Why does CBS get hated on so much?  I get that the whole ED round pushes people the wrong way, but what else do people think is so wrong with the school?  What are your thoughts Sandy? 

hbs round 2 accepts by college graduating class!!!!based on a survey of first 62 class cards, admitted Round 2 students,  U.S, by alphabet:

01  0%
02  8%
03 19%
04  31%
05  21%
06 11%
07  3%
08  2%
Older 5%

HBS AND AGE JIHAD: CLASS OF 04-06, COME ON DOWN!!!!!!!!!!!!! ALL OTHERS, PLEASE FLY STAND BY.

GOT THIS NOTE FROM A 27 YEAR-OLD WHO WAS AN ACCEPT AT HBS ROUND 2, JUST CONFIRMS MY EARLIER THEORY ABOUT HBS AND AGE.  FOLKS SHOULD REALLY PUSH BACK ON THIS NEXT YEAR AT FORUMS. I MEAN, IF YOU ARE 27.
Went through a ton of the classcards tonight. I have found about 3 others that are my age and two of the were in the military which explains why they could not applty earlier. I feel even better about getting in now. The most common years are definitey 04-06.
 
ANY ADMIT CARE TO RUN THRU 100 RANDOM CLASS CARDS, AND PRODUCE A LITTLE CHART OF GRADUATING CLASS YEARS, THANKS.

Wait List mania –below Boston Globe story is about college Waitlists,  not b school, and premise of the story is that less competitive schools have MEGA WL [take a look at numbers below] b.c. kids are applying to 8-15 colleges, so no one really knows where the bouncing ball stops. That is not ALL that comperable in b school world, altho………..it would not surprise me, if apps continue to climb, that kids will start applying to more schools, altho a ceiling here is that you sorta gotta go to college, for many, b school outside of band x y z is a non-starter.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has wait-listed 739 applicants, up nearly 50 percent from last year. Northeastern University has wait-listed 1,400, a 17 percent increase, while the University of Vermont has wait-listed more than 3,000, a 22 percent rise. Dartmouth will wait-list 1,500, up 15 percent. The increases are roughly in line with the rise in the number of applications.

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GMAT vs. GRE: below press release from GRE creators is a shot across the bow of GMATs and a useful summary of schools now taking the GRE instead of GMAT. Given Bolton’s point about YOUNG WOMEN being the most likely to present GRE’s in lieu of GMATs, it remains an interesting question of how long HBS can hold out on this front. SURELY no one actually thinks either test does a better job of actually measuring anything better than the other–and the purpose of either test is to give an added metric on the exact question of: How well you take standardized tests. Something schools are comfortable with then boiling into the stew, with the rest of your app. 
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BAD NEWS BEARS? HOW WILL FINANCE LAY-OFFS IMPACT APPS AND JOBS?
DUH, IT WILL, COUNT ON IT, WHILE LAYOFFS AND BLOOM OFF THE ROSE WALL ST. STORIES WILL LESSEN THE ‘PULL’ PART OF B SCHOOL APPS [E.G. STAR STRUCK TECHIES AND BACK OFFICE TYPES WHO DREAM OF $$$ ON WALL STREET] IT WILL ALSO ‘PUSH’ THOSE KIDS GETTING CUT FR. BANKS, AND FUNDS, AND FINANCE JOBS IN GENERAL, OUT OF JOBS AND INTO APPLYING TO B SCHOOL. THE PULL DECREASE WILL BE SMALL BUT THE PUSH OF KIDS LAID OFF WILL BE LARGER.
Story fr. New York Times has some interesting snippets:

Last week, after the Bear Stearns announcement, business school and college students called their institutions from spring break to ask if their finance jobs would be canceled. It remains unclear what will happen with many internships and job offers.

Goldman Sachs said in January that it would reduce its global work force by 5 percent. On Friday, The New York Post reported that the cuts would rise to 20 percent, which would bring the total cut to 6,400 jobs.

full story fr. New York Times below
March 24, 2008

With Economy Tied to Wall St., New York Braces for Job Cuts

By LOUISE STORY

New York is accustomed to job losses on Wall Street. They come with just about every economic slump, and their impact is felt throughout the city.

But now, as the city braces for a big contraction in the financial sector as a result of the credit crisis and the collapse of Bear Stearns, the fallout could be worse than in the past.

The New York economy is more dependent than ever on high Wall Street incomes, which have jumped by more than half since 2001, to an average of $387,000, according to the city comptroller’s office.

