How do you combat the perception of business schools as the means to a high-paying career?
There are a lot of little things we can do. At Stanford, we recognized a while back that there are great people who should be pursuing business school who frankly would have pursued an MBA a generation ago. They’re not looking at it now because of the stigma, because of the perception of what an MBA is. We need to do a better job of conveying the real benefits of this education. We can start by talking more to people while they’re in college. We’ve done a lot more outreach on college campuses to influence the students there before they hit major inflection points in their careers when they jump off to law school or policy school instead of looking at business school. We decided to take the GRE [scores, in addition to GMAT scores.] Let’s say we’re able to encourage students for whom the GMAT might have been a barrier, and who are looking at nonbusiness programs, to consider an MBA. I think that will make a difference. Honestly, I think you’ll see a lot of schools coming out of the econo
