MIT’s Sloan School vs. Harvard Business School

JangBM

There’s no doubt that MIT’s Sloan School of Management and the Harvard Business Schools offer two of the finest and most prestigious MBAs in the world. They’re both in greater Boston, with MIT in Cambridge and HBS in Boston; they both have a general management approach; and both are fortunate to attract the world’s best students and faculty.

The flagship program at both schools is the full-time, two-year MBA. Harvard has been more protective of its MBA degree than MIT which offers a variety of other graduate-degree granting programs in business, including an Executive MBA.

MIT also has a dual degree program in which 50 students a year work toward both an MBA as well as an MS in science and engineering. There’s also a master  of science in management studies, a one-year degree done in partnership with a select group of international schools. And there is a one year Master of Finance degree in which incoming students arrive in the sumer for a turbo finance class. This year, MIT has enrolled an entire cohort of 60 students in that program.

Here’s how these wo excellent schools compare with each other:

Geography: No difference here at all. Both schools are in Boston, one of the world’s most dynamic and inviting cities. It is both an academic Disneyland and a city of working class folks. Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, is just minutes away from Harvard. So is world-class arts and culture of all kinds. The winter months can be tough, with lots of cold and snow.

Size: MIT’s entering class of just under 400 students is less than half that of the Harvard Business School of more than 900. But it’s still considerably larger than Dartmouth whre the target class size is 240. Nonetheless, the scale of the MIT program is a big difference from Harvard where it’s far easier to get lost in the crowd. Total full-time MBA enrollment at MIT is only 792, versus Harvard’s 1,837.

Culture: While it’s a myth that competition is cut-throat among students at Harvard, it’s also true that the HBS environment is more competitive and intense. Size helps to breed some of this competitiveness among students, but so does the dominance of the case study method of teaching (see below) and the grading system. MIT is another story. Case studies are no more important than lectures or team projects, and the smallish size of the student body makes it far more likely that everyone in the class knows everyone else. “We’re a small school, and it’s all about the culture and the community here,” says Debbie Berechman, executive director of MBA programs at Sloan. “It’s an environment of ideas and innovation. The culture is collaborative, innovative, and energetic. Having a positive impact is one of our values. People are very much focused on the future and on opportunities. It’s very laidback and accessible, very ideas-based.”

Facilities: Harvard Business School is like a university onto itself with 33 separate buildings on 40 acres of property along the Charles River. HBS has its own state-of-the-art fitness center, a massive library, and a chapel. Strategy guru Michael Porter and his Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness even has his own building on campus. There is no other business school that can even remotely match Harvard for its expansive classrooms and study halls. At MIT, five core buildings make up the Sloan School on the east campus of the institute. A new 250,000 square foot building, dubbed E-62 for its location on the east side of the campus, will officially open. It’s a world class, modern four-floor structure with new classrooms, study rooms, and a 200-seat dining hall. The Sloan School, unlike Harvard, does not have its own library, but rather shares it with the university.

Teaching Methods: At MIT, there’s a bit of everything: lectures, simulations, action-learning projects, and case studies. “It’s an evenly distributed pie chart across all of them,” says Berechman. “The core to a large extent is lectures and cases and simulations. There is a team project in the organizational processes class, and there is a communications lab as part of communications.” At Harvard, the case study thoroughly dominates. Sure there are team projects, simulations and experiential learning in the mix, but it’s primary learning tool at Harvard is the case study. There are 30 cases in a course. The ten courses you’ll take at Harvard in the first year alone will require that you read 300 case studies. As a current HBS student who blogs under the non de plume “MilitarytoBusiness” explains, the average student in a 90-plus person class gains air time to comment on a case every other class. “That means that the professor determines half of your grade on an average of 15 comments over the period of three-to-five months. That’s not an incredibly deep well of information to help differentiate 94 highly talented students,” he says. That is the consequence of case studies in a 90-plus person class environment. Obviously, the system breeds a certain level of competition. In contrast, there is no forced grading curve at MIT as there is at Harvard. Faculty individually decide how to grade in each class and many feel that there is significant grade inflation. Oddly, MIT has a 5.0 grading scale (students need a 4.0 to graduate).

Program Focus: Unlike Harvard where the core curriculum takes up the first year of the program, MIT has a one semester core with just five classes and the option of one elective. There are no waivers, regardless of your level of experience or your background in any of the core subjects. The incoming class at MIT is divided into six cohorts which are then carved into ten teams that are meant to be as diverse as possible. At Harvard, the incoming class is divided into sections of 90 students each who go through the core classes together as well.

