by Carlotta Mast

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The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania debuted an online bulletin board for applicants this year, as a way of reducing the deluge of candidate e-mails. Applicants can log onto Wharton’s bulletin board, ask questions, and engage in dialogues with current students and admissions staff.

“We decided that e-mail had outpaced our ability to meet needs,” says Rosemaria Martinelli, Wharton’s director of MBA admissions and financial aid. “One e-mail from us to a candidate didn’t really allow people the opportunity to benefit from other people’s questions.”

Like many other business schools, Wharton also uses technology as a recruitment tool. This year, instead of mailing print view books to prospects, the school sent out a CD-ROM that discusses the history and value of an MBA degree, provides information about the Wharton School, and helps prospective students assess whether an MBA degree is right for them. The CD-ROM also guides prospects through the Wharton application process, with live links to Wharton’s Web site and other online resources.

“We are absolutely explicit about what we look for in an application and how to prepare for an interview,” Martinelli says. “Because we want to admit the best applicants not the best applications, we wanted to level the playing field by giving this information to candidates.”

While technology certainly enables schools to better market themselves to prospects, it also forces schools to be more cognizant of the information they are—and are not—putting out to the public, notes Jennifer Chizuk, director of the MBA program at Michigan State University.

“You can’t hide anything anymore, because there is a lot of open communication now, not only between us and the applicants but between the applicants themselves,” Chizuk says. “They have access to different chat rooms and to alumni and former students. You have to be aware of the information sharing that is going on and market yourself honestly.”

As one admissions professional sees it, technology has been a benefit but it hasn’t made it any easier to ultimately decide who gets into an MBA program and who does not.

Says Joshua Kobb, MBA program director at HEC in France: “Technology has helped deliver applications. It has helped us communicate better with candidates. But I don’t think it has helped with the decision process, because at the end of the day, we are still dealing with people and people issues.” //

Carlotta Mast, a freelance contributor to Selections, has also written for Business Week online and Working Woman magazine. Her article “The Art of Admissions” appears in the spring 2002 issue of Selections.

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