Don’t Believe The Wall Street Journal: MBA Apps Are Up Again & It’s Been Super Competitive To Get In
Maria |
September 28, 2021

The Wall Street Journal recently published the article “MBA Applications at Some of the Country’s Best Colleges Fell this Year” talking about how application volumes at many of the top MBA programs are significantly down from last year’s volumes. In this week’s episode of Business Casual, John, Caroline and Maria dig into this claim and what the story behind the numbers REALLY is (hint – the headline is clearly sensationalist and misleading). 

The team also discusses John’s article about the MBA Admissions Consulting Firm that claims to have the “most former M7 adcoms” on its team. Is this something that really matters when it comes to MBA Admissions Consulting? Should “adcom” experience be a requirement for you when selecting an MBA Admissions coach? And what really constitutes “adcom experience” anyway? (Like many things, this can be subjective!) Listen below to hear what the team has to say. 

Episode Transcript

[00:00:07.270] – John

Well, hello, everyone. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. Welcome to Business Casual, our weekly podcast. We have two very sexy topics to discuss today with my co hosts, Caroline Diarte. Edwards, Maria Wich Vila. Caroline, of course, is the former admissions director at INSEAD and a co founder of Fortuna Admissions, one of the leading MBA consulting firms in the market. And Maria is the inventor of ApplicantLab, which allows applicants to kind of do it yourself approach, gaining guidance along each step of the way to help you enhance your odds of acceptance. And Maria graduated from that school in Boston that we all know and that many people apply to. We want to talk about two things. One is a Wall Street Journal story that appeared under the headline MBA Applications at Some of the Country’s Best Colleges Fell this Year. The story begins with some of the best known MBA programs in the US registered precipitous drops or sluggish interests from prospective candidates this year following a 2020 admission cycle in which applications soared. That’s one thing we want to take on. The second thing we want to take on is a story I’m working on, actually today.

 

[00:01:28.670] – John

And we’ll have appeared by the time this comes out. And it’s about an MBA admissions consulting firm which claims to have more M7 admission officials on its consulting team than any other firm in the world and why it thinks that’s a good thing. So we want to talk about what kind of backgrounds do MBA admission consultants bring to the game and doesn’t really matter if you’re going to get a terrific coaching experience from them, no matter what their background is. Let’s tackle the Wall Street Journal story first. We know that applications at the Kellogg School of Business dropped by 20%, which was pretty dramatic last year, and at Columbia Business School by less dramatic percentage 6%. But we also know that those are the only two schools that have so far reported in this current time period that have had declines. Every other school has had an increase. Michigan Ross, in fact, had an increase of over 50%. Many schools from Cornell to Yale and others have had a twelve plus percent increase. And MIT just announced another increase. In other words, the only two schools so far that are highly prominent in the US that have had a decline are Kellogg and Colombia.

 

[00:02:49.410] – John

And to put a little context around that, if you look at what happened to Kellogg the previous year, their applications were up by something like 54%. Now how come? It’s because they expanded the time in which you could apply to the school because of the pandemic, and they actually announced that they would waive standardized tests. So in came a flood of applicants. Now judged against that period is a more normal application cycle where they did not expand the deadlines, where they ended their policy of considering waivers of candidates and so naturally the application volume fell by 20%. That was a pretty dramatic fall, but it’s a total anomaly. And yet you look at the headline on that Wall Street Journal, you look at the lead on that story, and everything else is behind a paywall. And guess what? You think that there’s fewer people interested in getting an MBA today. You think that schools are hard up to find applicants. Caroline, what do you make of this?

 

[00:03:56.000] – Caroline

It’s a showing about the headline, as you say, and that they’ve exaggerated this. And we were discussing this last week when we talked about the rankings, that publishers often like to dramatize things for the sake of attracting eyeballs and sort of finding a story that isn’t there. And I think that this is the prime case of that. We’re trying to build traffic and create a story where there isn’t really one. So look, I think that last year was definitely a banner year for business schools. Volume has stabilized, but I don’t see a drop in the market. We see very strong demand for the new season. I did actually talk to a journalist for that article. One of the points that I made is that the top schools have a very consistent pipeline. And even though there are fluctuations year to year, yes, there may be a surge because of economic downturn, pandemic, etcetera. And it is cyclical. Despite those variations, the top schools have an incredibly strong presence pipeline of outstanding candidates coming through year in, year out. And the media often like to make a story about doom and gloom for business schools. It’s all going to hell in a handbasket.

