Round One Is Where It's At  

Some of the US business schools have been in town. I managed to get on to the presentation sessions of some of them. The bulk of the talks were nothing new to anyone looking at the schools. The following tidbits on Rounds do however stand out in my mind...

In HBS's presentation they mentioned that they had 8660 applicants last year. They characterised the applicants in each round as follows:

• Round 1: The 'A' types just waiting to hit the submit button. Not necessarily the highest volume, but the round wiht the highest quality applicants. About 450 are admitted from this round.
• Round 2: The highest volume round. Quality of applicants tends to be 'normal'. About 450 admitted from this round.
• Round 3: Sometimes the school ponders getting rid of this round, but it always produces eccentrics that the school wants to have. About 100 admitted from this round.
  

At MIT Sloan's presentation, again the round information stuck out. They had 4000 applicants last year for ~350 places.

• In Round 1, the volume of applicants was 1/3 of the total. Half the class was admitted in this round.
• In Round 2, the volume of applicants was 2/3 of the total. Again, half the class was admitted in this round.

 Sloan does not have a Round 3. So doing the math, they admit 175 places for the 1333 applicants in Round 1 and 175 places for 2666 applicants in Round 2. i.e. 13% acceptance rate for admission in Round 1 and 6.5% in Round 2. 8.8% acceptance overall. And that's before the credit crunch...