Last year, the finance industry was responsible for nearly a third of all wages earned in the city, the highest in modern times. And each Wall Street job supports three workers in other sectors.

A great many of the 14,000 employees of Bear Stearns are expected to lose their jobs because of the firm’s cash shortage and its pending acquisition by JPMorgan Chase. As the credit crisis unfolds and other firms discover the depths of their losses related to bad loans, few expect the layoffs to stop there.

“Up to this point in New York City, the material result of the credit crunch hasn’t been felt as quickly as people were expecting,” said Marcia Van Wagner, deputy comptroller for the budget of New York City. “It took a while for the other shoe to drop.”

Indeed, even though economists say this slowdown started in the financial sector, New York has felt little of its pain. For example, real estate prices have largely held steady in the metropolitan area even as they have plummeted in other regions.

Now there are signs of nervousness, and not just among bankers and traders. Some prospective buyers in the pricey condominium market have put their plans on hold. Companies like SeamlessWeb, which delivers food to financial firms, are reconsidering plans to hire more staff. A newsstand operator across from the New York Stock Exchange greeted his customers last week by saying, “It will be O.K.”

Analysts are predicting wider cuts across the industry, even among workers who had nothing to do with mortgages. A UBS analyst, Glenn Schorr, said the major banks had already cut 5 to 10 percent of their work forces, and he said he expected them to make cuts on a similar scale again in the next few months.

“It’s fair to, unfortunately, expect another wave of cuts as they batten down the hatches,” said Mr. Schorr, who covers several major banks.

Some New York-area residents are becoming more cautious with their spending decisions.

Last month, Shai Shustik, a broker with Manhattan Residential, was helping a 27-year-old client find a $700,000 one-bedroom apartment on the East Side of Manhattan. But then the client suddenly put her search on hold. Her father, a banker, said he had lost too much money in the stock market to buy such an apartment for her.

Until two weeks ago, Mr. Shustik was also working with a Credit Suisse banker who wanted to spend up to $1.6 million for a one-bedroom apartment in the West Village or TriBeCa neighborhoods of Manhattan. The banker abruptly stopped his apartment search because he was too concerned about the stock market and his future bonus potential.

Last Tuesday, a woman picking at her salad in Grand Central Terminal said her husband, who works at a competitor of Bear Stearns, feared the trouble would spread.

“He’s worried,” said the woman, Emilie Bosak, a stay-at-home mother. “Most people in finance are worried.”

That worry has been building since last summer, just after two hedge funds within Bear Stearns collapsed and the mortgage markets were beginning to freeze. Employment at securities firms in New York had rebounded since the 2001 recession and was nearing its all-time peak of 200,000 from before that downturn, according to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, a trade group.

Since August, the financial industry has gradually shed at least 20,000 jobs, mostly among those selling loans, those bundling loans into complex securities and those placing trading bets on the likelihood that borrowers would pay.

Now the pace of job losses is increasing. Significant cuts at Bear Stearns are almost certain. Citigroup is in the process of cutting 10 percent of the work force in its investment bank, or 6,000 people. Lehman Brothers announced 1,400 layoffs two weeks ago.

Goldman Sachs said in January that it would reduce its global work force by 5 percent. On Friday, The New York Post reported that the cuts would rise to 20 percent, which would bring the total cut to 6,400 jobs. A spokeswoman for Goldman had no comment on the report.

“There will be more cutbacks because basically the business is not there,” said Richard X. Bove, a managing director at Punk, Ziegel & Company, an investment firm.

The last time Wall Street had a similar contraction was after the technology bubble burst seven years ago. At that time, financial firms cut 60,000 jobs in the New York City area, or 1 in every 10 finance positions, according to Moody’s Economy.com .

But those cuts were rapid, and this downturn strikes some people as more similar to the slow bleeding that occurred on Wall Street from 1987 to 1993, when 100,000 people in the New York area 15 percent of finance workers lost their jobs, according to Economy.com.

So far, Economy.com is predicting about 25,000 job losses in the New York area, but that number may be revised as the full impact of Wall Street’s credit troubles becomes clear, said Marisa Di Natale, a senior economist at Economy.com.

The firm’s chief economist, Mark Zandi, said of the current round of cuts: “It won’t be the same kind of job loss. Back in ’01 or ’91, it was a much larger share of the back-office jobs. But in terms of compensation, the impact could be just as significant. One hedge fund job lost today is worth 10 back-office jobs in the last downturn.”

