Harvard Business School Vs

7/30/2019 Harvard Business School Vs

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Harvard Business School vs. Stanford GraduateSchool of Business

Lets just say it right out: Stanford and Harvard are the two best businessschools in the world. In terms of prestige and status, you cant do better thanto win the coveted MBA letters from either Stanford or Harvard. So its notsurprising that a large number of people who apply to Stanford also apply toHarvard and vice versa. When Harvard gets turned down by applicants itaccepts (about 11% of those who gain an offer), more often than not theapplicants go west to Stanford. The same is true when Stanfords GraduateSchool of Business (known as GSB) is passed over by accepted applicants.They inevitably head for Harvard Business School.

Yet there are some dramatic differences between these two MBAeducational giants. Most notably:

Geography: This is an obvious point, but an important one. Stanford is inthe heart of Silicon Valley on a campus dotted with massive palm trees thatsway in the afternoon breezes. In the winter months, when Harvard studentsare bundled up and trudging through ice and snow, Stanford MBAs mightstill be wearing shorts. The Stanford campus is located between San Joseand San Francisco, which is about a 45-minute drive away. The HarvardBusiness School, of course, is in Boston, one of the worlds most dynamic

and inviting cities. Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, is justminutes away. So is world-class arts and culture of all kinds. But the wintermonths can be brutal in New England so the east-west difference is a bigone.

Size: With about 390 students per class, Stanford pretty much guaranteesthat almost every student knows each other. A Stanford class is less thanhalf that of Harvard which has the largest MBA enrollment of any top schoolin the world. Total full-time MBA enrollment at Stanford is just 765, versusHarvards 1,837. Its the difference between intimate scale and large

scale.

Facilities:The campus of Stanfords Graduate School of Business is smalland compact: a complex of eight new, separate buildings created aroundthree quadrangles opened in 2011 and a single residence hall. HarvardBusiness School, on the other hand, is like a university onto itself with 34separate buildings on 40 acres of property along the Charles River. Harvardhas its own state-of-the-art fitness center, a massive library, a newinnovation lab, and a chapel. Strategy guru Michael Porter and his Institutefor Strategy and Competitiveness even has his own building on campus.

There is no other business school in the world that can even remotely matchHarvard for its expansive classrooms and study halls. Stanfords new Knight


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Management Center, named after Nike founder and Stanford alum PhilKnight who tossed in $100 million of the $345 million cost, has given theschool modern, up-to-date, world-class facilities. The available squarefootage increased by 30% over the previous 280,000 sq. foot of space whenStanford lacked even a single classroom with windows (HBS boasts morethan 1.5 million square foot of space).

Stanford now boasts 13 tiered classrooms, up from 11, 20 flat-flooredclassrooms, up from eight, and 70 breakout and study rooms, a hugeimprovement from 28 previously. The larger number of breakout rooms, inparticular, have helped the school to more effectively deliver its newcurriculum changes that emphasize smaller seminar-style courses. A new600-seat auditorium replaces the previous 324-seat model. There also areeight 16-person seminar rooms, to allow for more intimate instruction, eightshowers for MBA students who also can use the university athletic centernext store, and an 870-car underground parking structure on a campuswhere parking was always an ordeal. But that still makes it 34 buildings tonine, if youre counting.

Culture: When Harvard Business School opens its essay section inquiringabout your three most substantial accomplishments, its not a leap tobelieve that Harvard a bastion of higher overachievement is signalingthat accomplishment, past and future, is paramount. That Harvard peoplevalue getting things done comes through loud and clear. My favorite

question on the Harvard application, though, is one of four optional essays,with a 400-word limit: When you join the HBS Class of 2013, how will youintroduce yourself to your new classmates? This gets at the aspiringstudents sense of identity, and how they present themselves, and may shedlight on how they might fit into a diverse group of students. The answermight also shed light on applicants anxiety about joining such a potentgroup.

Stanford Business School, on the other hand, starts by asking about valuesand aspirations: What matters most to you, and why? and then, more

directly, What are your career aspirations? Hear, hear for directness. Notthat Stanford is entirely focused on ideals; they also give applicants a choiceamong four other essay options, one of which inquires about experience ona high-performing team. As far as I could tell, Stanford was the only one ofthe top ten that didnt specify the maximum number of words for theiressays. It says something affirmative about the place that they trustapplicants to use their own judgment about how much to write.

