Punch line: Top US business schools are reporting single and double digit applicant decline, making admission easier for candidates. After years of applicant increases, admissions offices explain the trend by tough competition – with cheaper and more convenient programs, and ramped up efforts from 2nd tier schools.
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Excerpted from businessweek.com’s, “At Top Business Schools, an MBA Application Drought.”
In the last few weeks, a handful of top business schools have reported single-digit, and in some cases double-digit, declines in applications for their full-time MBA classes, including most recently Columbia Business School and New York University’s Stern School of Business.
Full-time MBA applications have sunk at at least a dozen of the top 30 B-schools.
Among the schools that have reported declines are the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, the Yale School of Management and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business (down 3.5 percent, 9.5 percent, and 7 percent, respectively).
A handful of schools reported even steeper drops, including Michigan State University’s Broad College of Business, where applications fell 18 percent, and Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, with a significant dip of nearly 21 percent.
The decline in applications is attributed to increased competition from rival business schools and a plethora of available choices, including part-time and online programs.
Second-tier schools are working more aggressively to recruit top MBA candidates and entice them with hefty financial aid packages. “…employer sponsorship for full-time MBA programs is almost nonexistent, and doing an MBA part-time or online can be an attractive offer for some students, especially when there is funding available.
With a smaller pool of MBA applicants, getting an offer to a top business school has become slightly easier … To meet their target enrollment for this year’s incoming MBA class, schools had to work harder to ensure admitted students accepted their offers. For many of those schools, that extra push paid off. Yield was up at nine of the 13 schools on which information was available.
This year, competition was especially stiff for women, underrepresented minorities, and students from nontraditional work backgrounds, says Liz Riley Hargrove at Fuqua. “It was just a really competitive environment, and I think it impacted everybody’s yield this year,” she says.
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