America’s Hottest New Dating Sites: Business School Campuses - The Wall Street Journal

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America’s Hottest New Dating Sites: Business School Campuses - The Wall Street Journal Posted: 09 Mar 2020 10:58 AM PDT By Patrick Thomas March 9, 2020 12:18 pm ET Liza Merolla and her husband, Justin Merolla, are among a growing number of couples who met through one of the world's most expensive dating sites. They were students at the business school of Columbia University in New York City, where two years of tuition and fees total more than $200,000. It paid off. The Merollas, ages 34 and 36, graduated in 2015 and are living happily ever after in Brooklyn. On Monday, they had their first child, Avery Merolla. I thee endow Roughly half of Americans ages 18 to 28 say they use online dating sites, according to Pew Research. Others are finding romance at business schools. Glenn Hubbard, former dean of Columbia Business School, said he has lost count of the number of business-school weddings he has attended. Statistics seem to support his observations. Women made up less than 30% of students enrolled in M.B.A. programs during 2005, the year the nonprofit Forté Foundation started to tally gender. Today, about 40% of the students at the top 50 programs are women. Share Your Thoughts How did you meet your spouse?Join the conversation below. The shift makes for a more gender parity during classes, study groups, recruiting events and boozy nighttime gatherings. No surprise that's a recipe for romance, Mr. Hubbard said: "Business-school students are pretty social." Sarina Richard, who got her M.B.A. at Harvard in 2016, said the rigorous admissions process increases the chance of meeting an interesting, eligible companion. "You've already been vetted through the admissions process, so you know this person is legitimate," she said. "You have this immediate connection around intellectual rigor." The odds of meeting a mate while pursuing an M.B.A. favor women, at least at Harvard. A campus study of its business-school alums found that a third of women, both baby boomers and Gen Xers, are married to, or partnered with, other Harvard Business School grads. It is 15% for similarly aged men. Ms. Richard, 35, and her 34-year-old husband, Drew Richard—also HBS class of '16—used their PowerPoint skills for a 50-slide deck presentation that detailed plans for their wedding guests. Harvard University Photo: Brooks Kraft/Corbis/Getty Images They met by chance when assigned to the same discussion group. M.B.A. students in these small-group settings often share life experiences, fears and failures, Ms. Richard said. Getting to know each other in a business-school group seemed easier than dating someone off campus, she said. Neither planned to date. Ms. Richard said something sparked when Mr. Richard talked about working as a military officer flying Apache helicopters in Afghanistan. "I've never met anyone like this before," she recalled thinking. Over time, she said, "We learned how to argue and communicate our thoughts." They now live in Houston, where he works for Chevron and she is an entrepreneur. Lindsay Hoffman, class of 2014, met her husband during orientation at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. They socialized at networking events and theme parties. "You get to see people in a variety of settings in a short period of time," Ms. Hoffman said. Now that 40% of Booth's M.B.A. students are women, administrators say the business school has yielded nearly 1,500 alumni couples. The Hoffmans used a kanban board—an agile workflow management technique they learned at Booth—to organize potential baby names. Their daughter, Quinn, has since celebrated her first birthday. "There is something about business school, you are just so close in this alternative reality, these relationships just sort of develop into friendship and can blossom into what we have," Jeff Taylor said. He and Angela Wang married in December after they received M.B.A.s at Columbia in 2018. They tell different stories of how they met. One said it was walking across the Microsoft campus when they were interns. The other said it was while working on a case study of PepsiCo Inc. They agree that business school brought them together. Mr. Taylor, 30, said he and Ms. Wang, 31, shared similar views on ambition, careers and family values. "We were both going through a transitional phase in life," Ms. Wang said. "We are both trying to achieve our dream together." After graduation, they returned to Seattle and Microsoft. They, too, see the admissions office as a matchmaker. "Schools are increasingly looking for what kind of character you have, what value are you bringing," Mr. Taylor said. Angela Wang and Jeff Taylor at graduation from Columbia Business School. Photo: Jamie Lin Angela Wang and Jeff Taylor on their wedding day. Photo: Jof Panlaqui The spreading reputation of business-school romances worried Brittney Mahler after her husband, John Mahler, was admitted to the Sloan School of Business at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She heard that M.B.A. programs had spawned the phrase "Married But Available." Instead, she said, the program created a set of newlywed business-school friends. The Mahlers recently attended a wedding in India where they joined a Sloan-couples-only dance. Farzad Novin, a marketing director for the London-based QS Quacquarelli Symonds, which runs business-school fairs, said he talks a lot about business-school romance with prospective students. "I often position a business master's program as an opportunity to hit the reset button in one's personal and professional life," he said. "We tell candidates that there is a good chance that they may meet their future business partner, or spouse during their studies." J.P. Matychak, an associate dean at Boston University's Questrom School of Business, said he tells gatherings for new students that they will form lifelong relationships, potentially in business, friendship or love. With people waiting longer to marry, the typical age of M.B.A. students overlaps with the current marriage-age sweet spot, he said, 25 to 30 years old. Questrom faculty member Paul "Hutch" Hutchinson teaches a class called "Teaming" during a get-acquainted trip for new students on Thompson Island in Boston harbor. It is no coincidence that he also has officiated at two weddings of business-school couples. "I teach how to work well as a team, manage conflicts, solve problems," he said, "and that's what marriage is all about." Write to Patrick Thomas at Patrick.Thomas@wsj.com Copyright ©2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

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