How much does age matter at Top schools?

[Guest]

I recently stumbled upon the age distribution for Harvard’s 2010 class and was shocked at how small the standard deviation is. I currently am an applicant with 6.5 years of work experience and according to the data, less than 10% of HBS incoming class are my age or older. Meanwhile, people with 4-5 years of experience make up 50% of the class.

I know that Harvard and other top schools are making a push for younger applicants, but it seems a bit unfair to see such a large drop-off based on a spread of just 1 year. I’ve waited "longer" than most applicants to apply to MBA school because I wanted to build up my experience and also because I simply really enjoy my current job. It seems awfully unfair to be penalized for that.

Is age really such a large factor in the decision process at Harvard? How does this distribution curve look like for the other top 5 schools?

[MBAApply]

It's not quite as young at other schools, but it still skews young.

My blog (in my signature) goes into detail about why adcoms are going younger, particularly at HBS, Stanford and Wharton. It's not about being fair or not, but about attracting a different kind of applicant.

Alex Chu
alex@mbaapply.com
www.mbaapply.com
http://mbaapply.blogspot.com