The Wharton School’s Blair Mannix

Blair Mannix, director of MBA admissions at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, has been named Poets&Quants‘ 2022 MBA Admissions Director of the Year. Here, she meets with University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill and other officials. Wharton photo

There’s a baseball cap in Blair Mannix’s closet, emblazoned with a number in a bold white font. It was given to her by the Wharton Women in Business club whose members wore identical caps around campus in 2021.

The number? 52 — the record-setting percentage of women in Wharton’s MBA Class of 2023.

It wasn’t just a milestone for the world’s first collegiate business school with a history dating back to 1881. It was a milestone among all the M7s — the vaulted “magnificent seven,” widely regarded as the most prestigious business school on the planet.

The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania is the first — and so far only — M7 school to achieve gender parity in a full-time, residential MBA class. No other school in the top 15 in our latest ranking has enrolled 50% or more women in their MBA classes. It is an especially major achievement because Wharton’s yield rate–the percentage of admits who enroll in the program–falls significantly below that of Stanford and Harvard, the school’s biggest rivals for talent. At Stanford, 94% of applicants invited to enroll do so. At Harvard, it’s roughly 83%, while at Wharton the yield rate is 67%.

“Obviously, it was a great day,” says Mannix, director of MBA admissions at Wharton since 2018, on achieving the milestone. “For (Dean) Erica James, for my own career, it was a great day. But it’s not like I woke up in October 2020 and said, ‘This is what we’re going to do.’ We let the talent dictate the class profile.”

GENDER PARITY — TWO YEARS RUNNING

As impressive as the milestone was at the time, more impressive perhaps is the fact that Wharton repeated the feat a year later, enrolling 50% women for the MBA class of 2024.

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Nicolaj Siggelkow, vice dean of the Wharton MBA

The secret to Wharton’s admission success – not just in gender parity, but in other underrepresented groups as well – is its intentioned efforts to increase its applicant pools while identifying true drivers of candidate success, says Nicolaj Siggelkow, vice dean of Wharton’s MBA program and the David M. Knott Professor and Professor of Management.

“There’s amazing work from Blair and her team, and Maryellen Reilly (vice dean, graduate student affairs), to ensure the admissions process is unbiased and more data-driven. The days are over where a single admissions officer would read a file and say ‘yes’ or ‘no,’” he told P&Q during an interview this fall.

“The other thing that they have done is to dig deeply into success drivers and to track them for career outcomes. It’s all about getting a better understanding of the factors that allow us to identify great candidates. I’ve only this year really started to appreciate this because I’ve had the chance to more deeply observe this process,” Siggelkow says.

“It is quite a difficult task to build an MBA class because you never know who’s coming and who is not coming. Some people apply to lots of schools and get great offers. How to predict who will ultimately come to Wharton and who will not come used to be an art. Now, it’s a little bit like ‘Moneyball.’”

BLAIR MANNIX, P&Q’s MBA ADMISSIONS DIRECTOR OF THE YEAR

For leading the first admissions team to achieve gender parity at an elite business school and for repeating the feat a year later during an industry-wide decline in applications, Blair Mannix is Poets&Quants’ MBA Admissions Director of the Year.

While we routinely highlight outstanding programs, professors, and deans at the end of each year, Mannix is the first and so far only admissions director to earn this distinction.

And, it comes at a particularly turbulent year for the MBA admissions game.

One of the top stories from the 2021-2022 admission cycles was the dramatic decline in applications. At least 16 of the top 25 business schools reported rather dramatic drops, while two schools (Northwestern Kellogg and UC-Berkeley Haas) did not report application numbers this cycle. MBA applications fell 24.8% at MIT’s Sloan School of Management in 2021-2022, 15.4% at Harvard Business School, and 16.5% at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. At Wharton, applications were down about 14%.

Blair Mannix, director of Wharton MBA admissions

Meanwhile, a string of high-profile MBA admissions officials has left or announced their departures over the last 12 to 15 months, stepping away from their respective schools including Columbia Business School, Michigan Ross, UC-Berkeley Haas, Northwestern Kellogg, and Carnegie Mellon. Kirsten Moss at Stanford and Chad Losee at Harvard coincidentally announced their intentions to step down on the same September day.

