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Questionmarks for current buoyancy applications
Questionmarks hang over current buoyancy Applications by Della Bradshaw
Published: January 17 2003 Financial Times
Last year was undoubtedly a bumper year for business school applications, with both the number and the quality of applications rising. But every golden age eventually comes to an end.
Business schools now have two questions to answer: can the buoyancy continue, and if so for how long; and have they learnt the lessons of last year, when many schools were caught on the hop by the surge in applications?
Although it will take another month for most business schools to assess their applicant numbers for the incoming class of October 2003, it is clear there has been a levelling off of applications, if not a decrease. "I sense it will be down, by a little," predicts Rose Martinelli, director of admissions at the Wharton school at the University of Pennsylvania.
At Columbia, in New York, Jace Shinderman, associate dean, agrees. "I don't think any of us are going to see the surge in applications again, from people leaving dotcoms, for example."
Nonetheless, applications are still looking remarkably healthy compared with two or three years ago when a buoyant job market meant many managers felt they did not need an MBA to achieve rapid promotion.
That said, the abundance of applications has produced its own problems.
There is still the question of whether a surge in applications means a surge in the number of applicants, or whether each applicant is applying to more business schools.
It does not require a degree in mathematics to calculate that if students applied on average to three schools for entry in 2001 and five schools in 2002, then applications overall would go up by 67 per cent, though the number of applicants would remain static.
If last year was anything to go by, the answer would seem to be that a bit of both was happening.
"The applicant pool did go up with a lot of people who were in the process of being laid off or were afraid of being laid off," says Eric Weber, director of MBA programmes in Iese business school in Barcelona. "But there was also an increase in the number of people applying to more schools to make sure that they got into a school of choice."
This meant the very top schools were spoiled for choice when it came to selecting a class, but many lower-ranked schools found their yield rate - the percentage of students offered a place who joined - fell last year.
At Columbia in New York, for example, the yield rose from 69 per cent to 72 per cent, whereas at Iese the yield rate fell from just under 70 per cent to 66 per cent.
The difficulty for many schools was predicting who would accept a place, says Prof Weber. "The problems arose for schools that didn't manage their waiting list programmes. Usually things become clear in June but this year it was as late as July or early August before we knew what our class would look like."
Prof Weber says Iese took the airline industry approach to offers - over-admitting in the belief that some students would opt out. "We had such good applicants this year it would have been sad not to fill the class."
Other patterns have emerged. In the US, an increasing number of applications are being made early, says Ms Shinderman. She believes this front-loading of applications is partly caused by uncertainties in the job market specifically and in the world more generally. "When there are more options open, people can apply at the last minute."
The tight job market, combined with the threat of international terrorism, has thrown up other problems for MBA directors. The increasing globalisation of the business school industry, which has been one of the shaping forces over the past decade, has largely been put on hold.
With so many MBAs on the market, corporations are able to pick and choose and many are opting to choose those who are the easiest to employ - in the US this means US nationals, in Europe it means Europeans.
With national governments in both the US and Europe reconsidering the number of work visas they issue to foreign nationals, business schools are having increasing difficulties placing overseas students. The situation is particularly acute in the US, where the government has reduced the number of work visas for foreign nationals from 195,000 to 65,000 this year.
"If you're coming to business school [in the US] with the intent to work in the US long-term, you need to rethink your priorities," says Ms Martinelli. "We have to be very honest [with applicants] about what is the purpose of the MBA. It is about personal growth and overall training."
Looking further ahead there are clear signs that the applications pool will continue to decrease. Dave Wilson, president of the Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC), which administers the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) entry exam for business schools, says he has seen a softening in the number of applicants in the second half of 2002. This may reduce the number of applications for the class of 2004.
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发表于 2003-8-12 06:32:00
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