World economy has been greatly affected due to Covid-19 but for graduate business education, Covid-19 set some extraordinary classroom strategies. Though the impacts of Covid 19 is still unknown for employment services and the number of MBA applications have seen an increase after a steady decay. Since March, Covid-19 affected the whole education system and the universities shut down their campus.
How did the Universities have a growth in MBA applications?
At the very beginning, the universities extended their admission deadlines to cope up with Covid-19. Next, the universities changed their admission requirements to apply some ease to the candidates. The change in admission requirements include the admission deadline extension and adding one more round for admission. It also included the acceptance of alternate tests.
All these cumulatively made the admission easier and more accessible to the candidates – as a result, the number of application increased. It is reported that there is an average increase of 22.6% in the MBA applications in 2020. In number there is almost 550 more applications in 2020 that too in 21 B-schools.
Now it is a fact that the class sizes increased for MBA enrollment 2020 in these universities. In some cases MBA application numbers increased with a record growth.
To be more specific, 12 B-Schools received an double digit MBA application increase in 2020. The table below holds the universities and percentage of increase in MBA applications in 2020.
| University name | % of Increase in MBA applications |
|---|---|
| USC Marshall School of Business | 66.4% |
| Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business | 63.4% |
| CMU Tepper School of Business | 60.2% |
| Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management | 53.8% |
| UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School | 43.8% |
According to the data found from M7 schools application, the graph below is prepared:
This picture shows that the universities accepted approximately 2000 more applications to MBA programs during 2020. Northwestern university seems to have a major increase in MBA applications. It is believed that all these are possible because of changes made during Covid-19 in application requirements.
The table below shows MBA application statistics of last 3 years which shows that the number of MBA applications down and it had a steady decay in last 3 years:
| School | 2016-2017 Apps | 2017-2018 Apps | 2018-2019 Apps |
|---|---|---|---|
| Northwestern (Kellogg) | 4,595 | 4,471 | 3,779 |
| Penn (Wharton) | 6,692 | 6,245 | 5,905 |
| Harvard Business School | 10,351 | 9,886 | 9,228 |
| MIT (Sloan) | 5,798 | 5,560 | 5,200 |
| Chicago (Booth) | 4,677 | 4,289 | 4,433 |
| Stanford GSB | 8,173 | 7,797 | 7,342 |
| Columbia Business School | 6,008 | 6,029 | 5,876 |
In 2020, the sudden growth in MBA application volume is affirmatively a blessing of Covid-19 to the US B-schools. In the table below, the MBA application statistics of last 4 years are given:
| School | 2016-2017 | 2017-2018 | 2018-2019 | 2019-2020 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| USC (Marshall) | 1,998 | 2,017 | 1,899 | 3,159 |
| Rice (Jones) | 813 | 587 | 625 | 1,021 |
| Carnegie Mellon (Tepper) | 1,833 | 1,656 | 1,307 | 2,094 |
| Northwestern (Kellogg) | 4,595 | 4,471 | 3,779 | 5,813 |
| UNC (Kenan-Flagler) | 2,151 | 1,758 | 1,323 | 1,903 |
| Virginia (Darden) | 2,736 | 2,279 | 2,190 | 3,016 |
| MIT (Sloan) | 5,798 | 5,560 | 5,200 | 6,350 |
| Cornell (Johnson) | 1,960 | 1,600 | 1,535 | 1,872 |
| Penn (Wharton) | 6,692 | 6,245 | 5,905 | 7,158 |
| Columbia Business School | 6,008 | 6,029 | 5,876 | 6,971 |
| Chicago (Booth) | 4,677 | 4,289 | 4,433 | 4,909 |
| Duke (Fuqua) | 3,796 | 3,557 | 3,036 | 3,356 |
| Dartmouth (Tuck) | 2,610 | 2,621 | 2,032 | 2,219 |
| Georgetown (McDonough) | 1,742 | 1,459 | 1,358 | 1,482 |
| Yale SOM | 4,098 | 3,785 | 3,194 | 3,453 |
| NYU (Stern) | 3,927 | 3,781 | 3,518 | 3,692 |
| UC-Berkeley (Haas) | 4,132 | 3,821 | 3,540 | 3,696 |
| Emory (Goizueta) | 1,146 | 1,348 | 1,022 | 1,067 |
| UCLA (Anderson) | 3,314 | 3,423 | 2,817 | 2,866 |
| Texas (McCombs) | 2,586 | 2,078 | 1,941 | 1,964 |
| Harvard Business School | 10,351 | 9,886 | 9,228 | 9,304 |
| Stanford GSB | 8,173 | 7,797 | 7,342 | 7,324 |
| Washington (Foster) | 1,038 | 934 | 836 | 833 |
| Indiana (Kelley) | 1,247 | 1,082 | 741 | 728 |
| Michigan (Ross) | 3,485 | 3,188 | 2,990 | 2,567 |
This MBA application decline seems to be paused in 2020. This shows that MBA application has increased in 2020, compared to last years and the reason behind this is the change in admission requirements. Therefore, it will not be wrong to claim that even after having a number of negative impacts, Covid-19 had positive impacts on the B-schools.
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