The M.B.A. Fast Track
Some Business Schools Give
Younger, Less-Experienced
Applicants a Shot

By Ronald Alsop
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal

Tom Starin graduated last spring from Pennsylvania State University, with a bachelor's degree in meteorology and a minor in global business strategy. On that basis, he was hardly an ideal candidate to get into graduate business school. Unlike most prospective M.B.A. students, he had almost no work experience besides summer internships.

Even so, Mr. Starin made a big impression on admission officials at the University of Rochester's Simon Graduate School of Business Administration, where he started last fall. His high score on the Graduate Management Admission Test (710) certainly helped. But what really made the 22-year-old applicant stand out was a successful online baseball-card trading venture. While at Penn State, he earned profits of $2,000 to $3,000 a year on an average investment of $3,000 to $4,000 a year in baseball cards. "In effect, I started my own little arbitrage business," Mr. Starin says. He bought cards of players once their teams were eliminated in postseason games and sold them at times of peak excitement, such as opening day in the spring.

"This guy is going to be a winner," says Mark Zupan, the Simon School's dean. "He has entrepreneurial zeal, creativity and a can-do attitude." All of which, the dean believes, overcomes Mr. Starin's lack of traditional work experience.

Missed Opportunities

More business schools are admitting students either straight out of college or after only a year or two in the workplace. Indiana University's Kelley School of Business, for example, is developing a "life-sciences scholars" program that accepts undergraduate science majors right into the M.B.A. program. If the business school had a strict work-experience policy, officials there say, it would risk losing top-caliber undergraduates to other graduate programs. And the corporate recruiters who visit campuses to seek out job candidates would never find out about them.

"The schools see the talented people we've missed, but the recruiters don't," says Edward Snyder, dean of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. To try to ensure that it doesn't keep missing those great catches, Dean Snyder's school has established the GSB Scholars program. U. of Chicago undergraduates can apply to the M.B.A. program in their senior year. If they are provisionally admitted, they must then get two to three years of "substantive" work experience before starting classes.

To be sure, 22-year-olds are still a fraction of most M.B.A. classes. And if some corporate recruiters have their way, the youth movement won't go any further: In a recent Wall Street Journal/Harris Interactive survey, recruiters' most frequent complaint is that M.B.A. students lack enough "relevant" experience. Most recruiters say they expect a minimum of four or five years of experience, preferably in their industries.

"The M.B.A. candidate with zero experience is basically still a kid," says John Paul Komasinski, a survey respondent and CEO of Komasinski Business Solutions, a marketing and technology consulting firm. "Management requires very special people skills, attention to details, organization and coolness under fire. None of these qualities is apparent in a green M.B.A. student."

Dr. Zupan and other deans counter that some recruiters will find younger graduates refreshing because they're more idealistic and less set in their ways.

The Simon School decided it had given too much weight to work experience and was missing people with "the right attitude." To Dr. Zupan, the right attitude means "willingness to learn from mistakes or a basic humility, and a willingness to roll up your shirt sleeves and not be afraid to do some scut work."

Katherine Schwab, a vice president at Citigroup, says she has recruited "young, hungry" M.B.A. graduates at Rochester with great success for the company's finance training program. "The students we have hired at Rochester bring a lot of energy and flexibility," she says. "They haven't had management experience in the past and are willing to travel all over the world and approach different opportunities with a lot of enthusiasm."

Robert Fuchs, a vice president at EchoStar Communications, also interviews less-experienced M.B.A.s, partly because there are few students with a background in the relatively young field of satellite television. "Experience is secondary," he says. "We consider a candidate's degree of pride, determination to win and taste for adventure."

Business schools' renewed flexibility has grown partly out of a sharp drop in applications to most full-time M.B.A. programs. Some schools are more apt to admit people with high scores on their GMAT and fewer years in the workplace to keep their academic standards high.

Chicago and some other top-ranked schools have relaxed work-experience requirements partly in hopes of attracting more minorities and women. "We believe that going younger will result in a more diverse class," Mr . Snyder says. Women, in particular, have proved elusive for many top M.B.A. programs, partly because some are getting married or having children when they reach age 28, the typical age for an applicant.

Quality, Not Quantity

Brit Dewey, managing director for M.B.A. admissions and financial aid at Harvard, says women are quite interested in Harvard's "early career initiative," which welcomes people with less than three years' work experience.

This year, Harvard even waived the $215 application fee for college seniors so there's no financial barrier. "This sends the signal that we're really serious about considering college students," says Ms. Dewey. "We're looking for academic ability and leadership potential first and foremost. Then we consider the quality of experience and maturity of the candidate, not the quantity of experience." Harvard looks closely at younger applicants who have started their own business, worked part time or participated in a co-op program while in college.

Recruiters and campus career advisers agree that younger M.B.A.s are unlikely to fetch as high a salary after graduation. Alan Ferrell, director of graduate career services at Purdue University's Krannert School of Management, estimates that about two-thirds of recruiters reduce salary and bonus offers for students who are light on experience. The rest pay about the same, he says, to keep compensation consistent for their new M.B.A. hires.