MBA School Competition
Why do I compete to get into an MBA school?
Every year, more than 120,000 people get an MBA degree around the world. This is facilitated by the fact that just in the USA there are more than 1,000 institutions that award an MBA. You might wonder with that being a fact why we're talking about the need to compete to get into an MBA school. The reason is that the best schools are very hard to get into. Yet if you can get into the best schools it is really worth your while. Only a fraction of the people that get their MBA can get one from the top schools. The biggest of the top class schools - which are INSEAD and Harvard Business School - will only take about 900 full-time students every year. These statistics suggest that to get your MBA from a top-ranked school you have to first be able to get into them, and that is some competition.
For instance, Harvard Business School has 10 applicants each year to each one accepted. The Haas School of Business which is at the University of California at Berkeley has 19 applicants for each one accepted. The pool of talent from which these students are selected is very deep, which is why schools such as these take a lot of trouble and a lot of time selecting the students that can go there. The schools have a brand, and that brand depends on the quality of the students that leave there. This is why they are so picky. As one full-time student as a USA school said - "the application process at the best business schools is brutal because the competition you are up against is brutal".
Some of this competition is a result of the increased marketing efforts that business schools have made in the last few years. Then there has been the economic recession - both the real one and the perceived one. This means that many people have lost their jobs and many people think that they may be about to lose their job or the companies that they work for seems to be encouraging them to leave. This means that a lot of people have been entering the market for MBAs - particularly as they can use their severance pay from when they were made redundant. During a recession - the MBA is a good thing to do as you come out best prepared for an economic recovery.
So business schools have a dichotomy - when the economy goes down, applications go up. But then graduates have a problem getting a job which hurts the school's reputation. Luckily, MBA students tend to be incurable optimists. This is why you have to compete to get into an MBA school.