Choosing between Asper, Rotman, and Schulich MBAs

I thought the hard part of my MBA process was over after I was done the GMAT. In retrospective, however, it turns out to be the easiest part of whole process as there are hardly any variables. Basically, you have to decide how much time you want to invest into preparing for it, and the rest is decided for you: you don't have to worry which test location you go to or which test to take. When it comes to figuring out which school to get your MBA from it becomes a much different process with great number of variables involved. Its not that different from a dating game, you pick a university you think would be your best choice, but might not accept you, and then you pick some that would probably accept you, but are not the best.

I started my process by considering a local school - Asper School of Business, at the University of Manitoba, Canada. Costing only $18,000Cdn it sounded like a good deal (well apart from the online, two month MBA degrees which as the ex Radio Shack CEO illustrated are not the most valuable degrees :). The reviews said Asper MBA it's not a bad degree if you want to stay in the province and on top of that it has only 15 students in the program and no dedicated teaching staff and out of 15 students 50% do not find a job within three months after the graduation... ouch, as the result that was the first University to get crossed off the list. With that in mind, I went to the next stage, looking at the rankings for MBA programs around the world and in Canada.

I found the MBA rankings really confusing to look at. Each one of them used different methodologies and as the result emphasized different things. One really has to dig deep to try to figure out what those numbers are telling you. I find it worth my while to also try figuring out the secondary signs, obvious one for example, if you want to work for a financial institution it's probably worth looking at the WSJ or FT rankings. Overall I found that there were four top tier MBA programs in Canada, offered through the following universities: Queens, Schulich (York University), Ivey (Western), Rotman (UofT).

I tried to narrow down my decision to the top two school and came to the following conclusions, Queens, which has consistently ranked at number one in International School ranking compiled by the Business Week magazine is a good school if you have a technical background and have been in the workforce for at least 7-8 years, as the average age of students there is 32. It a one year program and it didn't strike me as anything interesting right from the start. Western is the oldest MBA program in Canada and from what I could gather had been a pretty solid curriculum at least before the transition to a one year program. At that point I wasn't quite sure that one year program had everything that I was looking for out of the MBA. Moreover, I had a preference towards larger cities, so I decided to start my selection process with Schulich and Rotman. Both of those schools were highly ranked and well respected internationally, with Schulich having a bit better international reputation and Rotman being a very traditional destination for financial sector. I did my preliminary research and emailed both schools to arrange a visit. It took couple of days to get a response from either school. I liked Schulich's response way better, they were very accommodating with trying to arrange a school visit, while Rotman admissions just told me to come down there anytime I wanted.

Big advantage of Rotman School of Business at the University of Toronto is that it's located right in downtown Toronto and as the result is much easier to get to, from my experience. However, during my visit to Rotman, I was totally unimpressed by the admissions personal who seems very disorganized and unprepared to answer any questions. I found it was really hard to have a meaningful conversation about their MBA program. They told me that CIBC was the biggest recruiter on-campus every year and finances is what you will eat and breathe for the two years you are there. I was told that the rest of the information could be located on the website. I was quite disappointed and crossed Rotman of my list at that point, as I believe, the admissions is a face of an MBA. If the program director decided that they wanted to present a potential student with such a person then most likely that same approach going to resonate through the whole program. (Rotman MBA Blog)

My second visit was to the Schulich School of Business at the York University in Toronto. I was pleasantly surprised with the reception I received there, compared to my Rotman experience. I genuinely felt they were interested in me as a potential student, and directory of admissions spend more than an hour talking to me about advantages of the program. I very much enjoyed my visit there and moved Schulich to the top of my list. The only thing that I did not quite understand was the comment about the GMAT score. I was told that even though my GPA is not stellar I didn't have to aim high for the GMAT score and if I could achieve 660 or higher points I would pretty much be guaranteed a spot in the program. Add to that the fact that Schulich rarely interviews it's applicants, and you might get a questionable classmates that might have studied quite hard for the GMAT but lack in other key skills. Other than that I was very impressed with the program and the flexibility that it offers to its students in terms of electives, specializations, and switching between part- and full-time schedules. So as of June 2006 my number one choice became Schulich school of business.