The Role of the MBA Admissions Consultant: 10 FAQs

Most people seem to seek the services of an MBA admissions consultant in the six months leading up to an application deadline. This was true for 68% of applicants who told AIGAC they had used a consultant. However, this means that just over 30% were actually working with a consultant at an earlier stage - seven months or more - before a deadline.

Examples of what a consultant might be able to assist you with, before you actually set about completing an application, include narrowing down your selection of school(s) to target and identifying any gaps that may prove glaring come submission of a final application. 

Yes. As is true in many lines of service-orientated professions, quality will vary and there isn’t one overriding system of regulation to which consultants must adhere. Plus, individual firms will often employ a variety of different consultants, whose experience and personality may be more suited to some than others.

For these reasons, it’s imperative that you conduct thorough research if you want to enlist the help of an MBA admissions consultant. There are professional membership bodies that can help point you in the right direction. For example (but not exclusively) in the US, there is AIGAC, IECA (Independent Educational Consultants Association) and HECA (Higher Education Consultants Association) whose directories can be accessed by following the preceding links.

Aside from this, it’s a good idea to be wary of any success figures you see advertised on an admissions consultancy firm’s website – i.e. statistics that point to the strength of their services in securing admittance to top schools for their clients. The bottom line here is that any such figures are hard to verify – there is no compulsory auditing of claims – and therefore, open to misinterpretation about what you can expect from a particular firm. Aware of this, many firms don’t publish these kinds of figures.  

In 2010, Poets&Quants estimated that there might be as many as 500 individual MBA admissions consultants (rather than firms) internationally, creating an industry worth US$35 million each year.  However, a report in the Financial Times two years later revealed that this is far from being an agreed-upon figure and that the number of MBA-specific firms might be fewer than 20. The variance here seems to depend on who you ask – with questions of value and quality as well as definitions of what really constitutes an MBA specialist all adding to the mix.

This depends of the type of service or package you choose. One-off services might only cost a couple of hundred dollars, but the largest packages could set you back upwards of US$5,000, according to a blog for U.S. News penned by Stacy Blackman, an admissions consultant herself. This reaffirms the sense in identifying what you want to gain from a firm before making a monetary commitment.

Well, prospective MBA students that use consultants are driven by much the same desires to secure a place at their target school as those not using them. Interestingly, a recent Poets&Quants survey asked consultancy firms not to where most of their clients applied, but where their most talented clients ultimately enrolled. In the responses of 35 firms, Stanford, Harvard Business School and Wharton – the triumvirate at the head of QS’s latest regional rankings – came out in first, second and third place, respectively. European stalwarts, INSEAD and London Business School both made the consultants’ top 10. 

Business schools haven’t always embraced the existence of MBA admissions consultants, but they do appreciate that they have become a permanent fixture and that it does more good to engage with them than to pretend they’re not a popular option among prospective students. Even the skeptics have acknowledged that consultants can be useful when it comes to helping applicants understand different campus cultures, for example.

Worries mentioned by schools include receiving application materials that reek of professional assistance, especially from those for whom English is not a first language, and the fear that they will see too many applicants following the same strategy in their applications, by dint of a common consultant, in their attempts to win over an admissions team.

Maybe. An interesting finding in AIGAC's recent survey was that not all respondents who indicated using MBA admissions consultants said they had paid for services in support of their application. While this was true for only 9% of male applicants, the proportion swelled to 30% among female applicants. The suggestion, from this sample at least, is that if you are a female applicant you might find it easier to secure some degree of assistance from a consultancy on a pro-bono basis. The reason for this may well be linked to the current gap in usage by gender mentioned in Q3, coupled with the desire among business education providers to increase the proportion of female students gracing their classrooms at MBA level.