This edition of Real Humans: MBA Students takes us to New York City, where we find eager and diverse MBA students flocking to Columbia Business School.
Columbia Business School offers two intakes, one in August and one in January. For the Class of 2022, 211 joined in January and 571 matriculated in August, bringing the total class size to 782 (out of 6,971 applicants). Forty percent of the new class are women and 44 percent are international citizens. Students who are minorities of U.S. origin comprise a third of the class.
During their undergraduate years, business was the most popular major, as 29 percent of students pursued it. A fifth of the class had studied economics and 17 percent engineering. Fourteen percent earned degrees in social sciences and another eight percent in the humanities. Sciences cover seven percent of majors and three percent had studied tech. Altogether, their average undergraduate GPA landed at 3.6. When it came time to take the GMAT, CBS MBAs averaged a score of 723 with the middle 80 percent of scores ranging from 690 to 760.
Prior to joining CBS, new students earned an average of five years of work experience. Ninety-nine percent of the class had at least one year of work experience. Financial services and consulting were the most popular pre-MBA industries, at 30 percent and 23 percent, respectively. Fourteen percent had worked in media/marketing. Eight percent accumulated experience in the tech field before joining the MBA program and five percent in nonprofit. Another four percent each had worked in real estate or healthcare and others came from military/government, energy or manufacturing.
See what new CBS students brought to the MBA program in the following pages, as a handful of new students share their backgrounds, inspiration and more.
