From the Web: MBA Applications Down

Business School No Longer the Thing to Do

The Smartening up of American continues. Having already smartened up and stopped applying to law schools, it appears that more Americans are now smartening up not applying to business school, either. Just how smart can America get?

At least this smart:

This year, application volume was down at 21 of the top 30 full-time MBA programs, according to data collected by Bloomberg Businessweek. The decline in applications is a trend that appears to be accelerating, with eight additional schools reporting declines in application volume this year over 2010.

Could it be that all those thousands upon thousands of bright young things who spent the past decade flocking to business schools were motivated not by love of learning, but by some tawdry financial considerations? Hey, just because the corporate and financial sectors are now completely vilified and you can’t get hired there anyhow is no reason to give up on your pure, untainted love of spreadsheets and marketing strategy case studies. Go to business school whether it will make you money or not! The passion for wearing suits and attending professional conferences is what really matters.

What else are you going to do? Occupy Wall Street?

From Gawker via [Businessweek via Inside Higher Ed.]

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Now I want to know:

• What percentage of MBAs in 2000 vs 2011 went into finance/ banking?
• Which subjects’ applications are increasing?

Looking for a Role Model

To figure out exactly what I should be studying, I’m going with “imitation is the highest form of flattery”.  I looked into the MBA rankings in Business Week (a US publication) The Financial Times (an English publication) and The Economist (largely international publication) to find a consensus on the best MBAs in the world.

The problem is no one can seem to agree.  There is some overlap, but these combined top ten lists have a total of not 10 shared schools, but 19.  Most of them appear only once, 7 twice, and only Harvard and Stanford make all three lists.  I gave points to each school for their rankings and arrived at the below table.  As I am not overly keen to have a purely American perspective, I will combine the core curricula of Harvard Business School (the overall and American winner) with INSEAD (international) and London Business School (UK) in the coming weeks.  It would be interesting to make contact with anyone who is attending these universities at the moment, so contacts appreciated.