Is entrepreneurship a game killer?

[skah-uh]

I was just reading this transcript of a Business Week chat with Rakesh Khurana of HBS:

"One element of the rankings ... is the use of starting salaries to rank business schools. This dissuades admissions offices from hiring students interested in working in the social sector, social enterprise, or entrepreneurship more broadly because these students won't have high starting salaries."

Now a great strength of my application is my entrepreneurial experience and the fact that I've built from scratch an innovative and successful retail company. I'm sure this will help my application. My question is, when talking about my career goals, should I avoid talking about entrepreneurship? Would writing that my goal is to go into entrepreneurial consulting, for example, be a bad idea? Of course I want to be honest in my application, but I suppose I will have to be circumspect in deciding just how much information to divulge.

Thank you again!

[Lisa Anderson]

Dear skah-uh,

I think honesty is always the best policy in your business school application. You want to make sure you end up at the right place and the school needs to know not only who you are, but what you want to do, in order to determine if that school is a good fit for you. Salary statistics are reported according to reporting standards. According to those standards, schools should be not be including the starting salary of students who are truly starting their own businesses (entrepreneurs). However, they would include salaries for those entering the government or nonprofit sector if those students reported the information.

I think it is possible there are some schools where admissions decisions might be influenced by goals of working in social entrepreneurship or the social sector, but I think that is more the exception than the rule. Schools with large class sizes will not have as much of an issue with this since the number of salaries in the entire calculation is high. On the other side, schools with small (<70) class sizes might be more sensitive, but these do not tend to be the top 20 looking to hold on to their spot in the rankings. At the end of the day, it is hard to say how much your career goals influence the admissions committee's decision. But I do know that most admissions folks would never base an admit/reject decision solely on career goals.

Good luck,
Lisa