M7 admissions are tough regardless of your academic. GMAT/GRE score and the brand of your employer. Quite often, it is about your journey and your impact across different aspects of professional, personal, and community lives.
To improve your M7 MBA admission chances, look at four factors:
1) Acceptance Rate
Purely from an acceptance rate, Kellogg is the easiest to get in, followed by Booth, Wharton, and Harvard. But you must understand that applicants are not just randomly applying to M7 schools. They typically do a self-evaluation or reach out to consultants like me to see the chances before applying. This self-selection mechanism is more targeted at schools with certain branding, like Finance, Consulting, or Technology schools. Applicants who are not from the niche industries do not apply to these schools or deprioritize them for Round 2 or Round 3. Even if the acceptance rate is good, the competition from similar profiles would be much higher for the school.
2) Cost
The high cost tends to discourage applicants from typical management consulting, investment banking, and product management roles from targeting M7 schools. So there is an opportunity for those who take risks. Women applicants definitely have an opportunity to convert an M7 offer. Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton are on the wishlist for most applicants. If you are strategic and spend more time on Kellogg, Booth, and MIT applications, your chances for admission to one of the M7 schools will improve.
3) Culture and Essays
The third factor is the culture of the school and the essays that the schools use. You can reverse engineer and see what kind of a culture the school has by reading the latest MBA Application essay questions. For example, Stanford has continued with the What Matters to You the Most and Why Open Ended Essay but introduced an optional essay to verify the IMPACT in a professional context. Harvard gets a lot of high-achievers in their application pool. So they want to explore applicants with the right value to join the program. Booth maintains a balance of extracurricular and professional achievement. MIT removed essays in 2017 and changed to Cover Letter to encourage engineers and finance professionals who typically might not be good at writing essays. Kellogg has continued its focus on applicants with leadership skills. Columbia, in addition to balancing extracurriculars with academics, looks at your DEI initiatives to measure fit with a New York culture.
Essays and application questions reveal a lot about the culture of the school and what they want to measure.
Related Download: Winning MBA Essay Guide (M7 MBA Sample Essays and Curriculum Analysis you can use for the Essays)
4) Ranking
There is a reason why you see a lot of admissions publications keep promoting rankings. It influences application volume. Many swear by US news, while others look at the salary data over a 3-year period which FT prioritizes. Ranking data also discourages applicants from targeting an M7 school if it falls outside the top 10. So there is another opportunity to leverage this bias and target M7 schools with less competition from profiles like yours.
