<p>Mini, law and med schools admit folks w/o undergraduate degrees ALL the time??? Surely you jest or are merely spouting hyperbole to arouse comment. I’m going to call my buddy at Baylor and who was on the med school faculty of UMichigan and UCal-San Diego and graduated from YMS for his reaction to this.</p>
<p>Yup - ALL the time. There are 6-year medical school programs where one enters med. school in the 3rd year; 6-year law programs where one enters law school in the fourth year - in both cases, before a B.A. is earned. These include some of the best known and most highly touted undergraduate and medical/law programs in the country.</p>
<p>They are too numerous to list. Hamilton-Columbia Law; Claremont-McKenna Columbia Law; Penn State-Jefferson Medical School; UMKC; You can look 'em up yourself.</p>
<p>Again, to me, whether Mr. Gottesman has “what it takes,” and whether his years working for Bush in a fiarly minor position provides him with the tools to succeed at HBS is immaterial. HBS does not bend backward to admit the valets of the rich and famous, even though the valets can claim to be on more intimate terms than perhaps even the spouses of the rich and famous. </p>
<p>Of course, an important ingredient for success is the ability to network but, well…</p>
<p>HBS cares most about the type of work experience the individual has and this individual has good experience.</p>
<p>Do you think he is getting a good financial aid package? Is all financial aid need based at the grad school level? </p>
<p>It will also be interesting to see if he can make it through 2 years of HBS without cheating. I don’t mean deliberately cheating, but you know, working collaboratively, borrowing ideas, cutting and pasting, delegating authority, eves dropping, that type of thing. </p>
<p>I’m still waiting for someone to tell me it’s all a hoax.</p>
<p>( I agree: GREAT work experience, but his job description sounds like a combination of personal butler/court jester. Not a substitute for an undergraduate degree)</p>
<p>Why would this be a disservice to Harvard, and why would the school have to justify their admission policies? Isn’t the school … private? </p>
<p>In many posts on CC, we encourage students to pursue opportunities with initiative and knock on doors that may be closed. Prestigious internships are not advertised, and may not even exist on paper. Yet, students who create their own opportunities might end up snagging one. </p>
<p>Do we really believe that the Bush aide is still a normal twenty-plus person? And, what do WE know about his application? How well did he do on his GMAT and interviews? And, how well might he do in the future when thrown in the pool of the students? Can we not expect him to be sought after for work groups a LOT more than some freshly-minted number crusher from any US schools? Will he be the only candidate who might be a lot more versed in non-quantitative methods? Are all the successful HBS candidates cut from the same cloth? </p>
<p>For the record, I applaud the decision of Harvard Business School, and equally applaud the willingness of the candidate to take a risk and show a few leadership skills.</p>
<p>PS For some reason, I am certain that the critics would find the West Wing’s Charlie Young (aka Dule Hill) a lot more acceptable, even if he did not have a fictitious degree.</p>
<p>Well, of course he has good work experience: </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>My cleaning lady supposedly does many of these chores for other clients. Dog-sitting for her employer? check. Carrying speeches? No, but she’s carried their groceries. Does it count? Giving the “two-minute warning”? I don’t think they’re into speech-making, but she does remind them of things they may forget. And, she did not complete college (well, I think she never attended college, either). Shall I suggest they nominate her for HBS? They’re pretty successful business people.</p>
<p>Frank Wilczek did most of his(Nobel) prize-winning work as an undergraduate (at Chicago) and needed NONE of the academic prequisites at Chicago to do it?</p>
<p>Huh? Not according to Frank Wilczek’s brief bio. An exerpt.</p>
<p>I arrived at the University of Chicago with large but amorphous ambitions. I flirted with brain science, but soon decided that the central questions were not ready for mathematical treatment, and that I lacked the patience for laboratory work. I read voraciously in many subjects, but I wound up majoring in mathematics, largely because doing that gave me the most freedom. During my last term at Chicago, I took a course about the use of symmetry and group theory in physics from Peter Freund. He was an extremely enthusiastic and inspiring teacher, and I felt an instinctive resonance with the material. I went to Princeton University as a graduate student in the math department, but kept a close eye on what was going on in physics. I became aware that deep ideas involving mathematical symmetry were turning up at the frontiers of physics; specifically, the gauge theory of electroweak interactions, and the scaling symmetry in Wilsons theory of phase transitions. I started to talk with a young professor named David Gross, and my proper career as a physicist began.</p>
<p>Hum…didn’t become aware until a grad student at Princeton? I thought he did most of his (Nobel) prize winning work as a UC undergrad???</p>
<p>mini, your falling fast on my credibility scale.</p>
<p>I think people are once again being somewhat unfair to Mr. Gottesman. Heres a story from last year that provides a more complete description of his role as the Presidents assistant. (The story was originally in the NY Times, but Im linking to the SF paper because the Times no longer provides free access to it.)</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/05/30/MNGGBD0NV21.DTL[/url]”>http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/05/30/MNGGBD0NV21.DTL</a></p>
<p>A couple of excerpts:
The last paragraph is interesting clearly sometime in the last year Mr. Gottesman decided (perhaps the President suggested it?) that he should skip the college degree part and just go straight to B-school.</p>
<p>“To be considered for admission, a candidate must have successfully completed a degree program at an accredited U.S. four-year undergraduate college/university or its equivalent in another country”</p>
<p>Well, isn’t the White House another country? Some of you like to say its main occupant lives on a different planet. :)</p>
<p>Xiggi:
ROFL!</p>
