The Harvard Age Curve - Part II

Last year I published an article about the age of matriculating students for the Class of 2010 at HBS versus other schools. Dee Leopold recently published new data on the HBS admissions blog for the Class of 2012 as follows:

Since I got a lot of positive feedback after my last article, I decided to briefly revisit the topic given this new information.

I'll make the same assumption I made last time, which is that students on average graduate from undergrad at age 22; the numbers who graduate later probably roughly balance those that graduate earlier. I then subtracted a year to calculate the approximate age at time of application (average time from application to matriculation is around 9 months). Comparing the two data sets show little change:

The data compares class sizes of 900 and 909, so I normalized the data and made the followng observations in the difference between the two years:

• Age group 23 and under: Down 23 students
• Age group 24-26: Up 29 students
• Age group 27-29: Up 17 students
• Age group 30 and over: Down 5 students
• Overall mean age change: from 24.9 up to 25.1

Don't forget this is age at time of application. It means that the average HBS grad is 28 years old. While the age average technically went up slightly, it's not a very significant difference. More significant is the slight drop in students with under 2 years of work experience, which looks like it got absorbed by those with 3-5 years of experience. Although I would emphasize that these are very small percentages changes and it's very likely that none of the slight differences are intentional.

For those wondering about the best time to apply, let's look at percentage of students matriculating by age groups at time of application:

• Age 23 and younger: 10%
• Age 24-26: 78%
• Age 27-29: 12%
  
• Age 30+: 1%

The numbers definitely speak for themselves and probably don't need any added insight. I will say that over my year at HBS I have come to form an extreme respect for the institution and its methods. There are certainly those that question the age skew at Harvard, and I think it's always worth discussing, but I will say that after a year at HBS, I have come to give them a high degree of trust. They've been the best at what they do for a long time!