How Should B-School Scholarships Be Awarded?

Apart from being so expensive, full-time MBA programs mean that you’ll have to leave your job for two years – so you lose even more money than you thought. Hence the popular opinion that only rich people can afford an MBA.

For most prospective students, entering a business school means spending a huge lot of money. Data acquired from Financial Times shows that on average, a full-time program at a top business university costs 200,000 dollars.

Schools Helping Students

Of course, universities are fully aware of the incredible cost of their business programs. That’s why they give their students all kinds of financial help, like scholarships, stipends or grants. The distribution of these funds varies across the student body: some are based on merit only, and others are awarded to people with low income or a poor background. The amount of these scholarships depends on the generosity of any given school.

Free Education

There are even students who can enter a business university program for free. For some people, it seems unfair. Usually, free of charge education is offered only to the most promising and bright students.

One of such students was Paulo Manoel, who entered the Berkeley Haas School of Business (PhD program) and received a fellowship covering his tuition costs as well as a special stipend to pay for his living. It was regarded by some of his peers as decidedly unfair: such a generous offer from the university meant that the school deemed Manoel to be much better than his fellow students.

Actually, Berkeley Haas offers scholarships to all its PhD students; hence, the program is in very high demand: only 7% of candidates are actually admitted.

As for the school’s MBA programs, scholarships are given to their participants, too: almost a half of all MBA students in Berkeley Haas have some kind of scholarship. Such enormous generosity is explained by a simple reason: the business school wants to keep being competitive by attracting the best of the best.

Is such generosity from business schools worth the effort? Actually, yes: students who finished their education free of charge almost always give large donations to the school after going up the career ladder. Additionally, giving awards to the brightest makes a lot of sense: students should try to be better than their peers.

The only negative side to such scholarships is that sometimes funds are given to students who were quite well off to begin with, and they didn’t really need the stipend. Others, who may be less promising, but with a lot of potential, have to refuse enrolling to best business schools due to the tuition and living cost. Nevertheless, schools still prefer to choose the smartest over the poorest.

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