We’re just full of hot air these days.
First we have the audacity to publish our own Top 19 list of MBA programs (it’s “Top 19″ because EssaySnark).
Then we’ve been spouting out predictions of how the schools will change their essay questions this year (see individual school pages for a selection of these).
Now we’re going to make a projection for the entire coming admissions season:
And that is, we predict that applications will go DOWN for 2014-’15.
That should be (slightly) reassuring to all of you Brave Supplicants who are planning to apply this year. Fewer apps means less competition!
Actually it doesn’t. Not necessarily.
When apps go up, we hear over and over again from admissions directors that quality does not necessarily follow. Even if you hear that schools are receiving more apps – which Harvard did again this past year – it shouldn’t actually bother you in the slightest. We see what many people phone in to the schools. A good chunk of apps are very low quality. Harvard and other schools like to say that the vast majority of their candidates are qualified – meaning, GMAT and GPA and work experience in range – but that doesn’t mean that they’re competitive. So don’t let any of our little prognastications phase you one way or another.
Going back to our Punxsutawney Phil moment: We’re going to go out on a limb and make a super-early prediction for 2014-’15 that MBA application volumes at the top schools will dip down a bit — only because these numbers are looking pretty darned lofty to us.
You may have observed in our HBS Class Profile comparison post the other day that not much changed this past year in terms of the aggregate of the incoming class. The GMAT range shifted slightly to the right, but that’s about it that we can see.
Beyond that, the only other marginal change was that app volumes went up but not by huge numbers – from 9315 to 9543. HBS saw a bigger tick-up in both of the two years prior. For this just-finished season, this increase looks about par for the course. Every bschool we’ve talked to so far has mentioned that they also saw an increase in apps this past year.
But let’s put that in perspective:
Almost 10,000 apps to Harvard? That’s just like, wow.
Not that that’s a record. They broke the 10,000 mark for the Class of 2004, if memory serves. That would’ve been the application cycle in 2001-’02. Hmmm, what was happening that year? Oh yeah, a major collapse in the economy (the dot-com bust). Hopefully we don’t have another anytime soon.
This past year’s volume at Harvard is actually 20 apps more than they we saw in 2009-’10, which was the peak caused from the most recent recession (2008 housing bust). The economy looks nothing like it did then; still not fully “recovered” but things aren’t doing so bad for a lot of people. Why this increasing demand in the MBA? Typically it’s fully counter-cyclical to the economy.
Things are looking up, yet people are still flocking to bschool.
And everyone wants to go to Harvard.