon, says Maury Hanigan, CEO of New York-based Hanigan Consulting Group, which advises large companies on campus recruiting issues. "There's tremendous dissent in the ranks when a 26-year-old walks into work and tells people how to do their job," she adds. Jeanne Wilt, Michigan's assistant dean for admissions and career development, says the head start may even be detrimental to career progress: "They start at lower salaries with fewer opportunities."
Of course, at a lot of companies it may not matter. An MBA from a good school will still get many people onto the low rungs of Corporate America. And then, to climb higher, they have to prove that they can perform. The ones who can will most likely be successful, and the ones who can't won't -- no matter what their age
