Admissions consultants irk top business schools
BOSTON --Some of the nation's top business schools are looking for ways to shut out the growing number of consultants who coach applicants on essays and interviews.
Admission consultants charge MBA hopefuls fees ranging from $50 to $3,000 per application to elite schools such as Harvard, Stanford and Wharton. But school officials are worried that they're not seeing authenticity.
"At the end of the day, what we really want to see is the candidates," Britt K. Dewey, managing director for MBA admissions at Harvard Business School, told The Boston Globe. "We're looking for authenticity."
The deans of seven top business schools plan to discuss the issue at an upcoming gathering, the newspaper reported. They are considering conducting multiple interviews, giving different essay questions to different candidates, and requiring applicants to complete essays under supervision.
"We want to remove the possibility of outside interference," said Derrick Bolton, director of admissions at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Consultants, some of whom are former admissions officers, insist they're helping clients find their voices.
"Our value is in helping the applicant match himself or herself to a school," Linda Abraham, president of Accepted.com, a Los Angeles-based consulting firm, told the Globe. "We're not creating a generic application, and we're not fitting to a generic application."
The use of consultants is more accepted at undergraduate and law schools. At the elite business schools, there is a stigma because the degrees translate to high-paying jobs. The Globe reported that business school applicants don't disclose their use of consultants.
Some consultants are organizing a panel to discuss their work at a Graduate Management Admissions Council meeting in San Francisco this spring.
"We're starting to get some recognition by business school admission committees that we exist, that we're not going away," said Alex Brown, admissions counselor at ClearAdmit LLC in Philadelphia. 