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Education Technology

Elite MBA Programs Report Steep Drop In Applications (wsj.com) 95

Posted by BeauHD from the downward-spiral dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Wall Street Journal: Applications to some of America's most elite business schools fell at a steeper rate this year, as universities struggled to attract international students amid changes to immigration policies and political tensions between the U.S. and China. The declines affected some of the nation's top-rated programs, with Harvard University, Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, among others, all reporting larger year-over-year drops in business-school applications. Some, such as Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business, posted double-digit percentage declines.

Overall, applications to American M.B.A. programs fell for the fifth straight year, according to new data from the nonprofit Graduate Management Admission Council, an association of business schools that administers the GMAT admissions test. In the latest academic cycle ended this spring, U.S. business schools received 135,096 applications for programs including the traditional master of business administration degree, down 9.1% from the prior year, according to an annual survey. Last year applications for U.S. business programs were down 7%.
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Elite MBA Programs Report Steep Drop In Applications More

Elite MBA Programs Report Steep Drop In Applications

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  • MBA (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I for one believe MBA is the most overrated and equally worthless degree. // b.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      I for one believe MBA is the most overrated and equally worthless degree.

      I partly disagree. They can shield you from other MBA's in other departments or companies IF they do their job right. They manage the bullshit so you don't have to. They are like a Bullshit Shield to keep other Ferengi away.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by whitroth ( 9367 )

      No, no, it's not overrated and worthless, it's been destroying US corporations since the eighties, though it helped multi-millionaires become billionaires. How is that worthless?

      And for the sarcasm-impaired, if I ran a business, no one with an MBA would be qualified for cleaning the toilets.

  • Not a terrible thing (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Tuition at many of these places is egregious. Think $10k or more per class. Higher education needs a serious washout and reformation. Make higher ed and health affordable -- as it was not that long ago -- and you've dramatically improved quality of life for tens of millions of Americans.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      Tuition at many of these places is egregious.

      Yeah. But who pays it? I've worked for a couple of Fortune 500 outfits that will fund continuing education MBAs for employees who have identified 'executive potential' (inset PHB joke here). It's deductible as a business expense. And it's a drop in the bucket compared to the company jets, yachts and private resorts they already write off. So, dropping six figures on a group of people is no big deal.

      Now this kind of demand drives up the price of an MBA at all of the big name institutions. If you think drop

    • Too many MBAs running the schools.

  • If Only This Reflected a Change in Business Style (Score:5, Insightful)

    by X!0mbarg ( 470366 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @09:09AM (#59313920)

    Some of us certainly wish that this reflected a move away from the current business model of training management using the 2-step process of Bleeding them of All Traces of Humanity and Teaching them Accounting.

    We have all seen the results of that management system, and it's ongoing affect on the employed population, as well as the economy.

    Maybe the system needs to turn back to employee satisfaction, a fair, livable wage, and decent benefits to support health of mind, body and finances?

    I guess I'm the only one dreaming of such a system....

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Good news tag (Score:5, Funny)

    by onyxruby ( 118189 ) <onyxruby&comcast,net> on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @09:10AM (#59313930)

    If Slashdot doesn't have a good news tag, it really ought to create one now. I think it's a pretty safe bet to say that most people would consider fewer MBA's to be good news. Even if we haven't yet achieved fewer MBA's, we have at least achieved less interest in the MBA. One could well argue that this is well worth celebrating. How many perfectly good companies have been ruined by MBA's?

    • All of them?

    • Re:Good news tag (Score:4, Insightful)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @09:28AM (#59314030) Homepage

      What is happening is reality is setting in. An MBA in a so called elite school is worth no more than any other recognised school. An MBA at the so called elite school, is only of value to the children of the so called elite establishment, snooty snoot snoot, paper on the wall in a frame. For anyone else, they just wasted their money it provides them zero advantage. Reality is the MBA is one of the easiest degrees to earn, even easier than liberal arts programs. A elite school is only worth bragging rights for the spawn of the elite establishment, for the rest, so what who are you related to and how much are they worth, you fancy elite degree entirely worthless to them.

      The so called elite schools are not so elite when they are forced to drop standards to accommodate the spawn of the rich, greedy, ugly, smart and poor, greedy, pretty, stupid (so twice as greedy and not so smart, no so pretty, and wealth now divided). Yeah the elite schools had to make their courses a whole lot less elite and a whole lot easier (they are only elite in terms of exclusivity and not in quality of education they have fallen a long, long way).

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • You make an interesting point

      • Re:Good news tag (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @11:05AM (#59314430)

        Well, one thing an elite MBA lets you do is skip the whole "worker" phase of your career. It's like being a commissioned officer in the military...you are given management authority over people who are doing a job you have no idea about simply because "you can lead." I've seen people who have had no work experience outside of summer jobs here and there end up middle managers in large companies with no experience whatsoever.

