September MBA Changes: Enrollment Drops To Scrapped Requirements

So let's start with Duke.

Fuqua's incoming class of 2028 is 359 students.

That's down 16% from last year, and it's the smallest class the school has enrolled since COVID.

Applications dropped by nearly a quarter from the record of just over 4,000 to roughly 3,000.

So, Caroline, when you see a drop like that at a program as strong as this, what is your impression?

I don't think it's going to be a banner year for the business school world.

It's a very substantial drop.

It really reflects a weakened market.

And I think we had anticipated that the numbers would be down for this class, although I thought that it was going to be driven more by the international drop than the domestic drop.

But it seems that both have declined, which is not much fun for business schools.

So In fact, the percentage of international students has gone up slightly, I think, but they do point out that that's not because of a growing cohort of international students.

It's just that international students in the international pool dropped at a lower rate than the domestic pool.

Now, dropping such a large amount does look pretty dramatic.

But when you look back You can see that there's always swings and roundabouts in application volume from year to year.

So it's not a dramatic difference from where the score was three years ago for the class of 2025.

I mean, it's still a bit down from there, but it's not such a dramatic difference.

So it looks more dramatic because it's coming off a peak from last year.

So that makes a difference.

quite a story when you look year on year, but your article helpfully publishes the data going back a few years, and you can see that last year was the largest volume of applications for a number of years, and that had gone up about 700 applications from two years previously.

So We know that the business school market is cyclical and the media likes to make a big story about it when application volumes go up and down.

And I expect we can look forward to some articles proclaiming the death of the MBA yet again, which happens every time there is a bit of a slump in application volume.

And then, surprise, surprise, a couple of years later, application volumes go up again.

Yeah.

So I don't think that this is a long-term slump, but I think it reflects a challenging market where, I mean, we can talk a bit more about the reasons why the market is down, but I think it's clear that there is a slump in application volume from international candidates, largely because of the change in visa policies and the difficult environment for USA.

I think to the point about the death of the NBA story, I think we must have already done at least one or two of those.