http://www.mckinsey.com/careers/interviewing/national-education

Client goal

Loravia is a fictional country located in Eastern Europe with a population of 20 million. The government of Loravia wants to achieve major improvements in both the quantity and quality of education for its children. Because McKinsey has great deal of global knowledge and expertise in the education sector, the Loravian Department of Education has asked McKinsey to provide advice on how they can achieve this transformation in its school system.

Description of situation

Loravia’s free-market economy is still developing, having emerged from many decades under communism. Recently, the government of Loravia put in place a new economic plan, with aspirations to transform its economy and “turbocharge” its development so that it is well positioned to compete with its European neighbors. The government of Loravia realizes that the education of its children is a critical factor in meeting its economic-development goals. It intends to transform its school system over the next 10 years so that it is able to support its economic aspirations.

Schooling in Loravia is completely public, and is provided by a network of government-run schools, which admit children from ages 5 through 18.

The first stage of this effort is to diagnose the current state of education in schools in Loravia to determine how best to meet the government’s future aspirations.

McKinsey study

McKinsey has been asked to support the Loravian Department of Education in diagnosing the condition of its current school system, and in identifying the most important areas for improvement.

I have spoken about not-for-profit cases. My main opinion is that if you practice case-solving with a problem-solving mindset, not-for-profit cases shouldn't feel different than for-profit cases. All problem-solving principles apply.

From the case prompt, we should get three key pieces of information: (1) Who is our client? (2) What's our client's goal? (3) What's our task? Different from for-profit-cases, the (1) Who is our client and (2) What's our client's goal question is less obvious. This is where not-for-profit cases may prove to be harder than for-profit cases. It requires stronger listening ability and better and fast comprehension of situation.

Our client is Loravia government, its goal is to support its economic aspirations using a transformed and enhanced school system, our task is diagnosing the condition of the current school system and identify areas for improvement. Clearly, there are three layers to the goal here: the first layer is diagnosis, the second layer is transform school system, and the last layer is economic development. The first layer is the immediate task and the last layer is the ultimate goal. All three layers should be kept in mind, while the first layer should direct our immediate action, the second and third layers should be kept in mind when designing the actions.

Another key sentence to take note of is "The government of Loravia wants to achieve major improvements in both the quantity and quality of education for its children." This sentence is important because it semi-quantified the goal. "Transforming school system" is very abstract. However, "improvements in both quantity and quality of education" is a lot more concrete. Part of practicing solving cases is about sharpening one's ability to capture the more important sentences, phrases and words from a case. In today's case, this sentence should be a must-not-miss.

Question 1:

What are the issues you would want to investigate in diagnosing the condition of the current school system in Loravia?

Question 1 is a typical McK first question. The three buckets that naturally come to my mind are (1) Infrastructure (2) People, (3) Institutions, and (4) Performance. I think it's natural because when you think about how a school system works, first and foremost, we need schools with necessary equipments and supplies, and then you need teachers, students and other supporting stuff, and then you want to know how the system operates, and lastly you want to understand the current status quo regarding performance, since the goal of this question is to diagnosing the conditions. Moreover, not only these buckets would come to mind, a few quantitative approaches also come to mind. For example, to understand the current condition, I may want to (1) look at the historical path of the school system, and (2) cross compare the school system with other school systems of other countries.

As a consultant, we always want to quantify, which is one step beyond listing qualitative factors, so when I present my factors, I probably would list a few quantitative indicators.

So under infrastructure, I want to understand schools, equipments and supplemental materials. For schools, I want to know how many school are present, their acres and capacities, their geographic distributions, and how many villages, counties and cities have schools, and the student to school ratios. For equipments, I want to know a few key indicators like desks and chairs per school and per student, computers per school and per student, and sports equipment per school and per student. For supplemental materials, I want to understand how many and what kinds of books school stores for students to use.

Under people, I want to understand teachers, students, supporting stuff, and parents. For teachers, I want to know the teacher to student ratio, teacher's education level and training support; for students, I want to know their absence days, drop-out rates, their general family background and economic status, as well as health conditions; for supporting stuff, I want to know about the manager, dean, and president to student ratios.

For institutions, I want to know four aspects: (1) teaching: what type of text books are used, what subjects are taught, what's the teaching philosophy and methodologies, how schools interact with students and parents (2) Incentives: how schools are evaluated and incentives, and how performance is monitored and how feedback is given. (3) Funding: how funding sizes are determined, and where the money come from; (4) Organization: I want to know the organizational structure of the educational system of the government, and how do governmental officials answer to their responsibilities.

