Enrollment for MBAs holds steady

Although recent data show that the economic recession has not had a huge impact on enrollment in graduate business programs, for some, the recession is the perfect opportunity to go back to school.

While MBA enrollment at Wharton has increased, that increase has not been drastic.

The class of 2009 — which included mostly students who began at Wharton in 2007 — had 789 students. By contrast, the class of 2010 has 822 and the class of 2011 has 862.

Other top business schools — such as Harvard Business School, Stanford Graduate School of Business, the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management — also have experienced increases in their MBA enrollment, according to Wharton’s director of MBA Admissions and Financial Aid Jonathan Cutler.

“I don’t think there is a relationship between enrollment and economy,” said Cutler.

The number of applications increased by 2 percent, and MBAs were selected from a “very strong applicant pool,” he said. As the “quality of applications had improved,” more students were admitted.

He added that factors like Wharton’s name value, its hiring new faculty and superb facilities also influence students’ decisions to apply and enroll at top business education institutions like Wharton.

Davis Smith, a first-year MBA/MA candidate at the Lauder Institute, agreed that the state of the economy is not a commanding issue when considering business school enrollment.

The “application process is long and takes months of planning,” he said. The first round of applications were due around the same time as the market crash last fall, and it would have been “hardly enough time to throw together a strong application and take the GMAT.”

But Educational Consultant and Admissions Strategist Steven Goodman disagreed.

“What affects their decision is how good their job is, how good their job that they’re going to have is and their likelihood to advance in their companies,” Goodman explained. “If students don’t have other serious opportunities then it makes sense to go to business school now.”

First-year MBA student Caroline Kim worked in investment banking before returning to school. She described the work as “volatile,” since banking jobs’ “bonuses and other discretionary compensations depend on the state of the economy.”

There also tends to be “less activity and less interesting work” in the troubled financial industry, she added.

Because the opportunity cost of attending business school now is lower than it was two or three years ago when the economy was sound, Kim chose to enroll at Wharton.

But the economy didn’t affect her decision to go, Kim said. “It was just the matter of when I was going to go.”

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