Warren Buffet, Wharton, Harvard and Columbia

On my trip to Philly and the visit to the Penn Campus, I had a lot of time to think. One of the things that crept into my mind while walking past Franklin Field on the way to the Penn Museum of Archeology and Anthropology (excellent museum by the way) was that Warren Buffet had attended Wharton as an undergrad. That thought entered my mind because in Roger Lowenstein's book, "Buffet, The Making of an American Capitalist", there is a picture of Buffett at Franklin Field when he was Penn student. So walking past Franklin field, triggered that recollection.

Anyway, when I got home from my trip, I pulled the book out, and reread the excerpts from that part of his life. Warren Buffett did attend Wharton, however, he transferred to and graduated from the University of Nebraska. Although Warren attended Wharton from 1947-1949, he left according to the book because he felt he knew more than the professors. After Nebaska, Buffett applied to and was turned down by the Harvard Business School. He then applied to Columbia Business School where he met Ben Graham of Graham and Dodd fame, and the rest is history.

I wanted to write about this because I feel there are somethings to gleam from this tidbit of Warren's life as it pertains to business schools and the admissions process in general. First of all, I find it amusing that as good as a reputation that Wharton has, Mr. Buffett decided to finish his undergraduate education elsewhere. At first glance, this apparent snub does not reflect too well on Wharton. What did the "the oracle of omaha" not like about Wharton that made him dropout? More to the point, is one foolish to disagree with Warren here and go to Wharton anyway? Oh the horror! Maybe Wharton wasnt right for Warren to begin with. How could the admissions office miss that?

And whats this about Harvard turning Warren down? What was the admission committee thinking? The fact that Warren made it big, even without Harvard, should be inspiration to the thousands that get turned away by the HBS or any business school for that matter.

One more observation that I want to point out is that in the book, Lowenstein alludes to Buffett's dissatisfacotry experience at Penn as forerunner to his generall dissatisfaction with business schools. I have heard of this being true of other business leaders as well, notably Jack Welch. In fact, there are some prominent thought leaders that hold the MBA in disdain. The two that I know of are Pfeffer at Stanford GSB and Mintzberg at McGill. Not surprisingly, many legendary CEOs and other executives do not hold MBA degrees at all but Ph.Ds (Think Grove at Intel, Welch at GE, Schmidt at Google ) . Moreover, many of the richest CEOs are college dropouts. Look who's running Dell, Oracle, Apple, Microsoft (Gates not Baldmer) etc. So should aspiring CEOs head for doctorates or the exits instead of an MBA? Is the MBA an overrated degree?

I pondered many of these questions when I was contemplating the MBA. In my opinion, its a worthwhile thought experiment to go through, but don't fret though. Alls well that ends well. Wharton and Warren's relationship has withstood the early rough going. Harvard's endowment is doing just fine thank you, even without Warren's money. Columbia can lay claim to having one of the world's richest men as a distinguished alum. And last time I checked, companies continue to value and look for the brightest and best MBA students by the bucket load each year.

The road to Wharton

My current MBA situation is that I have matriculated at the Wharton exec program at the Philly Campus. Here's the story about how I got here.

I can remember first thinking about an MBA in about the third or fourth year of university. There was a good MBA program up the road from where I was going to school, at a place called Wilfred Laurier University. I had enough courses I could transfer to finish a FT MBA in 12 months post bachelors. The short time required seemed fairly appealing. I also recall at the time reviewing the HBS and Columbia websites and thinking, wouldn't it be nice to attend. I came to the conclusion at the time, that I didn't really feel like I was going to get much from an MBA. Plus who wanted to stay in school for another 12 months. After 5 years of engineering courses, I wanted to travel, make some ducats, and live large for a while. And so I did.

Fast forward about 10 years. Except for a few rocky years following the bubble, the career has been fairly good, but I feel like something is misisng. My wife reminds me that I always had that desire to go back to grad school. But I am married now, with a kid (one at the time), and mortgage, and car payments. No way I could go back to school full time. I do remember thinking about part time business programs funded by my company. But those programs could take anywhere from three to five years to get through. That did not appeal to me at all. I wanted immersion, I wanted networking, and I wanted it not to last longer than 2 years.

Starting in about 2004, I started researching different types of programs to see what was available. I was amazed at the plethora of programs to accomodate every budget, time frame, and schedule. There were part-time mba, evening mba, weekend mba, distance mbas, online mba, modular mba, professional mba, executive mba, one year mba programs all offered in the city I was located at. I attended cocktail receptions, lectures, open houses, and all the other types of recruitment activities that these programs offered. I sent away for the brochures and application materials. The marketing was so slick, I was hooked. I was going to get me one of these MBAs no matter what it took.

At the same time I was a little cautious. With so different types of programs , which one was the right one for me? After all, this was going to be a big investment of time and money. And with so much variaton in schedule and costs, how do I compare programs? It took me about 2 years to figure it out. I was looking to get more than just textbook knowledge from a program. I figured, for the most part, the different types of programs would cover similar course content, so I needed to look beyond the courses. What else would define a program? I came up with a list that included the quality of the faculty, course delivery, alumni network, location, student facilities and resources, career resources, school brand value and reputation, quality of the students, and ROI.

In addition, I wanted a program that would allow for immersion, opportunity to network with other like-minded individuals, an international trip to study business abroad. I sent away for many, many brochures. Some schools were local, some were in other states. I cast a wide net intentionally at this point. I was not being very discriminate yet. Interestingly enough, one factor I hadn't considered previously that played an important role in the schools I filtered out, was the dealings I had with the admissions offices. While you could argue that the admission offices are not necessarily a good reflection of the quality of the school or the potential ROI, my dealings with the different admissions offices did give me a sense of how differently schools treated their students or future students and definitely shaped my perceptions of different schools in the early going.

In the end I chose the executive MBA format because it offered the things I was looking for and careerwise, I was right about the average age for most of these programs. I found that Executive MBA programs provided more immersion, and more contact time with other students than say part time programs or distance learning programs. To me, the networking and opportunity to learn from others was a major part of the mba experience. I ended up narrowing the list to three programs, but partway through the application process, I narrowed it down to two. I started out applying to Kellogg, Wharton, and Emory. I eventually decided to drop Kellogg from my list and stuck to Wharton and Emory.

I submitted applications for both and was accepted to both. I had already made up my mind where I would go if I made it into both schools. It was a difficult decision because of the tradeoffs involved. In the end, I know I would have been happy at either school, but the Wharton brand recognition tipped the scales for me. Emory has a great brand in the southeast, but on the global scale, the Wharton name went a lot further. I ultimately see myself being fairly mobile career-wise, so the better brand name made sense. There were some tradeoffs however. Emory is a local school, while I would have to commute bi-weekly to Wharton. Wharton is also more expensive and takes about 8 months longer to complete. Then there's the philly winter...ughhh.