Myth #1 - It's hard to get into a good B-school

Schools go to great lengths to propagate the idea that they are really, really hard to get into. This is mainly because of the Groucho Marx principle that you wouldn't want to be part of any club that would want you as a member. No, instead, rather like the "Cartmanland" theme park adverts in South Park, we're told "There's so much to do at Business School, but you can't come!".

Schools do this by emphasising one particular ratio - applications per place, eg statements like "We had 5,000 applicants for 200 places last year". Implicitly we are supposed to assume that we each have a 1/25 or 4% chance of getting in. Receiving your offer then feels like receiving a valuable prize and you are more likely to accept.

But don't be fooled dear readers, there's one piece of information missing. The ratio of offers made to offers accepted by successful students, commonly referred to as the "Yield". So in our example if the school has to make 1,000 offers to fill its 200 spots, then we understand that our probability of gaining the option of attending the school is actually more like 1/5 or 20%. Still tough but an order of magnitude better.

The Yield is a powerful figure because it measures applicant behaviour for a serious, long-term, and financially costly decision. If you knew that most people receiving offers from your school turned them down, wouldn't that make you think again? Social proof is a powerful motivator.

So it's not surprising that Schools go to great lengths to keep their yields secret. As long as applicant pools are similar, comparing yields across schools would be the most objective way of ranking b-schools. Unfortunately I don't think this is going to happen...