(Photo: hans thijs)
For an MBA applicant, nothing is more pleasing than asking admission-related queries to their dream b-schools and getting quickly responded to. As we found out during an experiment, American schools edge out the British ones on this one. As part of a continuing experiment, we posed as MBA applicants and contacted the top 20 global b-schools according to the Financial Times Global MBA Rankings 2013 through board phone lines, email and their officially listed Facebook pages. While the good thing is that we did get a response from most b-schools, the time taken and the quality of response varied greatly.
The difference was most obvious in the email responses. Harvard Business School, Stanford Graduate Business School, Yale School of Management and New York University-Stern got back immediately with automated responses. Harvard mentioned that they did not send separate email responses to individual applicants but also sent FAQs and additional information related to our questions. Stanford and Stern followed the initial email up with another email addressing our specific query. Five more US b-schools responded within a day’s time while only three European b-schools replied in the same time. However, New York’s Columbia Business School replied in seven days, the longest time taken to respond among all b-schools we contacted.
*Blue, red and grey coloured bars represent US, European and Asian b-schools respectively
American b-schools, save MIT Sloan, University of Chicago-Booth and NorthWestern University-Kellogg, sent detailed responses to our emails as well. Contrast that with European b-schools where only IMD Switzerland sent us an exhaustive response. University of Cambridge-Judge in the UK responded to our query in two brief lines directing us to visit the website while IESE Business School, Spain, although apologetic, stated that they could answer the query till the application is reviewed.
B-schools responded much better to our phone calls with only six of them not responding to calls or being unreachable. In Europe, IE Business School could not be reached while the responsible staff at Judge was not available. We did not get a phone answer from the two Asian b-schools in the top 20. Among the US b-schools, only Sloan and Dartmouth College-Tuck did not take our calls. However, our question was recorded in an answering machine. Impressed we were with Stanford the most where even the automated responder spelled out exhaustive details of what we could do to get a question answered, while at Yale a lady who took the call guided us through the website for the required information.
These institutes were even more prompt with their Facebook pages with 13 of them responding to our scholarship query within a day’s time. Only Harvard, Yale and Judge did not respond to our enquiry on the social networking website.