Bush’s Harvard MBA

When Bush ran for president in 2000 he claimed there would be accountability in his administration, and he said that his business school training gave him the tools and vocabulary to be a manager.

I found the following Business Week article that delves into Bush’s business school days at Harvard: George W.'s B-School Days

“RESUME BUILDING. The story starts with Bush's application. These days, getting into Harvard's B-school, No. 3 in the nation according to BusinessWeek's 2000 Rankings, is no easy feat. Acceptance requires a resume with plenty of real-world work experience, a degree and a strong grade-point average from a reputable undergrad school, top Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT) scores, and strong evidence of leadership capabilities.

In 1973, "making the bar [at Harvard] was 98% meritocracy," says Michael Porter, now one of the B-school's most well-known professors and an expert in international competitive strategy. Bush's application landed at Harvard while his dad, George H. W. Bush, was chairman of the Republican National Committee. One year later, Poppy would become the top U.S. diplomat to China.

Surely junior's application stood out. George W. Bush was a picture of honor once he got past his party days at Yale with the Delta Kappa Epsilon brothers and members of Skull & Bones, a secret society that enrolled him during his senior year -- so hush-hush, in fact, it barely gets a mention in his book. Bush earned an undergraduate degree in history from Yale in 1968. His grades weren't great, and nobody can seem to locate his GMAT scores. But by 1973, he had completed a five-year stint in the Texas National Guard, worked on his father's failed 1970 Texas campaign for U.S. senator, and worked full-time for ProjectPULL, an organization that worked with inner-city youth.

"TURNING POINT." His experience at ProjectPULL, while "tragic, heartbreaking, and uplifting, all at the same time," Bush writes, was also a perfect stint for a B-school application. He admits in his book that "business school was a turning point.... By the time I arrived, I had had a taste of many different jobs but none of them had ever seemed to fit."

Once he sat down for his first core-curriculum class, Bush was just like any other MBA, people remember. "He was a nice young man," professor Michael Yoshino says, though he never had him as a student in class. "He would go to the library occasionally," says classmate Richard Payne, 52. "He liked to talk politics," too, Payne adds, though it wasn't a popular topic among B-schoolers. "He was keenly interested in what was going on in the world."

Around campus, people would point him out. "At a place like Harvard Business School, you always know who the sons or daughters -- but mostly the sons -- of famous people were," says Ruth Owades, chairman of Calyx & Corolla, a high-end flower catalog company and also a member of the class of 1975. "And then there were the rest of us."”