Monday7 October 2019 ★ FINANCIAL TIMES 17WORK & CAREERS
Kimberley
Manning chose
Insead in France
over US business
schools, citing
the hostile
policies of
Donald Trump’s
administration
Dale Harper/FTS
ilicon Valley’s connections
to the global tech industry
madeStanford’s Graduate
School of Business ttractivea
to Kimberley Manning.
Yet the software engineer, whose
family had moved to Australia from
Zimbabwe, halted her application.
“I perceive the US to be increasingly
hostile to immigrants and people from
other cultures,” Ms Manning says.
The US is the birthplace of the MBA
and home to 51 of the top 100 business
schools in the FT’sglobal ranking list.
But the market is five years into a fall off
in demand, which has been spreading in
recent years to even the most well-re-
garded institutions, including tanford,S
Harvard Business School and Wharton.
This year, applications are down at all
but one of 10 of the highest ranked
schools in the FT’s analysis.Chicago
Booth School of Business as the excep-w
tion with applications up 3.4 per cent
this year. But its numbers are still down
overall on two years ago, as it suffered an
8.2 per cent drop in 2018.
The tightening of visa rules for over-
seas students and hostilityto immigra-
tion under Donald Trump’s admin-
istration are seen as the biggest problem
for MBA admissions teams.
Ms Manning, who has worked in
Brisbane-based fintech start-ups since
she graduated from the University of
Queensland five years ago, will be head-
ing for France, not the US, this January
to start her MBA at the Fontainebleau
campus of Insead.
“I actually don’t feel individually
targeted and would be eligible for a
privileged work visa,” she says. “But I
don’t want to move to a country with
such openly hostile policies.”
She is not alone in making such a deci-
sion. Stanford University’s Graduate
School of Business, as the FTreported
last month, has suffered a 6 per centfall in applications for its MBA. It cites
immigration worries and theUS trade
battle with China.
A buoyant jobs market has also raised
the opportunity cost for would-be appli-
cants of leaving employment and going
to business school full time; a situation
not helped by above-inflation rises in
tuition fees.
However, there is also a growing
perception that MBAs are no longer
the most cost effective way to get on in
a career and that other avenues now
exist to gain what used to be exclusive
benefits of a business education.
Gorick Ng s a research associate ati
Harvard Business School, where he
completed his MBA last year, and is
also a vocational counsellor for Harvard
undergraduate students. One of the
biggest challenges he sees to the MBA
are the “unclear benefits” of thequalification to those who are consider-
ing taking one: these possible MBA
students are precisely the kind of people
who could build a network and find a job
through other routes.
“I am not saying that a business
school is worthless,” Mr Ng says.
“I am grateful for the education, men-
tors and life-long friends I made at
HBS,” he says.
“But, by and large, most business
school aspirants I’ve encountered have
lukewarm motivations at best and ques-
tion whether they made the right deci-
sion long after they graduate.”
The most common reasons Harvard
students give for taking an MBA include
fear of missing out on what friends have
done, the desire toleave a job they hate,
the chance to find a husband or wife —
and simply because they can, having
taken the Graduate ManagementAdmission Test exam and scored highly,
according to Mr Ng.
But he cautions that these reasons are
not sufficient when measured against
the cost of studying for an MBA, which
can run to $250,000 at schools like HBS,
and the two years of full-time study
required to complete the degree.
He says: “Like a spork, an ugly hybrid
that is not pointy enough to be a fork or
round enough to be spoon, business
school is so many things to so many peo-
ple that it ends up being not much of
anything to anyone.”
The decline in MBA applications
in the US is a concern but far from being
a crisis for the highest ranked schools.
This year, for example, Stanford
received 7,342 applications, down from
7,797 in 2018, for only 417 places. Law-
rence Linker, a Singapore-based admis-
sions consultant at MBA Link, whichoffers advice to potential students, sees
the declining number of applications as
an opportunity because they increase
the odds of acceptance into top schools.
“For those with the right test scores
and the funds available there has never
been a better time to apply to business
school,” he says.
There have been other changes in the
business school applicants — an increas-
ing number of women.
According to Elissa Sangster, chief
executive of theForté Foundation,
which campaigns to raise the propor-
tion of women in business education,
there is a “slow but steady” rise in
female enrolment on MBA courses
globally.
A third of 52 member schools had
40 per cent or more women enrolled
for last year’s intake, up from just three
schools in 2014, Ms Sangster notes. “We
have seen a more intense focus on
enhancing gender diversity in the past
five years,” she says.
While Ms Manning may have decided
against applying, this year Stanford
Graduate School of Business has
its most gender balanced MBA intake,
with women making up 47 per cent
of the cohort, up 6 percentage points
on 2018.
This is the result of several years of
expanding efforts to encourage female
applicants, such as outreach events to
g r o u p s o f w o m e n o u t s i d e
the US and scholarship support for
women, according to Kirsten Moss,
assistant dean of MBA admissions and
financial aid. “Diversity, equity and
inclusion is a key priority for the GSB,”
she says.
Financial aid proved important for
Ms Manning who has been helped with
her MBA costs at Insead with a €20,
Forté Fellowship grant.
“The MBA makes sense to me because
I want to get an international experi-
ence, hopefully to do something in the
future to help my home country, Zimba-
bwe,” she says.
The biggest barrier to her peers
applying to business school is not
money but indifference to the MBA as
a method of getting on in their careers,
she says. “In the tech industry, few
people have an MBA.”There is an upside to falling MBA applications
As demand drops for top
US business schoolcourses, applicants stand a
better chance of getting in.ByJonathan Moules
‘We have
seen a more
intense
focus on
enhancing
gender
diversity
in the past
five years’
OCTOBER 7 2019 Section:Features Time: 6/10/2019- 17:21 User:nicola.davison Page Name:CAREERS2, Part,Page,Edition:EUR, 17, 1