May 26, 2004

Blame Bush for MBA Enrollment Slump

Via Dane Carlson's blog, I bring you more evidence of the robust economic recovery underway in North America: Applications for enrollment in university MBA programs is down between 15 percent and 25 percent compared to this time last year, according to Economist magazine.

Kenneth Dunn, dean of Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business, says that applications for the full-time MBA programme, one of the country's best, are about 30% lower than this time last year. Allan Conway of the University of Calgary, and programme director of the MBA Roundtable, an industry body, estimates that applications this year for MBA programmes in America are down by between 15% and 25% on 2003.

Does that spell disaster? Not for top schools such as Tepper, which turn away far more applicants than they accept. Applications for MBA courses are counter-cyclical: they tend to rise when executive jobs are scarce and shrink when they are plentiful. This year's decline is a sign of the current economic boom, just as the 40% rise in applications to Tepper two years ago partly reflected hard times in the managerial job market.