Business Schools Are Back

An anonymous reader shares a report: After years of decline, the number of applications to the country's two-year MBA programs rebounded in 2024 -- rising 19%, according to a survey by the Graduate Management Admission Council. The pandemic saw a blossoming of new ways to deliver an MBA, but tradition has reasserted itself: The biggest growth last year was in conventional two-year and part-time programs.

As in recent years, the great majority of student demand came from overseas, but applications from the US rose as well. While the two-year class graduating this spring included record levels of international students at many institutions, most of the top 20 schools as ranked by Bloomberg Businessweek welcomed classes last fall with a reduced international presence. Given the Trump administration's hostility to immigration, the graduating class of 2025 could prove to be the high-water mark for international MBA students in the US for at least the near future.

This more than anything else

[hdyoung]

Tells me we’re in at least a hiring downturn, and probably a recession.

Re:

[Fly Swatter]

The IT/programmer copy paste monkey bubble is finally bursting. Throwing armies of questionable programmers or developers at a problem just increases costs beyond hiring a few actual programmers that can program their way out of a paper bag without a google search.

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[alvinrod]

MBAs don't seem to know that though. Right now that troupe of baboons is excited about AI which can code monkey about as well and less expensively than existing code monkeys, but that just means that they'll try to throw more AI at the problems instead of adding more monkeys and keyboards hoping to brute force a solution that way. They believe that the MMM is a month where the monkeys develop mythical coding abilities and develop a solution on time and under budget. It's not so much a bubble bursting as it

Re: This more than anything else

[databasecowgirl]

Or a COVID one?
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How to create a recession:

[Gravis Zero]

Hire a bunch of dumbass MBAs that will cut so many jobs that halts productivity and nearly tanks the company and be sure to do that at every company. But hey, profits will be way up for a single quarter! Fools do not learn from their mistakes.

as sanity buffers

[Tablizer]

I find MBA's are useful when they protect techies from the BS of other MBA's. More people are like Ferengis than Vulcans, and Ferengis understand other Ferengis more than most Vulcans do.

So as buffers between bravado and logic, MBA's can be the best people for the job: they know the lingo and mantra of the other Ferengis.

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[alvinrod]

That's great and all, but if we got rid of the MBAs wouldn't that mean we don't need the other MBAs to protect us from the idiocy of the aforementioned MBAs. If you'd like you can pay me to not burn down your house. I'd certainly appreciate both the money and gratitude that you'd show me for my services.

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[nightflameauto]

That's great and all, but if we got rid of the MBAs wouldn't that mean we don't need the other MBAs to protect us from the idiocy of the aforementioned MBAs. If you'd like you can pay me to not burn down your house. I'd certainly appreciate both the money and gratitude that you'd show me for my services.

It's one of the ways MBAs tend to breed like rabbits in any company they start to infest. Every department head starts thinking they need an MBA "on their side" to fight off the other department adjacent MBAs and pretty soon you've got "project managers" and "team co-leads" scattered throughout the company that are actually MBAs. They're a self-sustaining parasite once they infest a company, and if they aren't recognized as such and stopped quickly, they soon become the dominant life-form within the managem

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[Tablizer]

That's what killed Yahoo, they had like 10 PHB's per one Dilbert.

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[radarskiy]

When your leadership is all MBAs you get Boeing.
When your leadership is no MBAs you get OpenAI.

Neither is desirable.

Re: How to create a recession:

[databasecowgirl]

Don't forget the critical step of hiring consultants to make up the backfill and improve KPI so investors think you're saving money and improving the price earnings ratio just like 1985...

Trump's golden age

[backslashdot]

We're in a golden age. Trust me.

Re: Trump's golden age

[databasecowgirl]

It seems only yesterday he was just an eccentric New York tycoon in a motorhome following RAGBRAI cyclists across Iowa pursuing his third or fourth vanity campaign for president sitting in a folding lawn chair telling the curious Belgian media that he was going to establish his family as the American monarchy and reunite America with the UK.

https://www.foxnews.com/politi... [foxnews.com]

How Many Foreign Students Will Accept?

[databasecowgirl]

Given the warnings America's former allies are giving their citizens regarding the perils of studying in America, and American embassies for that matter, I wonder what percentage of those foreign students who applied before Trump was sworn in will be on campus for orientation.

Never thought I'd see the day Chinese Universities seemed safer...

https://www.irishtimes.com/wor... [irishtimes.com]

Difference between the US and China

[Cyberax]

So China has more and more STEM students, and the US has more and more MBAs. Guess who's going to win?

Well, to be fair, ...

[Qbertino]

... China has (way) more of just about everything.

Re: Well, to be fair, ...

[sonoronos]

Lol nice

Re:

[bussdriver]

China graduates more STEM than all the USA college graduates combined. They are working to improve quality while we don't adopt hardly anything proven to improve things. On top of that, there is a limit to how far one can improve without human evolution and we may have peaked as the top levels everywhere converge upon a relative rounding error. Like the Olympics where it's ridiculous how close the everything gets and how picky one has to be to find the best one; who can win randomly due to a long list of

in defense of the MBA

[jbmartin6]

I know MBAs in general inherit a lot of derision here, and in many cases deserved. But, I have found the things I learned while getting my MBA have been extremely valuable during my career in IT. The ideas behind modern finance, accounting practices, organizational and human management, and even basic statistics (I was not a STEM major in undergraduate). There wasn't anything in the curriculum about strip mining business assets to benefit private equity ownership. Granted, this was 20 years ago. The things I learned have been a great help in understanding and thriving a career in corporate work. An MBA can be a great asset to almost any career, if used properly.

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[bussdriver]

So can a law degree! But that doesn't stop 90% of them from enshitification of the world. MBA is similar.

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[radarskiy]

90% of everyone is crap

well every one knows America was great

[Growlley]

when it was winning the MBA race and there was no MBA deficit,