Great Mysteries of Elite University Admissions

One of the great mysteries of elite university admissions is how extraordinary people commonly get rejected. That's true at the undergraduate level, where competition for available spots at Harvard, Yale and Princeton is severe. It's especially true at the graduate level where work experience, career goals and your undergraduate record now come into play.

Of course, one reason why exceptional people lose out is because there are far too many great candidates seeking far too few available seats. That is certainly true at the Harvard Business School which recently informed thousands of applicants whether they would move on to the second phase of the admissions process--a one-on-one interview with the school--or were simply put in the reject pile.

On one day--Feb. 5--HBS dinged (the phrase for rejection used by MBA candidates) as many as 3,200 applicants. For many of them, getting into Harvard Business School was a lifelong dream that now is done. And for many, the rejection was one of the very few times in their young lives when they failed to get something they really wanted.

Here's a few of the extraordinary people who were turned down:

He’s a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt at a Fortune 100 company where he has worked in a process improvement consulting role for the past two years. With a hefty 760 GMAT and a 3.8 grade point average from a Top 20 university, this 26-year-old professional also has spectacular extracurricular activities to his credit, from spearheading a mentorship program at work to volunteering for an animal rescue organization. He wants an MBA to make the transition from the corporate world to management consulting.

With a job lined up with J.P. Morgan's investment banking group, this 21-year-old British woman is currently finishing up her undergraduate degree in Latin and Ancient Greek at the University of Oxford. With a 710 GMAT and a 3.7 GPA, she applied to Harvard Business School's 2+2 program, with an eventual goal of becoming CEO of a leading global luxury goods brand.

A West Point graduate, this 27-year-old military officer has spent the last five years in the U.S. Army. Consistently rated the top junior officer in his battalion, he has spent most of the last year commanding 80 soldiers and decided to leave the Army to get an MBA degree from a top school.

She seemed like the perfect MBA candidate: a 760 GMAT, a 3.98 GPA from an Ivy League university, four years of work experience and 26 years of age. She led marketing and communications for a major non-profit for two years and then founded her own social enterprise organization that she has led for two years.

Why didn't these four people make the cut? To gain some insight into how HBS decides who to accept or reject, we turned to a leading MBA admissions consultant, Sandy Kreisberg, founder of HBSGuru.com. We asked him to analyze the raw stats and profiles of candidates who generously shared their information with Poets&Quants.

Kreisberg's analysis shows how very little things can torpedo a candidate. For the Ivy League grade with a 3.98 GPA, it was most likely confusion over her career goals. She wanted to do urban economic development, not typically a career path for an MBA. For the West Point graduate, it turns out that both his GMAT and GPA were well below Harvard's averages. The Fortune 100 Black Belt, meantime, it may well have come down to something as silly as not working for a favorite feeder company into HBS. And for the Brit from Oxford University who majored in Latin and Ancient Greek, the rejection probably came down to the fact that she was applying under a program called 2+2 which was designed to bring in STEM undergraduates.