Student Reviews of MBA Programs

[alacarte]

I have been looking to apply to schools for an MBA but had trouble finding
real information from students about the programs. I found
www.graduateprograms.com and discovered that two of the schools I was
considering ranked in the top 25 of their Business school rankings,
http://www.graduateprograms.com/top-business-schools. I know I should take
the reviews with a grain of salt but more information is better than just
relying in the US News rankings I guess.

Does anyone else know of any other good student review websites for MBA
applicants?

[Reviewer1]

DO NOT APPLY TO LONDON BUSINESS SCHOOL (LBS)!

 

As a former student, I'm speaking from personal experience. If you want an education that will help you ACTUALLY FIND a job, then choose an Accounting or Securities certification instead. Employers look for skills, the LBS MBA does not give you much.

 

After having spent $110,000 USD for this MBA, I found that the career services team is useless, they have no credibility/relationships with employers, rely on working with recruiters (which you can do on your own) for placements, and students are not much more in demand than even ordinary (non-top 100) business schools.

 

If you are looking to do an MBA to further your career, spend your money at Stanford or Harvard instead. All of the top "European" business school (IESE, ESADE, HEC, LBS) have no demand in hiring companies worldwide. Waste of money & time!

[inseadsux]

INSEAD MBA review

It is with a heavy heart that I publish this review, but I feel that potential INSEAD students deserve to know. I am a native English speaking career changer and the INSEAD MBA did not meet my expectations, it added no value to my career. Despite years of job hunting I have not had a single post MBA job interview. This MBA program is not sophisticated enough to enable a native English speaker to get an MBA level job. INSEAD needs native English speaking participants; each study group has one native English speaker, the courses are in English and almost all the business cases are from the English speaking world. The education is just too basic to enable a native English speaker beat graduates from other business schools in the job market. I found the classes to be high school level intended for those working in English for the first time.

There are two main types of students at INSEAD:

Non native English speaking strategy consultants

Non native English speaking family business

To ensure that these two groups are best served INSEAD organizes a week long hazing event called 'Welcome Week'. This'd event makes it clear to all participants that INSEAD is just one long party for old money elites; upstarts are not tolerated.

INSEAD constantly sells its diversity but it is international not diverse. At this time in history most English speaking universities and work places are already multinational and have been for decades. So what does INSEAD give the native English speaker?

During my job hunt I have asked for help from the school, but I have been told: be more entrepreneurial - I have received no actual help from the school. If I could get a better job by simply being entrepreneurial I wouldn't have bought an MBA!

From my analysis of tyge job market I found that INSEAD has a bad reputation. Two separate organizations told me 'We previously hired someone from INSEAD, it was expensive since that person needed a visa, then that person just did not perform well'.

A recruiter summed it up; 'INSEAD students behave like they have already made it in life'. Indeed many INSEAD students are from wealthy families or already have excellent careers - so they have infact already made it in life. If you start a post MBA job in the English speaking world with that attitude you will fail.

[Kaneisha]

Wowee! These are some very brutal reviews. I can't weigh in on how common the experiences are as related by the Insead and LBS alumni above, but I have no reason to doubt they are real accounts from people who are disappointed in their experiences.

The best way to get a real deal opinion on what a school is really like is to speak with actual students. You would be surprised by how responsive recent alumni are to outreach from prospective students who would like to speak briefly (20 minutes or less) about their experience in business school. When I was applying, I reached out to current MBA students and recent alumni and lots of people responded and were helpful and encouraging. I found that recent alumni (less than 3 years out) were most responsive as current MBA students are outrageously busy.

Best of luck to all of you!

Kaneisha