Why I Sometimes Tell MBA Applicants Not to Hire Me

A good MBA admissions consultant should know when their involvement will materially improve an application and when it won’t. Admissions consulting is expensive, which means I owe every prospective client an honest answer, “Will my involvement actually help?”

When the strategy was already right

One prospective client came to me last year after being waitlisted at both Columbia and Wharton. On paper, she was exactly the kind of applicant an admissions consultant might be eager to sign. She had excellent test scores, a strong consulting career, compelling essays, and an excellent plan.

She’d continued staying involved at both schools, and outlined a promotion and new extracurricular involvement. She worked with several alums who were rooting for her, and was already thinking through Columbia's J-Term and a potential reapplication.

I reviewed what she was doing and told her she didn’t need me.

Could I have charged her for a waitlist package and spent several hours refining the edges of that strategy? Probably. But I did not see a meaningful problem that my involvement would solve. She was already doing what I would have advised her to do.

Sometimes the most useful thing a consultant can tell you is that you're on the right track. Keep going. Not every applicant who can benefit from feedback needs paid consulting.

When the MBA itself needed questioning

Another prospective client was in his early thirties with a successful engineering career at a technology company. He had studied in India and was working in the U.S. on a visa tied to his employment. He believed he needed a full-time MBA to establish greater credibility because of what he’d read online.

He could have been a competitive applicant. But as we talked, I became less interested in whether he could get into business school and more interested in whether he should leave his job to attend.

What skills was he actually missing? Was he unhappy in his career? What did he believe the MBA would allow him to do that he could not do now? And most importantly, was he comfortable giving up the certainty of his current employment and visa situation?

He wasn't!

He’d been comparing himself to candidates he saw online and those he’d graduated with. That led him to beleive that a traditional two-year MBA was the obvious next step. He hadn’t seriously considered evening, part-time, or executive MBA programs that could allow him to keep working while still gaining the credential and education he wanted, which is something we discussed. Most importantly, though, was that he didn’t need a package from me. He needed a conversation that widened the set of choices he was considering.

The most important question I owe every potential client I meet

Admissions consulting is expensive. That means I think every MBA consultant has an obligation to uncover and mull over whether their involvement meaningfully improves their potential client’s application.

Sometimes the answer is no.

I’ve spoken with applicants who were doing almost everything right already. I have also spoken with candidates who were so focused on getting into business school that they hadn’t yet stopped to ask whether the MBA path they were pursuing actually served their goals.

In both potential client situations, taking their money would have been easy. It just would not have been particularly useful.

Well, when does an MBA consultant make sense, then?

MBA applicants CAN benefit from leveraging an MBA consultant. From my vantage point, two needs justify consulting most often.

One is needing someone to project manage the process. Multiple schools, different requirements, recommenders to track, deadlines that don't line up. That's a legitimate reason to hire help, but only if the person running it brings real templates, guides, and expertise built around you, not a generic playbook applied the same way to every client who walks in.

The other reason is harder to name but just as common. Some applicants know their story and can talk through their career and their goals without much trouble. Others have all of that inside them and still can't get it onto the page. They know something is missing from their essays, but they can't identify what, or how to fix it. That's an unlocking problem, and a good consultant knows how to ask the questions that get someone past it.

If either of those is true for you, hiring help is a reasonable decision. If neither is true, and you already have a clear story and a workable plan, you probably don't need me. I'd rather tell you that upfront than sell you something you don't need.

If you want to independently navigate the MBA admissions process with a bit of structured help, check out my EmbarkMBA Application Guide.