Teaching Methods:At Stanford, theres far less reliance on case studies.Team projects, experiential learning, lecture and simulations make up half

the teaching. Obviously, teaching methods vary by course. In ManagerialFinance, for example, Stanford MBAs will largely be taught via lecture and


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discussion, with case studies accounting for about half of the work. InStrategic Leadership, however, most of the teaching (60%) is via casestudy, with about 10% lecture, and 30% experiential learning. At Harvard,the case study thoroughly dominates. Sure there are team projects,simulations and experiential learning in the mix, but its primary learning toolat Harvard is the case study. There are 30 cases in a course. The tencourses youll take at Harvard in the first year alone will require that you read300 case studies. As a current HBS student who blogs under the non deplume MilitarytoBusiness explains, the average student in a 90-plus personclass gains air time to comment on a case every other class. That meansthat the professor determines half of your grade on an average of 15comments over the period of three-to-five months. Thats not an incrediblydeep well of information to help differentiate 94 highly talented students, hesays. That is the consequence of case studies in a 90-plus person classenvironment. Obviously, the system breeds a certain level of competition.

Program Focus: Both MBA programs have a general management focus.The biggest single difference is in entrepreneurship. Stanfords location inPalo Alto, just down the street from Sand Hill Road, known for itsconcentration of venture capitalists, as well the mindset of its studentsmakes the GSB the ideal place for would-be entrepreneurs in technology.The words to focus on, however, are in technology. Harvards size makes ita formidable player in entrepreneurship. Harvard, for example, has its ownbuilding devoted to the subject, the Arthur Rock Center, named after the

HBS alum who invested in both Apple and Intel. Harvard boasts 35 facultymembers who teach entrepreneurship, the second largest faculty group atthe school, versus Stanfords 10 to 15 teachers, a number that includesadjunct instructors. All first-year MBAs at Harvard have a required course inentrepreneurship and can choose from nearly two dozen second-yearelectives on the topicpretty much the same number of courses thatStanford offers. As a percentage, more Stanford grads (about 15%) arelikely to either start companies or immediately work for startups than gradsat Harvard. Indeed, about 10% of Stanfords graduating class launchcompanies right out of school, versus about 3% to 4% at Harvard. However,

15 years out of HBS, about half of its grads end up as entrepreneursroughly the same percentage as Stanford. Even more surprisingly, Harvardalums compose nearly 25% of the entire venture capital industry. Clearly, itsa myth that Harvard is the breeding ground for corporate chieftains, whileStanford is the hotbed for entrepreneurs. In the most survey of b-schooldeans and directors by U.S. News & World Report, Stanford ranked secondin entrepreneurship vs. Harvards fourth-place showing. In this same survey,Stanford did slightly better than Harvard in finance, marketing, and non-profitmanagement. Harvard edged out Stanford in general management andinternational business.

On-Campus Recruiting:If youre aiming for a top MBA job at McKinsey,


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Bain, BCG, Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley, the Harvard- or Stanford-punched MBA will easily get you in the door. The small size of thegraduating class at Stanford, however, along with the more entrepreneurialmindset of the students, puts it at a disadvantage in getting large numbers ofcompany recruiters on campus. In fact, more than 90% of the companiesthat hire Stanford grads hire only one a year. Thats one major reason whyHarvard gets more campus recruiters than Stanford, or for that matter thanany other business school in the world. Its also why half of Stanfordsgraduating MBAs do self-directed job searches. Stanford has an edge intechnology, given its location, and geography also plays a part in whereMBAs land their first jobs. Some 52% of Stanford grads stay in the west,while only 15% of HBS grads migrate to the West Coast. About 18% of GSBgrads land jobs in the Northeast, compared to 38% of HBS grads.

Alumni Network: You cant really go wrong by being part of either theHarvard or the Stanford alumni network. Over the years, BusinessWeeksurveys of MBA graduates show that Harvard, Stanford and Dartmouthboast the strongest alumni networks of any business schools in the world.With 41,378 living MBA alums, Harvards network is larger and more global.Stanford, meantime, boasts 16,852 living MBA alums, with a strongconcentration in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley. Harvard also has moreglobal reach because of the size of its network. Because Stanford is clearlythe underdog to Harvards size and massive resources, its very likely thatalums try to be a bit more helpful to each other than those at Harvard.

Rankings:

In the rankings, Harvard tends to edge out Stanford. The P&Q rankwhichfactors into consideration all the major rankings weighted by their individualauthorityputs Harvard at number one and Stanford at number two. Theseare the up-to-date rankings from each ranking organization.

