Good morning!
Last week, the clocks went forward over here in the UK (daylight savings - donât ask me to explain it, i donât get it). Spring has sprung. The days are long. The sun is out. People are happier. Itâs a nice time to be here. Here is a photo I took yesterday of the building in front of my house and the endless blue sky-
April is a great time to reflect on the previous year - the admissions cycles are mostly over. We had a good year - over 90 people out of our 100 people cohort got offers from top schools like Harvard, MIT, Kellogg, Oxford, NUS, ISB etc. In the last 10 months, we have received over 18 crores in scholarships. Not bad.
But. I resent April. Itâs a new financial year and it kind of wipes the slate clean- previous accomplishments fade and I stare at a brand new page with nothing on it. The cycle continues. Which brings me to the topics of this edition:
Consulting - more and more people want to get into consulting after the MBA. Why?
2025 MBA rankings are out- what do they mean? who won? who lost (spoilers- Harvard lost)?
Letâs dive in đ¤ż
đ¨ Notable upcoming deadlines đ¨
Round 2 and 3 deadlines for Jan 2026 intake MBA programs are in April (~30 days)
Round 1 deadlines for Sept 2026 intake MBA programs begin in August (~120 days)
Most notable Mastersâ programs deadlines for the 2026 intake are after September but some scholarships deadline begin July onwards
Considering applying for the 2026 or the 2027 intake?
Why does everyone want to do Consulting?
Almost everyone(~70%) wants to do consulting after MBA. But not just any consulting company- everyone wants to join only MBB. Why? Well, the salaries to begin with:
McKinsey, BCG, Bain offer similar compensation for top talent-
- Base salary $175,000-190,000
- Signing bonus: $30,000-35,000
- Performance bonus: Up to $45,000
- Total first-year compensation potential: ~$250,000-270,000
Consulting is particularly attractive because of a heady mix of prestige+compensation+good exits
Career progression looks straightforward but can grueling. Please forget work life balance. Typically 2-3 years per level (Consultant â Project Leader â Principal â Partner). Exit opportunities are abundant- private equity, corporate strategy, startups, or industry leadership roles.
MBA recruitment typically begins in September-October of MBA first year. Many rounds of interviews, case studies. Majority get rejected here.
Around 50-70% of MBA students at top 20 schools apply to MBB. At M7 schools (Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Booth, Kellogg, MIT Sloan, Columbia), this number is closer to 70-80% due to strong recruiting ties.
This doesnât mean everyone gets in. At the M7 schools- about 15-20% of the cohort gets an offer. At the top 8-20 programs- about 5-12% of the cohort gets an offer.
Consulting isnât immune to the paradigm shifts happening right now with AI. A recent Ken story breaks it down:
Historically, the biggest advantage consulting firms have had is information asymmetry, said the McKinsey consultant. To decode the âconsult-speakâ, this essentially means they had access to industry- and market-wide trends at a scale clients simply did not. With AI, this asymmetry is fast shrinking. So consulting firms have been quick to leverage their expertise in the very AI thatâs making them obsolete.
McKinsey reported that 40% of its projects involved the use of AI. BCG and Bain, too, predicted that AI consulting would drive 20â30% of their business in 2024.
GenAI helped consultants improve their outcomes for creative problem-solving by 40%, per a 2023 research study on a group of 750 BCG consultants. On the other hand, for business problem-solving, it worsened outcomes by 23%. Thatâs because consultants trusted the technology in areas it wasnât competent in, and didnât trust it enough where its capabilities were proven to be sound. Most alarmingly, the study showed how generative AI reduced a groupâs diversity of thought by 40%.
Things are moving fast. No one knows what the landscape will be like in the next 2-5-10 years. The only thing to do is learn to be flexible - be water. Curious fast learners will always be awarded.
2025 MBA rankings breakdown
Top 100 MBA 2025 rankings are out! Some CRAZY standouts:
1. Harvard had a terrible year. It is now at rank 13- its lowest ever. Its been a rough couple of years for HBS students- No MBA program in the FTâs Top 25 has fallen more than Harvard in the past five years. Damn.
2. The Rise of Europe- Out of the top 10 schools, 5 are now European (not counting LBS)! This is pretty crazy. INSEAD, SDA, IESE, ESADE, HEC.
3. My beloved alma mater NTU Singapore is rank 22! Way ahead of long time rival NUS (37) + beating heavyweights like Yale, Oxford, Ross, Stern.
4. Indian schools feature more prominently among the top 100, a total of 8 schools make the cut - ISB is ranked the highest at 27 followed by IIM A B C Indore Lucknow Kozhikode, XLRI. Prediction- ISB will climb higher in the coming years.
5. Wharton is number 1 - This is the 13th time Whartonâs MBA program has won the FTâs top honor, more than any other program by far.
6. The best thing about the FT rankings are you can sort by multiple different metrics - based on what matters to you. For example, if you sort by 'Value for money rank'- top 5 schools are Terry, Warrington, ESCP, NTU and Smurfit. If you sort by 'International mobility' - top 5 schools are IMD, EMLyon, HEC, EMT, Rotterdam.
â¨tldr⨠- The dominance of US schools on rankings is slowly eroding- more schools more Asia and EU are creeping into the top 100s. This is good.
Caveat on methodology- of course, as always, analyze schools on your own. Rankings can and are gamed by the schools. Different publications use different methodologies. According to Financial Times- The MBA ranking is derived from 21 criteria- some have nothing to do with the MBA experience (eg faculty research output).
I've put the full ranking with some useful columns (salaries, employment percentages etc) over here as an excel sheet if you want to download and play around with the numbers.
What are we reading at Base Camp?
The limits of AI generated Miyazaki - The launch of GPT-4o inspired a rash of A.I.-generated Studio Ghibli-style images. They may bode worse for audiences than for artists.
Ways of Seeing - A delightful collection of essays on how to view art, one of the best things I read last month. Full of quotable bangers, allow me to illustrate -
Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed is female. Thus she turns herself into an object of vision: a sight.
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