Both Harvard and MIT’s MBA programs boast a general management focus with a lot of additional options. The biggest single difference is in the wealth of offerings at Harvard. With a full-time faculty of 228, HBS offers an unusual breadth and diversity of courses. Harvard lists 130 electives in its course catalog, compared to about 90 at MIT. Sloan, however, offers its students two formal, completely optional tracks: finance and entrepreneurship & innovation. Essentially, it means you can load up on electives in either one of these two areas, often taking the courses with students who are committed to one of these two fields. The 50 or so MBAs in the innovation track do a required trip to Silicon Valley with faculty; the 70-plus students in the finance track do a similar trip to Wall Street. There are also a fair number of track-related activities, including alumni events organized by the school.

If MIT has any advantages over Harvard in terms of specific areas of study, it may well be in such niches as production/operations and information technology. In U.S. News & World Report’s latest survey of B-school deans and directors, MIT beats all schools in both production/operations and information systems where it has a number one rank. Harvard is ninth in production/operations and 15th in information systems. In finance, MIT places sixth and HBS is just behind it at seventh; in entrepreneurship, MIT is ranked third, and HBS fourth. In management, Harvard is first while MIT is 13th; in marketing, Harvard is fifth, while MIT is tied for 14th with the University of Virginia’s Darden School; in non-profit management, Harvard places fifth, while MIT doesn’t even merit a rank, and in international business, Harvard is fifth, while MIT is a distant 22nd. So other than production, MIT tends to trail Harvard or only slightly edges it out (a difference that we believe is statistically insignificant).

A case in point: entrepreneurship. On the surface, given MIT’s more tech focus, you might expect it to have a strong lead over Harvard. It doesn’t. Harvard, for example, has its own building devoted to the subject, the Arthur Rock Center, named after the HBS alum who invested in both Apple and Intel. Harvard boasts 35 faculty members who teach entrepreneurship, the second largest faculty group at the school. All first-year MBAs at Harvard have a required course in entrepreneurship and can choose from nearly two dozen second-year electives on the topic. At MIT, there are about 14 courses. Yet, given these stats, there is another counter-intuitive surprise here: As a percentage, only 3% to 4% of Harvard grads launch companies right out of school. At MIT, possibly because of the technical bent of many of its students, about 10% start entrepreneurial ventures out of Sloan. However, 15 years out of HBS, about half of its grads end up as entrepreneurs. Even more surprisingly, Harvard alums compose nearly 25% of the entire venture capital industry. Clearly, it’s a myth that Harvard is the breeding ground for just corporate chieftains.

Surprisingly, perhaps, the Sloan School discourages students who want to launch their own companies out of the gate. “The faculty advise them not to do it,” says Berechman. “They feel that students who go out and get some real world experience get a chance to build the skills base that they will need to be entrepreneurs later on. It’s really hard to launch right out of school.” That said, about 3% of Sloan grads start their own companies before or immediately after graduation.

On-Campus Recruiting: Whether you’re aiming for a top MBA job at McKinsey, Bain, BCG, or Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley or JPMorganChase, or Amazon, Apple, Cisco, Google, IBM, Intel or Microsoft, the Harvard- or MIT-punched MBA will easily get you in the door. MIT, being just down the street from HBS, attracts as many prestige MBA employers as Harvard. But your access to on-campus recruiters may be slightly better at MIT because you won’t have to compete with hundreds of students for conversations during recruiting events or for slots on an interview schedule. The range of prestige employers at both schools is simply dazzling (see below on who hires for a glimpse of major companies who hire the most Sloan grads).

Alumni Network: Harvard’s alumni network is extraordinary. There is no business school in the world that can boast as many high achieving graduates than Harvard. The most obvious differences between MIT and Harvard is the vast size and scope of the HBS network. Obviously, no school can beat Harvard in the number of grads who hold CEO jobs at the largest public corporations. But Harvard alums are not only in positions of authority around the globe: they are also extremely helpful to each other. Over the years, BusinessWeek surveys of MBA graduates show that Harvard, Stanford and Dartmouth boast the strongest alumni networks of any business schools in the world. With 41,378 living MBA alums, Harvard’s network is larger, more diverse, and more global. The critical mass of that network cannot be overestimated. MIT boasts 25,000 Sloan alums, a number that includes grads of every kind from the Sloan School so it is not directly comparable to the Harvard MBA number. MIT has 75 alumni association clubs around the world.

