In recent years, international students drove growth in admissions in MBA programs. However, 59 percent of U.S. full-time, two-year programs said they received more applications from U.S. students for the fall 2015 semester, according to the report.
Here are three reasons accounting for the increase in MBA applications.
1. “We are in a more normal period for demand for the MBA,” admissions consultants and school officials say. The MBA market is typically countercyclical, meaning a strong hiring market often leads to more people staying in the workforce and fewer seeking advanced degrees. The recent rise in MBA program applicants might be a sign that students who graduated from college at the beginning of the 2008 financial crisis are now seeking an MBA as a form of financial and psychological insurance, Jeremy Shinewald, president and founder of mbaMission, an admission consulting firm, told WSJ.
2. Some schools are eliminating application “pain points.” Some MBA programs, , have restricted their MBA applications so they are less cumbersome, according to the report. For example, Cambridge, Mass.-based MIT’s Sloan School of Management eliminated one of two required essays from the initial application. Some schools have also begun accepting the Graduate Record Examination, the general graduate-school admissions exam, in addition to or instead of the Graduate Management Admission Test. New Haven, Conn.-based Yale, Washington, D.C.-based Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business in Los Angeles said they received more GRE score submissions this year than last, according to the report.
3. More women are applying. More than half (51 percent) of MBA programs reported an increase in the number of female applicants, according to the report. Top schools such as Chicago-based Booth; Tuck School of Business at Hanover, N.H.-based Dartmouth; Evanston, Ill.-based Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management; and Durham, N.C.-based Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business now have MBA classes of which 40 percent are women.
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