        The ones who come straight from school into management consulting are especially amusing. Companies pay millions to their consultants who haven't done anything more complex than shift supervisor at Starbucks...yet they dress them up in identical suits and fly them around the country delivering PowerPoint presentations.

        • It's like being a commissioned officer in the military...you are given management authority over people who are doing a job you have no idea about simply because "you can lead." I've seen people who have had no work experience outside of summer jobs here and there end up middle managers in large companies with no experience whatsoever.

          And they then proceed to fail upward. Utterly fuck up a string of technology projects? You're the new regional manager!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

          All sounds perfectly reasonable. I can't imagine how that could possibly go wrong.

      • Re:Good news tag (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ravenscar ( 1662985 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @01:45PM (#59315218)

        You're overly discounting the worth of the network the is developed at one of these schools. I used to work at large financial services firm. One of the guys with whom I worked had graduate degrees from Duke and Northwestern. He could quickly get you in the door just about anywhere because he had contacts from school in high positions at all the major players. Need a meeting with Black Rock or Goldman or some Hedge Fund? No problem, this guy had an in. This person was a smart guy and he deserved his role, but his network certainly helped keep his status high in the eyes of the CEO.

  • They could offer more opportunities to Americans. I get the feeling they don't want to stoop to associating with regular Americans though.

  • MBA (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Managerial Bean-counter Asshole

  • Demand For Professional Corporate Saboteurs Declines

    Strange because they are highly effective. ;)

  • MBAs can be useful (Score:3)

    by mwfischer ( 1919758 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @09:23AM (#59314012) Journal

    Having a MBA teaches you how to be an executive at a large company and to lead a business in the 1990s - 2000s.

    What is useful to running a business now? Coding with a buddy and being bought by *large company name here*

  • Who wants to go to a school with hundreds of aunt Beckie offspring?

  • Maybe let in some people from the USA then? Wow, the idea of it. No, they are not perfect. Yes, they have umpf!
    • There is a major problem with your plan. First, those terrible people from outside the US which you speak of should be called by the terrible name which properly describes them: immigrants. Do you realize that some of these immigrants (OMG!!!) have non-white skin!!! (gasp!)

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Perl-Pusher ( 555592 )
        An immigrant comes to a country to live and applies for permanent residency status and eventually citizenship. Not just go to school, my daughter took language courses in Bejing, didn't make her an immigrant . Apparently your so focused on color that you can't understand a simple concept and have to throw race in to every discussion.
        • I definitely should have included a sarcasm tag. I thought it was obvious enough. I guess there are some viewpoints that cannot be parodied without being taken seriously.

  • Cook vs. Jobs (Score:4, Insightful)

    by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @09:47AM (#59314104) Homepage Journal

    People who are inspired by Tim Cook should go to MBA school. People who are inspired by Jobs should learn about entrepreneurship.

    There's a "get a job or be a Jobs" joke in their somewhere (a little less on the Grandiose Narcissism, though).

  • It's all about taxes - not immigration. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sonoronos ( 610381 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @09:54AM (#59314138)

    Up until 2017, US college and terminal graduate degree programs (such as MBAs) were a huge tax shelter.

    The IRS terminated the tuition and fees deduction in 2016 (for both US citizens and resident aliens). With elite MBA program tuition at 65k+ / year, almost everyone except the most wealthy EMBA students qualified for the 80k MAGI cap.

    The opportunity cost for MBA programs is now massive. Instead of having to only account for making up a fraction of tuition not offset by tax deductions and summer work (or EMBA pay), elite MBA students now have to absorb $160-200k in cash loss. Even with "average" post-MBA incomes of $135-150k, it would take 5-10 years in earnings to absorb that loss.

    It's all about taxes, and not about immigration policy, which is what the media seems to blame everything on.

  • if anybody should understand supply and demand, it's these phukkers
  • Good they can lower their prices and attract more American students.

  • They probably found that the degree is worthless (Score:4, Informative)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @10:32AM (#59314304)

    Or rather prospective employers may slowly wise up to the little problem that MBA graduates often produce more problems than they solve, i.e. often have negative productivity.

    That does take more than a view to the next quarter. But once you take a multi-year view and investigate where all these problems with delayed and failed projects, incompetent coders and system administrators, complex processes, too many meetings, short-sighted optimization, etc. come from, you quite often find some MBAs that do not understand the business aspects of what they are managing and have a distinctive a lack of effective strategic thinking.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Paul Graham [paulgraham.com] had similar words on why Yahoo failed despite having an early start compared to Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.

      Quote:

      Hacker culture often seems kind of irresponsible. That's why people proposing to destroy it use phrases like "adult supervision." That was the phrase they used at Yahoo. But there are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example.

      I should note that startups have different management needs than say a bank. Early Amazon was buggy as hell, but quality didn't matter as

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Some (reasonable) irresponsibility combined with actual skills and permission to use them can work well in some environments. I think Yahoo list anybody with real skills pretty fast.

