The numbers are in, and they’re not pretty.
MBA applications this past year plunged at 18 of the Top 20 U.S. business schools. Only two schools bucked the trend and not by very much: Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, which eked out less than a one percent gain over its year earlier number, and UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, where applications rose 3.3%.
Just outside the Top 20, only one other prominent school could report an increase: the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, which saw just a one percent uptick. But ten highly prominent MBA programs suffered double-digit declines, including the University of Texas’ McCombs School and the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business.
There are a couple of quick conclusions once you look at the data. One is that even the very best schools, including Harvard Business School, Stanford GSB and Wharton, could not overt the downturn. The so-called M7 schools, which include those three plus Booth, Kellogg, MIT Sloan, and Columbia, saw a combined 4.7% drop.
Another is that schools ranked from tenth to 25th suffered twice the decline in MBA applications in 2017-2018 than those in the Top Ten. All together, the Top Ten MBA programs experienced a 4.9% fall in applications; the next 15 ranked business schools saw their applications decline by 9.7%.
By now, the reasons for the decline are well known. International MBA candidates, scared off by anti-immigration talk in the U.S. and concern over their ability to get a work visa, are now applying to European and Asian MBA programs or just postponing their graduate education ambitions. The strong economy is keeping domestic applicants in their current jobs because there already are plenty of opportunities at work. And the sticker shock applicants may experience when they calculate the full costs of an MBA.
“There’s no doubt that immigration policy is having a negative impact on U.S. business schools,” says William Boulding, dean of Duke University’s Fuqua School and the new chair of GMAC. “You’ve seen growth in business schools outside the U.S., but the U.S. is losing the pipeline of talent. If we are going to maintain our reputation for having the best business schools in the world, we have to be able to attract the best and brightest in the world. Student mobility has become a big issue (see Fuqua Dean: Immigration Policy Hurting U.S. Business Schools).”
In some cases, however, the falloffs were exacerbated by other issues. At Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Management, the downturn was made worse by last August’s Hurricane Harvey which dumped 51 inches of rain on greater Houston in two days. The catastrophic storm shut down everything. “We were completely underwater,” recalls George Andrews, associate dean of degree programs for the Jones Graduate School of Business. “We had two weeks of cancelled classes and we missed two months of international travel for recruiting events internationally last fall.”
At first, the early declines were attributed to the disruption caused by Harvey. But then, the numbers continued to fall. “One hundred percent of our decline was international,” adds Andrews, “with applications from India and China down by 40%, give or take a percent. Our domestic applications were actually up. When we talked with other schools about the falloff, the political climate was something that got mentioned regularly.”
At UVA Darden, the downturn was fueled in part by the violent white supremacist protest in Charlottesville, Va., last August. As if international candidates needed another reason not to apply to a U.S. business school, the protest which made headlines all over the world didn’t help.
The post Who’s Hardest Hit In This Year’s MBA App Slump appeared first on Poets&Quants.
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