Despite the turbulence, Wharton seated a 2024 MBA Class that was not only 50% women, but also 23% Asian American, 7% Black/African American, and 5% Hispanic. Eleven percent of the incoming MBAs are first-generation students. Of the 877 students enrolled, they are 35% international, representing 77 different countries.

The class of 2024 also increased its percentage of LGBTQ+ representation to 8%, up one point from the previous class and an all-time high in the category.

Diversity in MBA classes is, of course, about bringing a wide range of perspectives into classrooms to reflect an increasingly global workforce. But, it’s also about fairness, and about finding talent in places where opportunities might not be as apparent as in the traditional pipelines to elite institutions.

“You should reflect the talent pool that’s out there in society. If it’s not, then the question should be, why isn’t it?” Siggelkow says. “Is it the fault of society or is it our fault (in elite business schools) of not finding the right people?”

Blair Mannix welcomes the MBA Class of 2023 on Franklin Field at the University of Pennsylvania. Mannix uses two mottos to lead the MBA admissions team at Wharton: ‘Fair and accurate’ and ‘read to admit.’ Wharton photo

A UNIQUE B-SCHOOL ADMISSIONS ORIGIN STORY

As far as MBA admissions origin stories go, Mannix’s is pretty unique: She knew even as an undergrad student that she wanted to work in university admissions. She aspired to it. It’s not a job title she stumbled upon and happened to like.

Mannix grew up in Maryland’s D.C. suburbs and enrolled at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia to study political science and history. When she grew homesick early on, she transferred back to her home state, and then soon realized that it wasn’t a good move for her. She returned to St. Joseph’s, working closely with the people, mostly women, in the schools’ admissions offices.

“They absolutely saved my life,” Mannix tells Poets&Quants. “When I was about 19, I thought, ‘this is exactly what I want to do for a living.’ One, because they had helped me so much, and two, because I saw that they were public speakers. Even at a very young age, I knew that I was a public speaker in my soul.”

She took her first admissions job at the University of Pennsylvania in 2006 and literally sat at the front admissions desk, a place she’d found so much help in her college journey. The dean at the time wrote the playbook on selective admissions, and she soaked in everything she could learn.

She stayed in undergrad admissions for about six years, running operations, evaluation, and selection for 31,000 Penn applicants (which has since ballooned to closer to 50,000.) She moved to the Wharton School in 2012 to run the ideology and philosophy of admitting Wharton students, a data-intensive process that starts with the training of app readers to spot talent, and then doing all the math required to get a class in the door.

She became the Wharton MBA admissions director in 2018.

WHARTON’S SECRET ADMISSIONS SAUCE

The secret to Wharton’s admissions success is by and large, well, secret. In an ever-increasingly competitive market for top MBA talent – both from companies and among the schools themselves – and at a time when more people are publicly expressing their skepticism of the degree’s value, much of the behind-the-scenes process is proprietary and confidential.

In interviews, Mannix is delightfully open and animated. She comes across as less guarded and more transparent than many of her peers. Even when declining to answer specific questions about its secretive selection process, Mannix still seems approachable, likable, and, strangely enough, candid. Full of kinetic energy, she brings a strong sense of self-confidence to her job.

MBA admission consultants say she has shown exceptional support for Wharton’s applicants and students and a deep commitment to using data to make admission decisions. “She wants to “democratize” access to admissions information,” believes Linda Abraham, founder and president of Accepted.com, an admissions consulting firm. “In all my intereactions with her over the years, she projects a concern for the applicants as human beings.”

LOUSY AT MATH DURING HER PREP SCHOOL DAYS, MANNIX EMBRACES DATA

For a person who once joked that her math grades were the worst at the Connelly School of the Holy Child, a Catholic, college preparatory school in Potomac, Md., Mannix has completely embraced data and numbers. “Anyone coming in their careers right now would do best by themselves to track towards data, data science and math,” she said in an alumni interview with Holy Child. “I was not this person and didn’t get in touch with that side of my brain until I was 27 years old.

