Important new trend in top b-schools: Evening MBA students being forced to designate on resume.

In a meeting earlier this week with the Director of Career Services for a top 25 b-school I was shocked to hear that schools are now beginning to force evening MBA participants to designate on their resumes that they are in the evening program. While yes, it should be obvious to a recruiter if a student is in the full time MBA program or the evening program from their resume details, in the past, it has always been an attractive benefit of attending an evening program that you can put MBA on the resume as opposed to MBA, evening program. This has been a very unpopular move with many evening students as you can imagine, but also consider that the alternative was really upsetting the daytime MBA students at these same schools. You see, the daytime students felt they were competing for jobs with the evening students and were not happy about it. Since the Bloomberg BusinessWeek rankings depends on student satisfaction to a large degree, the program administrators are quick to listen and respond. Result? New rule requiring evening students to designate. The good news for evening students is, that most recruiters nowadays holds the evening MBA students in just as high esteem as the daytime candidates. In some cases, the evening students are indeed winning jobs over the daytime students because of their employability. Think about it…they already have a job and in most cases have more work experience than the full time MBA candidates do. Work experience counts for a great deal in this economy. So, if you find yourself trying to decide between an evening program and a full time program, just know that this new trend is out there, and if it bothers you, you should figure it into your decision.

That is an interesting trend. In general, are evening MBA programs considered to be less demanding and easier to get admitted to than a school's full-time MBA program?

Typically, the admissions process is more forgiving for evening programs, for several reasons: 1) they are often larger programs and can accomodate more students since the facilities are otherwise unoccupied in the evening hours. This results in a process for admissions that makes it easier for schools to add on more students. 2) Schools are highly motivated to admit students into the evening programs because they are usually revenue producing sources for the schools. 3) Schools are not required to report statistics for evening students when it comes time for FT, BusinessWeek and US News to compile their top schools lists, which allows schools to be more forgiving on things like GMAT scores and GPAs, avg. years WE, etc... So, while it's viewed as easier to get in, what makes it tough is the rigor of the program does not wane in the evening, which becomes a very tough 3 years for students who are working full time and also going to classes. So in a way, it's much more demanding than a full time program, and many recruiters are recognizing this and showing interest in recruiting these highly motivated, very good time managers who are in the evening programs.