The official profile for the Class of 2019 at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management reveals some interesting things about the students who, as of late this past summer, have called Evanston, Illinois, home. For starters, they’re a smart bunch. (Surprise.) The average GMAT score for this year’s incoming class was 732—four points higher than last year and the continuation of a multi-year increase that just five years ago had that same metric at 708. In fact, the meteoric rise of Kellogg’s average GMAT score places it second only to Stanford Graduate School of Business. The overall GMAT score range was between 600 and 780. Average GPA kept pace with the class before—3.6.
As for what the Class of 2019 did before coming to Kellogg, 49 percent of this year’s incoming class majored in business or economics as undergraduates, up from 45 percent of the previous class. STEM majors, meanwhile, made up 30 percent, and humanities majors rounded out the class, at 26 percent.
In terms of work, more than one in every four (27 percent) of the students in the current first-year class comes from a consulting background. Applicants who have worked in financial services follow, at 20 percent; “other” makes up 14 percent, and those from a tech/communications background make up 12 percent. Average work experience at Kellogg this year is 5.1 years, with 80 percent of the class having between 3.5 and 7 years. The average age of the incoming class is 28.
Women are well represented in the first-year class—accounting for 42 percent—up a hair from the 41 percent in the Class of 2018. Kellogg’s first-year MBA class is also 35 percent international, though U.S. minorities are 25 percent, a percentage point decline since last year. Still, Kellogg notes that this year’s class is among the school’s most diverse ever.
But what does all of that really mean? As we’ve come to learn here at Clear Admit, it’s one thing to pile on the impersonal stats and another thing altogether to let actual members of the Class of 2019 bring them to life. And that’s exactly what we’ve got in store for you.
The group of students assembled here embodies much of the diversity outlined above. Hailing from Connecticut, Mexico, New York, and Shanghai, they bring truly international perspectives. In college they studied everything from economics to Spanish, art history to entrepreneurial studies. And as for work, one can share with his classmates exactly what it’s like to work at Amazon, another got a taste for the Series-A tech startup world working for a new venture in the emergency calling/connected health space. There’s also an experienced brand manager in the bunch who no doubt knows more about Oreos than you do, another who spent five years working for an organization dedicated to increasing the scale and effectiveness of impact investing, and oh, then there’s the guy who spent eight years in the Navy as a special operations bomb disposal officer. Talk about fodder for interesting class discussions…
Of course, there’s much, much more that make these five Kellogg students fascinating—both in how they differ from one another and some of the shared goals and experiences they bring with them. We should also point out that not all five are actually Kellogg MBA Class of 2019. One is completing Kellogg’s accelerated one-year MBA, making him Class of 2018, and another is a student in Kellogg’s unique dual-degree MMM program, so she’ll actually graduate with both her MBA from Kellogg and her M.S. in Design Innovation from the Segal Design Institute. Just another way this group is diverse. Read on to get to know each one!