In fact, when Abraham first met Mannix at a trade association conference for MBA admission consultants, “she was talking with someone and ‘geeking out’ on correlation studies that were attempting to correlate certain aspects of the application with success in the program. Whenever you speak with her,” adds Abraham. “she backs up what she says with reliable information, frequently statistical.”

Consistent with her need not to reveal how Wharton quantifies soft skills and other aspects of its admission decision, she declines every effort to lend more light to the mystery of who gets in and who doesn’t. However, Mannix does share two of her personal mottos that she has printed on stickers given to every staff member and stuck to laptops, whiteboards, and in welcome kits around the Wharton admission’s office: “Fair and accurate decisions” and “read to admit.”

AN ADMISSIONS APPROACH BASED ON ‘FAIR & ACCURATE’ DECISIONS

Fair and accurate means the same, defendable standards are applied for every admit and are central to every decision – whether it’s to admit, to waitlist, or to deny.

Read to admit is a reminder to every staffer to read an application with positive intent–not to dwell on the fact that Wharton rejects 75% to 80% of the candidates who apply for admission to its full-time MBA program.

“The positivity we bring to every file is bedrock to the culture. We are looking for your best day, and that actually matters when you’re deciding at scale. It’s something that has been part of my soul for the 16 years I’ve been doing this,” Mannix says. It is a point she often expresses. “With every application we open,” she told one interviewer, “we are looking for reasons to admit you and not for reasons to deny you. That is a huge deal. Your application will be read by people who are looking at your best day and not your worst day, with positive head space and not negative head space. Just know that the people who are reading your story are on your side.”

‘WE PAY LESS ATTENTION TO THE GMAT THAN ANYONE WOULD EVER BELIEVE’

That philosophy was put to the test during the height of the pandemic when many schools began waiving standardized tests or going test-optional. Mannix held firm on the GMAT or GRE requirement for admission. Sitting next to her in Wharton’s admissions office is a full-time data scientist who has done more than one study that shows how predictive a test score is to one’s success in the MBA program. That is one of the reasons Wharton, with its data-driven culture, is holding on to the test, though Mannix insists in interviews that she and her staff pay less attention to the GMAT and GRE “than anyone outside my walls would ever believe.”

As she explains, Wharton is such a data-driven place. Admissions has a full-time data scientist on staff. Shares an office with her. She has done more than one study that shows how predictive eating is to one’s success in the program.

She did, however, extend some level of flexibility to applicants impacted by COVID in the 2019-2020 admissions cycle. Mannix extended the final deadline to apply by 14 days and agreed to review applications from candidates who did not yet have an official standardized test score. Instead, applicants were given until early August to hand in official scores. She also extended the deadline for recommendation letters an extra five days. The increased flexibility helped the school register a 21% rise in applications, vs. Harvard Business School’s meager 0.8% increase that year.

During its most recent application cycle, 6,319 people applied for the Wharton MBA program and 877 enrolled. (Wharton does not disclose its acceptance rate.) The average student has 5 years of work experience, a 733 GMAT score (the highest ever, tying last year’s record), and a 3.6 undergrad GPA.

But simply hitting these averages will not earn a candidate an invitation. Wharton is looking for indicators on where students go next, and what contributions a student will make to the Wharton community. For those candidates invited, Wharton does not do individual behavioral-based interviews, which research shows can be biased, Mannix says. Instead, the school uses team-based discussions meant to model the collaborative nature of Wharton’s classrooms. Four to five Wharton candidates are invited to the same interview and work together to present a solution to a given problem. That exercise is unique in MBA admissions.

“The team around me in MBA admissions are involved in every step of the process. It’s not a process where every decision rolls up to me,” Mannix says. “We have a robust committee, we come from a variety of different backgrounds, and the main tenor is we interview on ‘read to admit.’ They read applications and I need to see their point of view on talent. We’re getting people in the door that have a positive attitude on talent selection, and it really helps with our culture.”

“The team at Wharton, from the Dean suite all the way down, are the most fun, creative, innovative, character-driven, and lovely people. They have the best time playing in the sandbox.”