Rankings:

In every major ranking, including our own, Harvard predictably performs better than MIT.  Harvard is ranked number one by us as well as by U.S. News and World Report, number two by BusinessWeek and number three by Forbes and the Financial Times. The P&Q rank–which factors into consideration all the major rankings weighted by their individual authority–puts Harvard at number one and MIT at number eight, just behind the Kellogg School of Management. The lowest positions awarded MIT by major media brands is The Economist’s ranking of 19th and Forbes’ ranking of 14th, the latter solely on the basis of the return-on-investment grads have achieved after five years (Stanford is first). That makes the gap between MIT and Harvard on these two surveys considerable: HBS has a 14-place lead over MIT in The Economist ranking and an 11-place lead in the Forbes survey. Even BusinessWeek, where one would think MIT would have some advantage in student and recruiter satisfaction, has Harvard ahead by seven places over MIT. MIT’s highest ranking comes from U.S. News & World Report which believes that Sloan is the third best business school in the U.S. These are the up-to-date rankings from each ranking organization.

MBA Rankings MIT Harvard
Poets & Quants 8 1
BusinessWeek 9 2
Forbes 14 3
U.S. News & World Report 3 1
Financial Times 8 3
The Economist 19 5


Historical Rankings  by BusinessWeek:

The biggest question is how come Harvard has never placed number one in the most influential MBA rankings published. Over a 22-year period and 11 biennial rankings, BusinessWeek has never put Harvard at the top of its carefully watched lists of the best MBA schools. Just as surprisingly, MIT has had one of the most inconsistent runs of any top business school in the Business Week survey, coming in as low as 15th in the inaugural ranking in 1988 and in 1998 and climbing as high as fourth in 2000. Harvard, with its largest graduating classes and east coast pedigree, has definitely been ranked far more consistently over the years. HBS has generally came in the number three spot, going as high as two twice and as low as number five on three different occasions. It’s important to remember that  BusinessWeek measures customer satisfaction. While students rate these schools very highly, recruiters often have other issues. At Harvard, some corporate recruiters balk at the price tag. At MIT, the BusinessWeek methodology may put the school at a slight disadvantage due to its smaller size.





Harvard MIT
   
1988 2 15
1990 3 11
1992 3 13
1994 5 10
1996 4 9
1998 5 15
2000 3 4
2002 3 6
2004 5 9
2006 4 7
2008 2 9
Historical Rankings by The Financial Times:

Unlike BusinessWeek’s rankings, The Financial Times includes business schools from all over the world. So the FT is ranking both Harvard and Dartmouth against such places as London Business School, which ranked number one in this survey in 2010 and 2009, and INSEAD, which ranked fifth these last two years. Over the years, HBS has bested MIT in all 11 years charted below. Yet, Harvard has topped this list only twice in 11 years (the biggest winner in the Financial Times surveys has been Wharton which has been ranked first on nine separate occasions and second twice). MIT has never had a higher FT rank than fourth, way back in 2000,  and has been ranked as low as 14th in 2007.





MIT Harvard
   
2000 4 1
2001 6 2
2002 6 2
2003 10 2
2004 9 2
2005 13 1
2006 10 2
2007 14 3
2008 7 5
2009 9 3
2010 8 3




Admissions:

MIT and Harvard are two of the most selective business schools in the world. There are only other schools that reject a higher percentage of applicants than these two: Stanford and Berkeley. Getting a yes from MIT’s Sloan School has become increasingly more difficult in the past three years, a period when applications have risen by 55%. MIT now gets 12 applications for every available seat. For the class entering in the fall of 2010, applications were up 15% over the previous year. Harvard also had the second highest number of applications ever received for the same class. Harvard’s average GMAT score for the Class of 2011 is 719 versus an average of 711 for MIT.  An asterisk indicates the 10th to 90th percentile only and not the full range of GMAT scores.

Admission Stats MIT Harvard
Average GMAT 711 719
GMAT Range 650–760* 490–800
Average GPA 3.57 3.67
Selectivity 14.2% 12.2%
Yield NA 89%

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Enrollment:

MIT enrolls less than half the students of Harvard, resulting in a more intimate and close-knit environment (even though Sloan’s total enrollment is larger than such top schools as Stanford, Dartmouth, Berkeley, Yale, and Carnegie-Mellon. The numbers for women, international and minority students are for the Class of 2011.

