hbs round one vs. round two: To Me the conclusion is clear: R1 GIVES YOU A CLEAR ADVANTAGE THAT CAN NOT BE CORRECTED BY QUALITY OF APPLICANT POOL. SO ALWAYS APPLY R1…

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I disagree.  I dont always agree w. HBS party line [no real diff in terms of outcomes or strategy for r1 vs. r2]  but I do on this score, based on my own experience base over last 10 or so years, which includes lotsa, lotsa HBS experience.  The app. pool for Round 1 is really more  dense w. freq. flyers and stars fr. banks, consultiing, PE etc., dudes and dudettes who have industrialized their work exp. over 3, 4 5 years and have been planning to apply HBS round 1 since college. Round two gets a lot casual applicants, lazy applicants, and odd ball internationals who first hear about HBS in road shows in Shanghi, etc. which typically occur too late for R1, but road shows to top IB and PE shops happen over the summer. Your case is built up a lot on Admission 411 stats, which are worth sumpthing, but I’m not sure exactly what. In my experience, the whole application cohort goes thru Admission 411 burnout, sorta from Sept to Feb: it seems like a Godsend of an idea, when you first discover it, and just what you want to know, then you figure out the 411 info is not personalized in terms of minority status, work pedigree or extras to be of much real value, so, duh, the Admission 411 stats just fill out the stats offered by schools themselves, and kids start falling off, and even stop reporting. HBS r2 accepts come out in late March, and by that time, my guess, lotsa of accepted kids dont report, and have stopped going to the site, b.c. value is null, except maybe for WL.

YOU SAY: “The acceptane rate in R1 is 16% vs. R2  11% (meaning you have almost a 50% better chance of being accepted in R1).” Assuming for sake of argument those stats are correct,  you are falling for tyranny of small numbers. Lets say, simply, that 3000 kids apply R1 and 4500 apply r2: that gives ~450 accepts in each round. The 100-200 super stars from McK, Bain, BCG, Goldman, Citi, JP Morgan, Blackstone, etc. and other early bird stars could account for the bulk of your “50 percent” better number. My pt. being that w. a total universe of ~1000 accepts (I was omitting R3 above), 100 accepts can make a real whopping stat difference. And my guess is, there are at least 100 more super star [90 percent accept rate]  applicants in R1 than R2.

I take a real close look at about 200 HBS accepts and near accepts every year, thru my own work and interview reports, and just networking. I just dont see a pattern where any “near accept” would have gotten in, in a dif. round. I will admit, 10 percent of outcomes (esp. no interveiw) are baffling, but that happens in both rounds, pretty evenly, and is my diagnostic error metric for HBS adcoms (the crap shoot factor, if you will), similar to that of most doctors, according to professional lit.  

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Dee in her official pronouncements has said that they roughly admit equal number of people in each round, with R2 having more apps than R1. To me this clearly means that R2 has a lower acceptance rate. However, Dee might be correcting for qualitative factors like a stronger applicant pool or something to make that claim.

However, examining the 411 data for HBS 2009, I derive very different conclusions.

- You almost double your chance of being interviewed by applying in R1 vs. R2.
- The acceptane rate in R1 is 16% vs. R2  11% (meaning you have almost a 50% better chance of being accepted in R1).

I understand that the data is probably not completely reliable but I am only using affirmative statistics in my analysis (i.e. only looking at admits to account for “laziness factor” of people not recording their rejects). Additionally I am comforted making this generalization since the sample size is > 700 or about 10% of the applicants and the overall accptance rate of 14% mirrors the actual HBS rate last year.

To Me the conclusion is clear: R1 GIVES YOU A CLEAR ADVANTAGE THAT CAN NOT BE CORRECTED BY QUALITY OF APPLICANT POOL. SO ALWAYS APPLY R1…

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