Blair Mannix speaks to students during a Welcome Weekend at The Wharton School. She tells P&Q that the talent of the applicant pool dictates the class profile, not set quotas. Wharton photo

LETTING THE TALENT DICTATE THE CLASS PROFILE

One goal Mannix made for herself in her leadership role is to help candidates prepare the best business school application that they could, not just to Wharton but across the industry. Wharton was among the first B-schools to host application tip webinars and info sessions, and it offers “Ask the AdCom,” a series of virtual events at the start of admission season.

Because data is only as good as its inputs, Mannix and her team constantly re-examine Wharton’s application to create more signals for talent. They’re also always looking for those “pockets of talent” that have traditionally been overlooked by elite business schools – prospective students who may have previously not considered an MBA but have skills and perspectives that can enrich both Wharton and society at large.

While the significance of achieving gender parity for two straight years cannot be overstated for such a premiere institution like Wharton, it’s not a stated goal for the admissions team, Mannix insists. Rather, they will continue to seat Wharton classes based on the talent in the application pool.

That said, the increasing demand for women in boardrooms and leadership positions has impacted the types of applications Wharton receives. A decade is a long time for professional women to start seeing the ROI of an MBA in their mentors and colleagues, and then start to see that path for themselves. While the raw number of women applicants has definitely increased in that time, so has the talent profiles of those applicants.

“This is what the market is asking for,” Mannix says. “The market is asking for more women to come into their companies, more women to rise in leadership. And one of the best ways to do that is to have a top-tier MBA. And so being able to deliver what our employers want and what the market is asking for has just been a delight. It matters because of representation. It matters for the students that they are part of the class that has this milestone. It matters for so many people besides one lowly human.”

Blair Mannix, bottom left, speaks on during a Workplace by Meta virtual panel at Wharton HQ. Wharton photo

HOW WHARTON’S MBA APPLICANTS HAVE CHANGED

In her 11 years in Wharton MBA admissions, Mannix has witnessed distinct changes in the applicant profiles. The industries they come from and hope to move into have changed, as have the reasons people want a Wharton MBA.

Most significantly, Wharton MBAs more and more want to be a force for good. They talk about ESG and DEI and the impact they want to make on the world. Wharton recently launched two new majors: Environmental, Social and Governance Factors for Business; and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (both effective 2023-2024 academic year). Lessons in corporate social responsibility, impact investing, and other topics are incorporated into Wharton classrooms.

Colan Wang, the first recipient of Wharton’s Prism Fellowship. Courtesy photo

In 2020, Wharton was also the first elite school to offer a full scholarship to a leader in the LGBTQ+ community. The Prism Fellowship was established by a gift from Wharton MBA Jeffrey Schoenfeld, a 1984 alum and partner at financial services firm Brown Brothers Harriman. When he entered Wharton in 1982, he was one of very few “out” MBA students in his class, Schoenfeld said at the time of his gift.

Prism Fellows are selected by the Wharton Fellowship Committee based on their leadership qualities, community impact, and personal essays submitted with their MBA program application.

“I’m not surprised by Wharton’s leadership on the issue, because when I was looking into business schools and deciding which ones I wanted to apply for, I noticed that Wharton is one of the only schools to publish on their website the percentage of students who identify as LGBTQ,” the first Prism Fellow Colan Wang told Poets&Quants in 2020. “So that immediately stuck out to me, because it demonstrated that Wharton really values the perspectives and the lived experiences that a diverse student body can bring to the classroom.”

There’s power in bringing together a wide range of experiences, perspectives, and backgrounds, and putting them together in a place like Wharton. Watching the impact such inclusive MBA classes have on the world is the purpose of Mannix’s work, and the work of the entire admissions team.

“I’m very humbled, very surprised, very grateful,” Mannix says of being named P&Q’s first MBA Admissions Director of the Year. “But this is about the entire team. It’s about everybody at Wharton, from the Dean’s suite on down. This admissions team is made of the best people, and I’m just lucky to lead it.”

DON’T MISS: Q&A WITH WHARTON VICE DEAN NICOLAJ SIGGELKOW and AT WHARTON, BUILDING A NEW COALITION FOR EQUITY & OPPORTUNITY

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