“I was really lucky that I had really high-quality experiences over the summer with those firms,” Thomas adds. “I never just had ‘shadowing’ jobs, but was actually given real responsibility, so for someone my age, I managed to accumulate a significant amount of experience just in my summers.”

A Shifting Focus

Efforts to gain a larger early-career student population at HBS come as a result of a variety of interests—from the pedantic to the practical.

“We had created a self-fulfilling prophecy, where because we emphasized getting work experience, people started...getting a little more experience, and we started admitting more experienced students.” HBS Dean Kim Clark told Bizforward magazine in September 2001.

Currently, the average work experience of HBS students is 4 years.

“We started hearing things, where a lot of companies have decided that they are going to try and keep their very best people from going to business school,” he said. “We were worried that we were going to start losing the very best people who would not ever go to business school.”

In the mid-90s, HBS had about one to two students per class who came right from college, according to HBS Managing Director of Admissions and Financial Aid Brit K. Dewey.

“A couple of years ago, the school started noticing some things about our admission candidates,” says Shad Professor of Business Ethics Joseph L. Badaracco. “One, we got very, very long resumes—word had gotten around that it was to have two—even three—entry-level jobs before applying. There was an ‘experience’ creep—and we ended up with students who had far too much experience, students who could apply for entry-level executive programs.”

“We were worried,” Badaracco adds. “We didn’t want people to think that they had to work for McKinsey, then Goldman Sachs, and then apply to HBS after all that.”

But Badaracco says that the initiative does not mandate an about-face in HBS admissions procedures.

“My hunch is that we will go more slowly, and try to get a sense of what the true experience has been for students right out of college, let a couple of years pass,” he says.

“There had been a very strong tradition of having people come to HBS right out of college, but then, the word was out on the street that you had to wait to go to B-school,” Dewey says, noting that eBay CEO Meg Whitman came to HBS directly from Princeton University. “Conventional Wisdom kept reinventing itself. So we looked at our applicant pool and said where are the amazing folks who want to come out of college?”

Furthermore, faculty felt that HBS’ signature case study teaching method was enhanced by a diverse age-range in the classroom, according to a Harvard Magazine article by Cizik Professor of Business Administration David A. Garvin. The method, which uses real-life business examples to spark discussions on organizational problem-solving, relies on students with different experiences and points of view chiming in, Garvin wrote.

The Early Career Initiative was born out of this reaction—and with brochures and postcards printed, HBS admissions offers are doing more than ever to help spread the word that there is “no right time to apply to business school.”

“Everyone seems to think that having one—or even two—jobs after college will make you a more competitive candidate at this place,” Dewey says. “Very few people apply right out of college. But we don’t feel that there really is a right time to apply, and it’s up to each individual to take stock in where they are now. We want people to think about HBS as an option right out of college.”