MBA Rankings Stanford HarvarPoets & Quants 2 1

BusinessWeek 6 2Forbes 1 3U.S. News & World Report 1 1Financial Times 4 3The Economist 7 5.

Historical Rankings by BusinessWeek:

The biggest question is how come Harvard or Stanford have never placed

number one in the most influential MBA rankings published. Over a 22-yearperiod and 11 biennial rankings, BusinessWeek has never put either of


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these two highly prestigious business schools at the head of the class.Harvard, with its largest graduating classes and east coast pedigree, hasdefinitely been ranked far more consistently over the years. HBS hasgenerally came in the number three spot, going as high as two twice and aslow as number five on three different occasions. Stanford has had a moreinconsistent run, going as low as number 11 in 2000 and as high as numberfour in three different surveys in 1994, 2002, and 2004. The answer isunderstandable. BusinessWeek measures customer satisfaction. Whilestudents rate these schools very highly, recruiters often have other issues.At Harvard, some corporate recruiters balk at the price tag. At Stanford,some recruiters dislike the fact that so few of the schools MBAs are on theopen market. Too many of them are headed for newer companies or directlybecome entrepreneurs that recruiting at Stanford is often frustrating formany companies. Thats generally why both schools have never beennumber one in the BusinessWeek survey.

.Historical Rankings by The Financial Times:


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Unlike BusinessWeeks rankings, The Financial Times includes businessschools from all over the world. So the FT is ranking both Harvard andStanford against such places as London Business School, which rankednumber one in this survey in 2010 and 2009, and INSEAD, which rankedfifth these last two years. Over the years, Harvard has bested Stanford in 9of the 11 years charted below. Only in one year did Stanford edge out HBS,in 2008, when Harvard fell to fifth and Stanford came in just ahead atnumber four. Even so, Harvard has topped this list only twice in 11 years(the biggest winner in the Financial Times surveys has been Wharton whichhas been ranked first on nine separate occasions and second twice). Givensome of the peculiar factors that the FT throws into its methodology,including international mobility and the percentage of women faculty,neither of which has anything to do with quality or customer satisfaction,both Harvard and Stanford have performed fairly well over the years.

Admissions:

Stanford is the most selective business school in the world, accepting only6.5% of those who apply for admission. Its average GMAT score, 726 for theClass of 2011, is also the highest. Harvard is number two, accepting little

more than 12% of its applicants and with an average GMAT just sevenpoints lower than Stanfords. Only 11% of applicants who gain an offer from


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Harvard turn the school down; Stanfords estmated yield is ten percentagepoints below Harvard.

Admission Stats Stanford Harvard

Average GMAT 726 719GMAT Range 540800 490800Average GPA 3.66 3.67Selectivity 6.5% 12.2%Yield 79% 89%.

Enrollment:

Stanfords class size is less than half that of Harvard, resulting in a more

intimate and close-knit community environment. The numbers for women,international and minority students are for the Class of 2011.

Enrollment Stats Stanford HarvardTotal MBA Enrollment 766 1,837Women 34% 36%International 33% 36%Minority 21% 22%.

Poets & Quants:

Stanford seems to open its doors for far more poets than Harvard. Studentswho did their undergraduate work in the humanities represent 47% of theClass of 2011 at Stanford, versus 40% at Harvard. On the other hand,Harvard is much more open to enrolling business undergrads than Stanford.About 26% of Harvards Class of 2011 have business undergraduatedegrees, versus just 17% at Stanford.

Undergrad Degrees Stanford HarvardHumanities 47% 40%Engineering/Math 36% 33%Business 17% 26%

.

Jobs and Pay:

The severe recession of 2009 had a big impact on even the best schools.Nearly a third of Stanfords Class of 2009 didnt have jobs when they


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graduated and nearly a quarter of Harvard MBAs were in the same boat.Grads from both schools fared much better three months aftercommencement, but these numbers are rare lows for the two best businessschools in the world. The estimates of median pay over a full career comefrom a study by PayScale done for BusinessWeek and do not include stockoptions or equity stakes by entrepreneurs. We suspect that if you includedstock, Stanford grads would easily make up the half-a-million dollardifference due to the liberal use of options in Silicon Valley.

Job & Pay Data Stanford Ha

Starting salary & bonus $132,769 $1MBAs employed at commencement 69.1% 76MBAs employed 3 months after commencement 85.4% 87Estimated median pay & bonus over a full career $3,327,145 $3

Harvard Business School Vs

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