Lastly for performance, I'd like to look at the historical performance and cross compare the following indicators with other benchmarks in the world: (1) student: average test score by subjects, preferably standardized to facility cross comparison around the world; average dropout rate; average years taken to complete high school; percentage of students who attend college; and preferably, economic outcomes like average wages in latter stage of life; (2) teacher: teacher-to-student ratio, average education level, average age, subject area distribution.

This is probably what I would do for Question 1. It's far from perfect. But it has a reasonable structure, it's tailored to the case, and it quantifies and specifices methodologies. McK has its sample answer too. It structured by quantity versus quality, which is great because it's what the question asked for in the beginning. I think both work. There can be many versions of answers.

Question 2:

The chart below shows some important education-related measures for Loravia, and also for some comparison countries. Three sets of comparison countries have been used. In the first set are some of Loravia’s neighboring countries in Eastern Europe. In the second set are some of the most developed economies in Europe. Finally, in the third set are some countries that have similar sized economies to Loravia on a per person basis (similar GDP per capita).

What can you observe from this chart?

One thing I found helpful in solving cases is to always remind yourself of the problem you are solving. In this case, our goal is to help our client improve its educational system. So when a table of data is presented, natural questions that facilitate achieving the goal include: 1. what story does the data tell? 2. how does the story help with solving the ultimate question? 3. is the data sufficient in telling its own story? 4. what other data would help in solving the ultimate question?

Before interpreting the storyline of the data table, observations should be made: (1) our client is not doing very well measured by average international accessment score (2) however, it doesn't seem that our client spends a lot per student compared to neighboring countries and similar economies, and this may imply some degrees of ineifficnecy(3) Developed countries spent more per student and achieve better asscessment score, but it doesn't necessary imply a causal relationship (4) Our client's student per teacher ratio is very competitive even compared with developed economies, which futher supports the hypothesis that our client's system is not very efficient (5) There seems to be a large variation in regards to students per school, and there doesn't seem to be a direct correaltion between students per school and test scores

I think it's ok to articulate the observations to the interviewer first without a super organized story line, but it's definitely important that after the observations, you offer some conclusions based on the observations, talk about potential drivers behind the story, and then what the implication is of the story and drivers, and lastly what do you recommend to do next.

You can find all these elements I just mentioned in McK's suggested response.

Question 3:

One of the clients at the Loravian Department of Education mentions the example of neighbor country C, which outperforms all of Loravia's economic peers and neighbors in the international assessment. She believes that the more concentrated school structure in this country is a big reason for its better outcomes in the international assessment. She suggests that having larger, less fragmented schools allows for more effective selection and training of teachers, leading to improved education outcomes for the students.

What would be the reduction in the total number of schools in Loravia if it were to reach the same average school size as neighbor country C?

Your interviewer can provide you with the following information if requested:

• 15 percent of Loravia's population are currently attending school.

Question 3 is a second quantitative question. It's very simple. The basic principle of solving a quantitative question apply here. (1) You should tell the interviewer your approach first before solving it (2) Solve and at the same time communicate with your interviewer with regard to each steps so that you keep your interviewer engaged as well as use the interviewer as a check (3) Interpret your result after you've had one. With regard to this specific question, I personally would probably had said in the interpretation that without specific qualitative and quantitative studies, it's hard to say what's driving a better international score. It could be true that school size is a driver, but it could also be true that it's just a reflection of other factors: for example, bigger metropolitan areas may have bigger schools, and bigger metropolitan areas may drive up students' scores through many other channels like parents' educational levels.

I encourage you not to be constrained by case facts but use your training from grad school to analyze problems. After all, there's only so much data that can be shown to you in an interview and it's absolutely normal that the data is inadequate to drive to any definite solutions. I feel candidates should be afraid to question the data and just say that the data may not tell a complete or good story.

Question 4:

Based on the issues and information discussed so far, what further issues would you want to investigate as part of the diagnostic of the current education system in Loravia?

The last question is a brainstorming question. It's called brainstorming question because it clearly asks for a list of ideas. By now, if you are reading my case studies, you should know that this quesiton is not looking for a random list, it's looking for a structured list. It's easy to approch this question if you have a good structure in Question 1. Bascially, you just need to look at your structure in Quesiton 1, incorporate the information you have gotten in Question 2 and 3, and then give an updated list as the answer to Question 4.

Innovativeness is always welcome. I find it easier to be innovative if I approach brainstorming questions as if it's just a problem that I need to solve. Not a business problem. If I treated it as a business problem, I immediately start to feel that I'm inadequate and it limits my imagination. However, just to repeat, the bottomline is that you have a structure. Innovate with a structure!