<p>To me, it is not about how well he is qualified or if he could succeed even if he followed a less conventional path into B school. I have taught in college programs for non traditional aged students. Those programs are willing to give college credit for documented life experiences. I am not saying this guy might not have what it takes (though I have no clue if he does but just saying maybe he does). But if life and work experiences can be a path into B school, then that should be known in the admissions criteria. It should be known that one can make a case for life experiences or learning on the job and be considered for admission and an UG is not necessarily required. I think if this guy is let in, fine but let in the many who could surely document learning in various life/work experiences, and not just the guy who worked for the Prez. I guess if you have the right connections, the rules don’t apply.</p>
<p>I have spoken with him personally. What he learned in Chicago, he told me, was that he did NONE of the physics involved in his Nobel as an undegraduate. He brought none of the physics from his undergraduate days into his Nobel work, because he didn’t have any (though he did have a relationship with Freund.) He did higher order concepts (which was your point) before (or after!) he did any formal lower concept work (he had done all of that in high school - and in junior high, or so he said - he drove poor Mrs. Russo insane), and did none of it as an undergraduate (with the exception of his relationship with Freund).</p>
<p>An unfair exception of course - Wilczek is off the charts as far as these things go. But I imagine not so exceptional as far as advance mathematicians and theoretical physicists are concerned.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I don’t think this will be an issue, most people seem to think that b-school work is pretty easy, it’s quite difficult to fail out of wharton because of the way the grading policies are set up and the fact that you can re-take classes if you receive no credit (and the amount advised for no credit is 0-5% for the class) I’d imagine Harvard’s grading policies are similar.</p>
<p>Soozie, if earning an undergraduate -any undergraduate- to comply with the “stated” requirement had been necessary, the candidate could have found hundreds of school granting a degree after presenting a minimum of subjects, and get subtantial credit for experience. </p>
<p>How would you feel, if Gottesman deferred his admission by one year to earn a quick UG degree, or earned one during the summer? Impossible? Me think not! I assume HBS preferred not going through a charade.</p>
<p>xiggi, (and others)</p>
<p>For many of us, the problem is that this admissions decision seems to be much less about the merits of the applicant and much more about connections, power etc.</p>
<p>To the degree that higher ed and institutions like HBS hold themselves out as meritocracies, this rubs me the wrong way. </p>
<p>Yea, I realize this is probably not an isolated thing. I also am a strong believer in the hypocracy of many higher ed admissions practices. That still does not make confirmation of my darker views any more pleasant.</p>
<p>FWIW, I would be just as unhappy if the admittee were one of Bill’s former aides with similar qualifications.</p>
<p>Xig:
Frankly, if Gottesman went through a college that was willing to grant some credits for life/work experiences (usually requires writing/documenting/reflecting) and other coursework they may have required (none of the adult degree college programs I have worked at will grant ALL the credits needed to graduate from life experiences…just some), and then applied to Harvard B School…yes, I’d feel better. He’d have earned a degree from a school that had granted him credits, in part via life experiences, and expectedly, also required other course work or independent studies…whatever they required to grant the degree.</p>
<p>However, as I said, I would not have a big problem if Harvard’s B school admitted students without an UG degree if that was in their policy…if they said that documenting life/work experiences would be considered. Then, this guy would NOT be the exception but would be admitted according to admissions criteria that is known to all. I have no doubt he has had significant learning the past several years outside of a college but he surely is not the only qualified person who could claim so. He just is the only one who gained such experience working with W.</p>
<p>NewMassDad wrote:
“For many of us, the problem is that this admissions decision seems to be much less about the merits of the applicant and much more about connections, power etc.”</p>
<p>Agreed.</p>
<p>I have a feeling this is not the only person who has gotten into some college or another via connections/power. On a much much much smaller scale, as a college counselor, I have had several parents suggest to me who they knew who could pull some strings with admissions (though I find many of these to be invalid assumptions they possess) and it is shocking to me how many want to utilize such attempts with admissions. I now realize it is not so uncommon to attempt the “connections” route. Clearly, for many this won’t work. I am now thinking that if one’s connections or power are “high” enough (I guess W will do), it works.</p>
<p><<I don’t blame him for dropping out–it was the chance of a lifetime to do a job few young people would ever get a chance to do. I’d probably support my own son doing that.</p>
<p>HOWEVER, I’d expect him to go back, and get some kind of baccalaureate, before being admitted to grad school. If higher education itself (in the form of HBS) is going to start devaluing a college degree by waiving that as a requirement for graduate study…well, it’s just surprising.</p>
<p>I’d waive it for Bill Gates, sure. This young man isn’t Bill Gates.>></p>
<p>hoedown, I completely agree. I would encourage my S to do the same. But, yeah, go back and finish undegrad and then apply to grad school.</p>
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</p>
<p>I am not intimately familiar with these programs, but Michigan used to have one, too. As I have understood it, these programs are a different sort of thing than the case mentioned. These are specific, structured programs.</p>
<p>They may be joint degree programs (I know the Penn State one you mentioned is) where a student gets a BS eventually. They may be quite selective and involve the student taking an “accelerated” program (possibly including summer study) while doing the undergraduate portion.</p>