In New York and surrounding counties, for example, financial workers accounted for 29 percent of all money earned and only 11 percent of jobs in 2006. That is up significantly from 1990, when the finance industry accounted for 19 percent of wages and 12 percent of jobs, according to an analysis by Economy.com.

That increase is related to an unprecedented rise in bonuses over the last four years and also to the elimination of some lower-paying jobs because of outsourcing and computer improvements.

Some New Yorkers said their neighbors seemed to be in denial.

“I was at a benefit last week, and a major well-known chief executive told me that ‘Everything will be just fine. People will start buying houses again,’ ” said David Patrick Columbia, who runs the New York Social Diary, a Web site that chronicles Manhattan social life. “Another one blamed everything on the media. He went on about how the media is creating a recession.”

To be sure, it is not clear how prolonged the downturn in the economy will be or where its effects will be felt the most. Historically, most recessions have hit the manufacturing sector, for example, much harder than financial institutions. This downturn is different, many economists say, because it was set off by troubles in the financial sector.

That distinction is evident among executive recruiters in the securities industry, some of whom say they received a barrage of résumés last week after the sale of Bear Stearns was announced.

“Bear was a shock to the market. No one could have fathomed a year ago that something like this would happen so fast,” said Michael Karp, chief executive of Options Group, a recruiter in New York. “So employees across the board are nervous.”

Adam Zoia, managing partner at Glocap, another New York recruiter, said employers using his firm listed the same number of job openings in the first two months of this year as in the period a year earlier. But, he said, they filled 20 to 30 percent fewer of those positions because of uncertainty about the economy.

Last week, after the Bear Stearns announcement, business school and college students called their institutions from spring break to ask if their finance jobs would be canceled. It remains unclear what will happen with many internships and job offers.

Anxiety is also being felt among the businesses that cater to Wall Street and its high-income workers.

Jason Finger, president of the food delivery company SeamlessWeb, said he saw a clear drop in business this past week. Each order was just a bit smaller.

“It’s only on the margin,” Mr. Finger said. “The financial markets have been very unsettling for us.”

Harry’s Cafe, a cavernous restaurant in the financial district, saw a 15 to 20 percent drop in business over the last two weeks, mostly at lunchtime. The nearby Delmonico’s steakhouse also was slow during lunch. The restaurants’ managers say people living in the new condominiums downtown have added some stability at dinnertime.

At Bistro Laurent Tourondel, or BLT, a sleek steakhouse on 57th Street and Park Avenue, Yann Le Morzellec, the assistant general manager, said: “A lot of the clients have the black Amex card, which shows to us they are pretty stable. I think a lot of them might be immune to what’s going on.”

Eric Bedoucha, the chef at Financier Patisserie, a downtown bakery, tracks the financial market by the types of cakes his customers buy.

“They buy a ‘Good luck!’ cake for when someone is fired and ‘Welcome to our team!’ when someone is hired,” Mr. Bedoucha said.

He saw lots of job-loss cakes in November but has not seen many since then. Still, the bakery opened in 2002, after the last bubble had burst, so he does not know whether people will buy any type of cake if there are large-scale layoffs.

Reporting was contributed by Annie Correal, Geraldine Fabrikant, Christine Haughney and Sharon Otterman.

David Brooks, the often banal NY TIMES op-ed regular, actually provides a service today, by rolling through the 20 buzz words and ocncepts which could form the sub-structure of a good HBS or Stan goals or vision essay: to wit, using the techniques of private enterprise and start-ups to impact massive social good. See also our prior posts about 4th Sector, and http://www.fourthsector.net/

Op-Ed Columnist

Thoroughly Modern Do-Gooders

By DAVID BROOKS

Fashions in goodness change, just like fashions in anything else, and these days some of the very noblest people have assumed the manners of the business world — even though they don’t aim for profit. They call themselves social entrepreneurs, and you can find them in the neediest places on earth.

The people who fit into this category tend to have plenty of résumé bling. Bill Drayton, the godfather of this movement, went to Harvard, Yale, Oxford and McKinsey before founding Ashoka, a global change network. Those who follow him typically went to some fancy school and then did a stint with Teach for America or AmeriCorps before graduate school. Then, they worked for a software firm before deciding to use what they’d learned in business to help the less fortunate.

Now they work 80 hours a week, fighting bureaucracies and funding restrictions in order to build, say, mentoring programs for single moms.

