If you are applying to a position in research, please reconsider.
1. The position you are applying for, especially at entry level is probably not what you think it is. EAB research largely consists of managing a senior leader's calendar and scheduling phone calls for your team lead to try and sell memberships or prevent members from leaving, usually by making up research and services EAB does not have. This changes in the last 5 weeks of every research project, where team leads search google for interesting data sets or ideas, make up anonymized quotes, and skim popular business books for buzzwords to fill up 100s of powerpoint slides that you will draw.
2. You will not get promoted. Research leadership is run by a cluster of upsettingly close friends who write each other's performance reviews to pump up their bonuses. As a result, senior leadership will take credit for everything, steal ideas from more junior team members, and pretend to have supported innovative concepts even after publicly bullying the employees that suggested the idea in the first place.
3. The culture will not protect you. If you have a work visa and the regulations change they will not support you. If your manager harasses you EAB's "advocates for women in leadership" will force you out. If you don't look right or sound right you will get performance reviews that look nothing like reality. Avoid HR entirely, it is a clean up crew for the managing directors.
4. You aren't actually helping education. The business model demands that prospective members remain terrified of fabricated demographic crises, or blinded by over-hyped science fiction solutions to existing challenges. It is why so many of the current research projects are focused on hypothetical high-tech futures or rebuilding higher education from scratch (mind you almost nothing they profile is ever more than a year out of beta, if it exists at all). EAB also loves to sell higher education culture solutions from "cool private sector companies." Taking a tour of Zappos, and cutting your ties in half will not properly calibrate your new RCM budget model.
5. The experience won't be helpful. You never really get growth opportunities which makes it difficult to move into a better job post EAB. Most other employers, even in education and the greater DC area, have no idea what EAB does and will struggle to match you to appropriate roles in the hiring process. EAB also needs to make sure that its members think that they still have expertise in every topic they cover, even if those experts have left the company. Should you do good, useful work on a high-demand topic, once you leave you will find your name removed from your work, occasionally replaced with new names who have no connection to the project at all.
