Am I too old for an MBA?

We have recently heard from several people like you who have been around the block a few times and wonder if their window of opportunity for pursuing an MBA degree has closed.

Increased interest in the MBA degree among people aged thirty or older is a trend that I suspect has to do with the current state of the economy. The economic downturn has left many people’s job security in question. I imagine that those in middle management are getting squeezed hardest because upward mobility is limited in their firms. Making a jump to another company is fiercely competitive.

The desire to return to school for an MBA to sharpen their skills, expand their career options, and supercharge their professional network makes sense. The question is, are the early thirties a no-man’s/woman’s land between the full-time MBA program and the Executive MBA programs?

Although most business periodicals publish the median age of accepted students in their rankings, it is difficult to find age ranges for full-time MBA programs. The Economist is one source that provides age ranges for many of the top-ranked U.S. and international programs.

For your convenience, your Prep Professor has compiled a sample of the age range data from one of The Economist’s past rankings reports:

A quick look at these numbers tells us that at age 32, you are not totally out of the running for eleven of the twenty-two schools listed. But you better apply before your next birthday, unless you only want to apply to Duke, Carnegie Mellon, or Kelley.

As discouraging as these age ranges look to those of us over 31, they don’t tell the whole story. It gets worse.

To truly understand the chances for an older applicant, we would need to know the age distribution of accepted students. Those figures are typically not available – with one notable exception.

Harvard Business School published distribution statistics on the college graduation years for students entering the program in Fall 2010. A 32-year-old applicant to the class of 2012 would have graduated from college approximately 11 years prior, so his or her graduation year would be 1999. According to the distribution graph, how many students graduated in 1999 or earlier? Five. Five students out of a class of roughly 930 students were aged 32 or older.

Now, the statisticians will say that this isn’t sufficient justification for the thirty-somethings to give up on a full-time MBA program. That is because we don’t know what the age distribution was of applicants. While that’s true, I think it is fair to assume that the odds do not look promising for those more than a few years past thirty. The age distribution statistic raises another question: How do you feel about going to school with a bunch of mid-twenty-somethings who don’t have the life experiences and professional experiences you have?

Perhaps these statistics will discourage the other 32-year-olds from applying, and your odds of success will increase. My advice is that if you have the qualifications and the profile, the long odds may still come out in your favor. An alternate path to consider is applying to the EMBA programs. In those programs, you would be younger on average than your classmates.

You won’t know for sure unless you apply, so if you have your heart set on a full-time program, you should apply this year. After all, you’re not getting any younger!