Earlier generations of benefactors thought that social service should be like sainthood or socialism. But this one thinks it should be like venture capital.

These thoroughly modern do-gooders dress like venture capitalists. They talk like them. They even think like them. That means that aside from the occasional passion for heirloom vegetables, they are not particularly crunchy. They don’t wear ponytails, tattoos or Birkenstocks. They don’t devote any energy to countercultural personal style, unless you consider excessive niceness a subversive fashion statement.

Next to them, Barack Obama looks like Abbie Hoffman.

It also means that they are not that interested in working for big, sluggish bureaucracies. They are not hostile to the alphabet-soup agencies that grew out of the New Deal and the Great Society; they just aren’t inspired by them.

J.B. Schramm created a fantastic organization called College Summit that provides students with practical guidance through the college admissions process. Gerald Chertavian, a former software entrepreneur, created Year Up, which helps low-income students get apprenticeships in corporations and packages its fund-raising literature in the form of an I.P.O. prospectus.

The venture-capital ethos means instead that these social entrepreneurs are almost willfully blind to ideological issues. They will tell you, even before you have a chance to ask, that they are data-driven and accountability-oriented. They’re always showing you multivariate regressions or explaining why some promising idea “didn’t pencil out.” The highest status symbol in their circle is a Rand study showing that their program yields statistically significant results.

Bill Gates, who fits neatly into this world, came to dinner with journalists in Washington last week. He looked utterly bored as the conversation drifted to presidential campaign gossip. But when asked about which programs produce higher reading scores, the guy lit up and became a fountain of facts and findings.

The older do-gooders had a certain policy model: government identifies a problem. Really smart people design a program. A cabinet department in a big building administers it.

But the new do-gooders have absorbed the disappointments of the past decades. They have a much more decentralized worldview. They don’t believe government on its own can be innovative. A thousand different private groups have to try new things. Then we measure to see what works.

Their problem now is scalability. How do the social entrepreneurs replicate successful programs so that they can be big enough to make a national difference?

America Forward, a consortium of these entrepreneurs, wants government to do domestic policy in a new way. It wants Washington to expand national service (to produce more social entrepreneurs) and to create a network of semipublic social investment funds. These funds would be administered locally to invest in community-run programs that produce proven results. The government would not operate these social welfare programs, but it would, in essence, create a network of semipublic Gates Foundations that would pick winners based on stiff competition.

There’s obviously a danger in getting government involved with these entrepreneurs. Government agencies are natural interferers, averse to remorseless competition and quick policy shifts. Nonetheless, these funds are worth a try.

The funds would head us toward this new policy model, in which government sets certain accountability standards but gives networks of local organizations the freedom to choose how to meet them. President Bush’s faith-based initiative was a step in this direction, but this would be broader.

Furthermore, we might as well take advantage of this explosion of social entrepreneurship. These are some of the smartest and most creative people in the country. Even if we don’t know how to reduce poverty, it’s probably worth investing in these people and letting them figure it out.

They won’t stop bugging us until we do.

Sandy– on the HBS blog, it states that some Round 2 candidates may be waitlisted without receiving an interview invite.  Why would HBS eventually take a waitlisted candidate that it has not interviewed over a waitlisted candidate who has gone through the interview process (and did not mess up the interview)? 

That doesn’t make sense to me.  It seems like if you don’t receive an interview request then your odds of eventual admittance are close to zero.  Am I missing something?

As to getting on WL on D-day and then being called for interview later, it happens, and it HAS happened already this year in R1, or so people have claimed. That has happened in years prior as well, and yes, some admits.

As to chances of being put on WL on R2 D-day without interview, and then being called for interview, and getting IN, dunno, there could be 2 or 3 kids like that, with class of 1000 admits, all kinds of weirdo stuff happens in tiny numbers. I do know a guy who got an interview invite sorta around now in Round 1, and got in, I have absolutely no idea why the timing went that way, he was perfectly standard dude, in terms of background, etc. As to why these blips and hiccups happen, dunno, my guess is HRH has a deskful of oddball cases, and in response to micro motives (someone says at a meeting ‘we need more nerds’ ) or just her own internal rythmns, she shuffles thru the pile every once in a while  and decides to play God. It aint more complicated than that, altho feel free to concoct all sorts of speculative systems. She also responds to bigfoot pressure, dean hints, and the general vibes that run thru HBS ‘air’ — it’s a tightly wound place, and no syllable goes unnoticed, and some syllables are more important than others.