Enrollment Stats MIT Harvard
Total MBA Enrollment 792 1,837
Women 36% 36%
International 37% 36%
Minority 27% 22%

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Poets & Quants:

MIT’s image as a quant school keeps a lot of poets away. “We find that people with soft backgrounds who we think would not only do well but would turn out to be great graduates turn us down out of fear over the rigor of the program,” says Rod Garcia, MIT admissions director. Harvard, in fact, pulls nearly double the percentage of poets than Sloan does. Instead, MIT tends to get a significantly higher percentage of students with computer science, engineering, math, and science undergraduate degrees. No surprise. Yet, a remarkably high percentage of the Class of 2012 are composed of engineering graduates alone: a full 37%. The numbers tell you a lot about the quant-intensive intellectual milieu of MIT.

Undergrad Degrees MIT Harvard
Humanities 21% 40%
Engineering/Math 47% 33%
Business/Economics 32% 26%

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Jobs and Pay:

The Class of 2009 graduated into one of the worst job markets in recent memory. As the stats show, roughly 30% of Sloan School grads didn’t have jobs at commencement. Harvard fared much better, but even the HBS numbers weren’t comforting: nearly a quarter of the class lacked jobs at graduation. Grads from both schools fared much better three months after commencement, but these numbers are rare lows for the two of the best business schools in the world. Starting pay for MIT grads is fifth highest among U.S. B-schools, after Stanford, Harvard, Dartmouth, Northwestern, and Michigan. The estimates of median pay 20 years out and over a full career come from a study by PayScale done for BusinessWeek and do not include stock options or equity stakes by entrepreneurs.

Job & Pay Data MIT Harvard
Starting salary & bonus $125,707 $131,219
MBAs employed at commencement 69.5% 76.8%
MBAs employed 3 months after commencement 83.4% 87.3%
Estimated median annual pay & salary 20 years out $176,000 $230,000
Estimated median pay & bonus over a full career $3,049,280 $3,867,903

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Where MBAs Go:

With Wall Street in near total collapse during 2009, the big, global consulting firms stepped up to take a large percentage of the best graduates at the top business schools. This was especially true at both Harvard and MIT which saw record numbers of MBAs go into prestige management consulting positions. More than a third of MIT’s graduating class of 2009 took consulting jobs, three times as many at those who went into investment banking.

Industry MIT Harvard
Consulting 33.2% 26%
Investment Banking 11.3% 6%
Software/Internet 10.1% 4%
Computers/Electronics 7.7% 3%
Investment Management 4.9% 5%
Autos/Aerospace 4.5% 1%
Healthcare/Pharma 4.0% 7%
Oil/Energy 3.6% 2%
Financial Services 3.2% 4%
Starting Own Business 3.0% 3%
Retail 2.8% 3%
Hedge Funds, VC, PE 2.8% 16%
Telecom 2.4% NA
Consumer Packaged Goods 1.6% 5%
Transportation/Defense 1.2% 2%
Non-profit/Government 0.8% 7%
Media/Entertainment 0.4% 4%

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Who Hires Who:

Unfortunately, Harvard is one of the very few business schools which declines to report on its major employers. As a result, it’s not known which firms hire the most Harvard MBAs, though you can be sure that the elite MBA players, McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Monitor, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and JPMorganChase are high on top of the list. Truth is, it’s hard to imagine a better degree that opens doors more widely than a Harvard-stamped MBA. At MIT, the big, major consulting firms carted away the largest groups of students, making McKinsey, Bain, BCG, and Deloitte the top four employers of Class of 2009 Sloanies. Not surprisingly, technology companies love MIT as a primary hunting ground: Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, and United Technologies all hired five or more of Sloan’s MBAs; Amgen, Biogen, British Telecom, Genzyme, Google, Hubspot, IBM, Infosys, Intel, and Novell all hired three to four grads each. (MIT does not breakout specific numbers of hirers for companies that employ fewer than five of its graduates).

Hiring Company Number of Hires

at MIT
Number of Hires

at HBS

McKinsey & Co. 24 NA
Bain & Co. 10 NA
Boston Consulting Group 8 NA
Deloitte Consulting 7 NA
Amazon.com 6 NA
Barclays Capital 6 NA
Apple 6 NA
Microsoft 6 NA
Cisco Systems 5 NA
Fidelity 5 NA
Goldman Sachs 5 NA
L.E.K. Consulting 5 NA
United Technologies 5 NA