Wharton’s Dean: Speaking Frankly
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• On B-School Homogeneity: “One of the challenges [of Wharton's recent branding campaign] was to look at [the websites of] the top 20 schools, take off the brand names and see if you could tell which school was which. Even putting Wharton in there, they all look very much alike.”
• On Wharton’s Limited Competition: “At the undergraduate level, our competitors are Harvard, Yale and Princeton. At the M.B.A. level, it’s Harvard and Stanford. Executive M.B.A. in Philadelphia, it’s Columbia [Business School], I suppose. For the most part, we compete with Harvard [at the M.B.A. level]. There are still tremendous regional biases.”
• On Producing B-School Faculty: “When we admit students [to Wharton's doctoral program], in the letter of admission, the expectation is that they will go into academia. The notion has even been floated that if they don’t go into academia, they should pay back the cost of the Ph.D. program. It costs about $400,000 to educate one Ph.D. student, because they don’t pay tuition and they get stipends. If [Wharton's departments] are not placing at top schools, or if their students don’t go into academia, we will cut back the number of Ph.D. students that they’re allowed to admit.”
—Thomas Robertson, dean of the Wharton School, to Melissa Korn of the Wall Street Journal, April 4, 2012.
This article was originally published on Paul Bodine’s blog. Paul is a graduate admissions consultant with over 13 years of experience, having helped hundreds of applicants get into their dream business, law, medical, and graduate schools. He has also published several books on graduate admissions.
