New members of the Harvard Business School MBA Class of 2023 discuss their admissions journeys, the leading b-school and more in this edition of Real Humans: MBA Students.
HBS’s Class of 2023 is made up of 1,010 students–an above average size since the school had implemented a deferral policy last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the admissions team split the 200 deferring candidates across the Classes of 2023 and 2024.
Forty-six percent of the latest class are women and 37 percent are international. HBS shares the racial and ethnic identities of its domestic students in two ways. Federal reporting guidelines allow each individual student to be represented in a single race or ethnic group, whereas HBS also employs multidimensional reporting, allowing students to be counted in each group they identify with. Out of domestic students and permanent U.S. residents, when counted according to Federal guidelines, 24 percent are Asian American, 12 percent are Black or African American, 11 percent are Hispanic /LatinX, and 4 percent identify as multiracial. Multi-dimensional reporting indicates that 26 percent of students identify as Asian American, 14 percent are Black or African American, and 11 percent identify as Hispanic or Latino. This method also reveals that 59 percent identify themselves as white as opposed to 47 percent under Federal reporting guidelines.
During their undergraduate years, 27 percent of HBS students had majored in engineering. Business/commerce and economics followed at 21 percent and 20 percent, respectively. Fifteen percent had studied math/physical sciences and 13 percent social sciences. Four percent earned degrees in the arts/humanities. The average GPA, based on U.S. schools with a 4.0 scale, landed at 3.69.
New students of the Harvard Business School MBA Class of 2023 averaged five years of work experience. Seventeen percent came from the consulting industry and another 15 percent from venture capital/private equity. Another 12 percent had backgrounds in financial services. Eleven percent each had worked in technology or manufacturing/industrial/energy fields before matriculating. Nine percent came from the consumer products/retail/ecommerce sectors and another eight percent had worked in non-profit/government/education. Five percent were members of the military before attending HBS.
Seventy-one percent of the new class had chosen to take the GMAT. Their median score landed at 730 and scores ranged from 590 to 790. For those who took the GRE, the median Verbal score came in at 163 and the median Quant score at 164.
Get to know some students from the new Harvard Business School MBA class and their insights into student life in the following pages.