  • People aren't seeing the big payoff (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ErichTheRed ( 39327 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @10:57AM (#59314396)

    Living near NYC, I see a lot of the products of these elite programs working in management consulting or investment banking. Just like everywhere else, the opportunity to get obscenely rich just by getting into one of these programs and graduating is drying up. Investment bankers still make buckets of money but there are fewer associate positions available for all the graduates. The top 5 MBA programs still hand them out as graduation presents, but you have to consider the return on investment. If you're not at a top 5 school, the other elite schools charge just as much.

    This is the same thing that's happening with the legal profession. Getting a law degree used to be a guaranteed ticket to a life of luxury. Now, only the top 10% of the classes of the top 14 law schools are being offered associate positions in big law firms. Go anywhere else for law school, and you've wasted your money because the big firms won't consider you and the big firms are the only ones paying massive salaries.

    The only truly safe profession that's a guaranteed ticket to Easy Street is medicine. If you can get in, you'll never be outsourced, your income will never go down and your job will never be automated. MBAs used to be a good investment but not anymore...there's not enough of a guarantee attached.

    • I agree that medicine has the best chance of a ticket to Easy Street, but there's 8 years minimum of med school and residency after a baccalaureate, with no guarantee of acceptance to med school, or matching in residency (especially for those attending school outside the US). However, outsourcing (aka medical tourism) is a possibility with some procedures, and some specialties like radiology may be outsourced to AI in the not-too distant future.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

        Take something that's not useless for your bachelors in case you don't get into med school. Once you're in, it's usually 4-5 years until you're qualified as a general practitioner, which certainly qualifies as easy street. In terms of residencies, my understanding, at least in Canada, is that there is no problem with every candidate getting a slot somewhere, it's just that the poorer ones may not like what they match with.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bigpat ( 158134 )

      I disagree that medicine "will never be automated". Much of what doctors do is to take in a bunch of symptoms and come up with a diagnosis. I would much prefer that could be done in an automated and reproducible way without relying on faulty humans. I know of too many horror stories of people getting sent home from the ER because whichever doctor got 2 hours sleep in the last 48 hours decided their magnificent sleep deprived brain was capable of making a 5 second diagnosis without additional tests.

    • Re:People aren't seeing the big payoff (Score:5, Interesting)

      by nealric ( 3647765 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @01:54PM (#59315246)

      Lawyer who previously worked in biglaw here (now F500 in-house). Your 10% cutoff is greatly exaggerated. With the possible exception of the time period between 2009-10:

      Anybody with a pulse who goes to Yale or Stanford will get a biglaw job if they want it (many want to be professors and/or SCOTUS clerks). Just about anybody at Harvard or Columbia who has even the very slightest amount of social skills will get a biglaw job (as in, can at least shake someone's hand and look them in the eye). At the next rung down, (NYU/Penn/Duke, etc.), you just need to not be bottom 1/3 in the class and have a modicum of social skills. At the lower T14 (Cornell/Georgetown/Northwestern) same as above but cutoff is more like bottom 1/2. Granted, the lower down you go, the firm quality will decrease too. You still need to be top 10% or so at a place like Columbia to have a chance at Wachtell (the most prestigious and highest paying biglaw firm).

      And even Medicine wouldn't necessarily be truly safe. You will always have a job, but the U.S. is a bit of an outlier for physician salaries due to policy choices we've made. Those policy choices could change, and salaries could revert to the much lower salaries common in Europe (for example).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      and your job will never be automated.

      Mmm. I don't know about that. Medicine is the world's most successful guild. Too successful. The cost of healthcare is rising to unsustainable rates just as the capability of non-physician systems (both human, like nurses, and machines) is catching up and surpassing.

  • Shortcut (Score:5, Funny)

    by Tablizer ( 95088 ) on Wednesday October 16, 2019 @11:21AM (#59314510) Journal

    Who needs to spend all that money when they can just read this. [amazon.com]

  • Lately there seems to be more interest about PMP or Quality certs than MBAs. Although maybe that's just because they're cheaper to support your staff in getting.

  • A quick google search for "corporate buzzword generator" will reveal a myriad of free services that serve the same function.

    It's sad, but technology marches on.

  • It's interesting to me that everybody is commenting as if fewer applications is the same thing as fewer MBAs. That's not even remotely true, ESPECIALLY for the elite schools...

    HARVARD
    For the 2021 MBA class, Harvard received 9,228 applications and enrolled 938.
    For the 2015 MBA class, Harvard received 9,686 applications and enrolled (about*) 932.

    STANFORD
    For the 2021 MBA class, Stanford received 7,342 applications and enrolled 417.
    For the 2017 MBA class, Stanford received 7,899 applications and enrolled 407.

    MI

  • Yea, With starbucks hiring down MBA have not place to work.

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