It’s no secret that thousands of graduate programs at universities all across America leave students with mountains of debt and mediocre incomes. Many master’s students have gotten themselves into debt beyond what their incomes will easily support once they graduate.

But the slim odds of getting into have only fueled the admissions consulting industry. The Poets&Quants profiles over 562 consultants alone, up 13% in just two years.

However, he made a fatal mistake: he underestimated the importance of the MBA interview. He did not prepare well for the interview, thinking that his credentials and achievements would speak for themselves.

I was an amateur applicant. I didn’t sufficiently ask that question. There is no shortage of MBA admissions pages or advice. I hope this one can be helpful and differentiated. At a minimum, in hindsight, here is what I wish I knew:

“It’s my ability to connect and empathize with my clients,” confides Bond, a director at Fortuna Admissions who earned her people skills at London Business School and The Boston Consulting Group. She invests the time necessary to intimately know her clients, building mutual trust along the way. “Once you do that, you get them to open up to you. And when you are at that point with a client, I get to understand more about them and their story.

Harvard doesn’t just churn out cases — it consumes them, too. Harvard MBA students read 500 cases over the course of their two years in the program.

The evaluated research from 157 UK higher education institutions in 34 different subject areas, measuring both the quality and impact of the school’s research submissions. uses the REF findings to rank schools, and it ranked Judge No. 1 in the Business and Management Studies.

Wharton, which claimed the top prize in 2017 and in 2018 when the school’s MBA program tied with Harvard Business School, narrowly edged out the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. Stanford slipped to third place, while Northwestern Kellogg and Harvard rounded out the top five MBA programs in the U.S.