Top Feeder Companies To Stanford

A mere half dozen of America’s most elite consulting and investment banking firms account for more than a third of the students in Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business Class of 2013, according to an analysis by Poets&Quants.

Stanford admits who have done a stint at consultants McKinsey & Co. at one time or another account for an estimated 10% of the class. The other five companies who had employed the most members of Stanford’s latest incoming class are Boston Consulting Group, Bain, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and J.P. Morgan/Chase. Together, these half dozen firms represent an estimated 33.9% of the 397 first-year students in Stanford’s MBA program.

It shatters the common myth that Stanford is the anti-establishment school versus Harvard. In fact, the admission stats show that Harvard is less Establishment than its West Coast rival. And Stanford’s heavy reliance on just six elite firms for more than a third of its MBA students is also a primary reason why Stanford’s starting salaries are as high as they are–former consultants and investment bankers tend to be among the highest paid graduates.

A RARE GLIMPSE INTO THE EDUCATIONAL AND WORK BACKGROUNDS OF ENROLLED MBA STUDENTS

The data provides a rare glimpse into the educational and work backgrounds of the students accepted and enrolled at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Business schools keep this information close to the vest, never disclosing this information in typical class profiles. Yet, an applicant’s undergraduate and work backgrounds loom large in admission decisions, in some cases dwarfing the importance of other factors from grade point averages and GMAT scores to the quality of one’s essays or admissions interview.

Percentage of Class of 2013 At Five Top Schools From Six Elite Employers

The analysis shows that Stanford’s admissions staff relies more heavily on a handful of firms to filter applicants into its prestige MBA program than any of its top business school rivals (see table on left). The same six firms, for example, account for about half the percentage of Class of 2013 MBA students at Harvard Business School, where Poets&Quants estimates that 17.8% of the first-year students are from these same six companies. Stanford’s enrolled students from these super elite firms, in fact, is nearly four times the percentage of those at Columbia Business School, where an estimated 9.6% of the Class of 2013 have one of those six firms on their resumes.

STUDENTS FROM GOLDMAN OUTNUMBER ALL THE COMBINED MBAS FROM THE BIGGEST TECH COMPANIES

Another surprise is how few of Stanford’s MBA students hail from Silicon Valley’s most prominent high tech firms. Given the school’s location in the heart of Silicon Valley, the school’s admission policies seem to be out of whack with the school’s reputation and image. In the Class of 2013, for example, there are more former employees from investment banking firm Goldman Sachs alone than all of the students combined from Apple, Google, Cisco Systems, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, eBay, and Microsoft. Consulting firm Bain & Co., with 20 ex-employees in the first year class at Stanford, had more than twice as many staffers in Stanford’s Class of 2013 than the combined total of the seven tech companies cited above.

The analysis of Stanford’s top feeder companies into its MBA program is based on a study of Internet records that allowed Poets&Quants to identify and confirm the educational and work backgrounds of 269 of the 397 students in the Class of 2013. We then estimated the total number of students from each feeder company based on the 68% sample of the entire class. Poets&Quants used LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and corporate internet sites to put together its profile of the class. Bain, for example, noted that it had 27 former employees in Stanford’s Class of 2012, not including six summer associates, versus the 20 in the Class of 2013. Bain identified 43 ex-employees in Harvard’s significantly larger Class of 2013 and 28 in Wharton’s Class of 2013.

FEW FROM SUCH BIG FIRMS AS GENERAL ELECTRIC, PEPSICO, KRAFT, SAMSUNG OR SIEMENS

Representation in the class by former employees of some of the best-known companies also was scant. Poets&Quants found just one former employee from each of the following major corporations: General Electric, General Motors, PepsiCo, Kraft, Merck, Samsung, and Siemens.

Despite the heavy emphasis on former consultants and investment bankers, there’s a wide variety of backgrounds in Stanford’s Class of 2013, ranging from a U.S. Army battalion staff officer and a Navy Seal to the brand manager for Oreo cookies and a Harvard Medical School-trained surgeon. Many applicants, of course, had several jobs before going to Stanford. One Dartmouth economics undergrad did a stint with McKinsey before moving on to the buyout firm Kohlberg, Kravis Roberts (KKR).  A Yalie with a degree in ethics first landed a job with BCG before moving on to Bain Capital, while a Penn undergrad with a political science degree had first worked with Merrill Lynch before going to Open Table, the restaurant booking website.

THE MOST UNUSUAL ADMIT LAST YEAR? A PROFESSIONAL POKER PLAYER

The most unusual admit, however, has to be Galen Hall, a professional poker player who has a political science degree from UC-Berkeley. According to his LinkedIn profile, Hall must have spent most of the 2010 year online because he says he  played one million hands of pokers in more than 8,000 online tournaments. Typically, Hall played 24 tables simultaneously. While he had little conventional business experience compared to most of his colleagues, Hall scored a 790 on the GMAT and according to some reports his total poker winnings come to $3.5 million.

A far more typical profile belongs to Dan Laufer, who arrived at Stanford last fall after having spent time at enterprise data and software company Mitchell International as director of strategy, analytics and operations. Before his 21-month stint at Mitchell, Laufer toted up three years and five months at Bain & Co., working as a consultant for clients in media and entertainment, telecommunications, defense contracting and meat processing. He graduated with honors from the University of Virginia with a B.S. in systems and information engineering.

Or consider Lu Ni who came to Stanford from McKinsey’s Beijing office after nearly three years with the firm. She did a double major in English literature and economics at Peking University. When she entered Peking’s graduate school, where Ni ultimately earned a master’s degree in English Lit, the university waived her examination due to her number one academic standing. Her grade point average at Peking where the grading standards are high: 3.8 on a four-point scale.

(See following page for table of the top feeder organizations into Stanford’s Graduate School of Business)

Top Feeder Companies for Stanford’s Class of 2013

Source: These numbers for Stanford’s Graduate School of Business’ Class of 2013 are calculated from LinkedIn, Facebook and other online sources, including employer websites. The work backgrounds of 269 of the 397 enrolled students, roughly 68% of the entire class, were confirmed by Poets&Quants using Internet searches. The estimate of students with work experience at a specific firm is based on the percentage of the confirmed sample who have worked for that employer.

Related Reading: Top Feeder Schools

• Top Feeder Colleges to Harvard Business School
• Top Feeder Colleges to the Wharton School of Business
• Top Feeder Colleges to Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business
• Top Feeder Colleges to Columbia Business School
• Top Feeder Colleges to the Johnson School at Cornell University
• Top Feeder Colleges to Chicago Booth

Related Reading: Top Feeder Companies

• Top Feeder Companies to Harvard Business School
• Top Feeder Companies to the Wharton School of Business
• Top Feeder Companies to Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business
• Top Feeder Companies to Columbia Business School
• Top Feeder Companies to Cornell’s Johnson School of Business