 

[00:05:18.590] – Caroline

People don’t need MBAs any longer. Declining demand. It’s just not happening. We don’t see that there may be greater fluctuations in demand for schools that are further down the pecking order, but the top schools have consistent demand coming through, and we don’t see that changing.

 

[00:05:37.220] – John

That’s true. And the facts are just they’re obvious. Duke of 12.1%. Michigan of 55.9%. Cornell up 12.4. Yale up 12.3. Dartmouth, tuck up 11.0. Mit up 12.0. How in the world you could actually justify coming out with the story saying that things are bad, applications are down? I have no idea. Maria, you don’t trust what the media says even though you had a career in media.

 

[00:06:08.450] – Caroline

That’s why he doesn’t trust them.

 

[00:06:10.650] – Maria

I don’t trust anybody. John. No, you know what’s sort of annoying about this analysis, this quote unquote analysis is that it’s really not an apples to apples comparison. I mean, 2020 was such a crazy year, not just in MBA admissions, but you might have noticed that it was also a slightly crazy year on other facets of life as well. And so to say something like, well, Kellogg’s applications are down. That’s like saying, well, during the pandemic, I placed a lot of online grocery orders. And after the pandemic, I placed a lot fewer of them. And it’s like, well, does that mean that the grocery business is dying? No, it’s just because things are different now. And so I think I actually admittedly my coffee is still kicking in. But I Googled actually what was the 2019 application number to Kellogg? And so it might be down 20% versus last year. But if I did this correctly in my little Handy Dandy Excel sheet, they’re actually up by three and a half percent compared to 2019. So if this were really a doom and gloom thing, we would be seeing this very consistent downward trend even from pre pandemic levels.

 

[00:07:14.460] – Maria

So it’s really not fair to put up this pandemic number, which was crazy because as we’ve discussed in the past, Kellogg extended their deadlines. Kellogg said you don’t need a GMAT anymore, I believe. And guys, correct me if I’m wrong, because like I said, the coffee hasn’t kicked in yet. I think Kellogg actually even said, if we rejected you in an earlier round, you can come back and reapply. Maybe we’ll change our minds, right? So of course a bunch of rejected people were playing. So it’s not at all an apples to apples. It wasn’t an apples to apples comparison. So I get it, man. You need to generate the clicks. If you just say things are going swimmingly, not much change to report, then no one’s going to click on it. And John, you’re the one who was a journalist. Maybe your editor gets mad at you and they walk in and all grumpy and they’re like, nobody’s clicking on your article. Shape up, Byrne.

 

[00:08:05.090] – John

Luckily, I was a journalist.

 

[00:08:09.630] – Maria

You got out.

 

[00:08:12.390] – John

And to your point about catalog, okay, even after the 20% client, the application volume at the school was higher than any Kellogg admissions cycle since 2014. Okay, so of course that wasn’t in the story either. But it just goes to show and we’ve addressed this issue before. Why are there so many people who are so eager to, in one way or another, diminished the MBA? Yeah, I know, it’s the most popular graduate degree in America, and people tend to love success, but they also tend to envy and hate success in people and organizations and everything. When you’re number one, you’re always a target. But why is it so consistent that everyone wants to be a bearer of bad news when it comes to the NBA?

 

[00:09:03.870] – Maria

Maria, why do you think sodonfreude? It’s schadenfreude, right? I mean, everyone loves nobody. The only thing people love more than an underdog story is a fall from Grace story. And I wonder, I actually have not yet clicked on this article, but oftentimes the journalists who love writing these stories themselves don’t have MBAs. And so it’s really great. It’s extra great to be on the outside criticizing things. It’s like when people are like, oh, the Royal family, let’s throw rocks at them. And it’s like, well, is it because you really don’t like them or is it because you’re a little jealous that you’re not in the Royal family. Or maybe I don’t know if that analogy holds up, but you know what I mean. It’s like, well, wait a minute. Do you have an NBA? Like, if you did, you probably would think that it was a pretty valuable experience and maybe you would be a little bit less likely to throw rocks at it. Aka, jealous much.

 

[00:09:51.870] – John

Yeah. And Maria, you have an MBA. Caroline. You have an MBA, Caroline. I bet you are. There are times and people say, hey, do you really think that MBA was worth it? Don’t you regret having gone?

 

[00:10:02.560] – Caroline

Well, they don’t say that to me so often these days, given my profession, I think they can assume they know that the answer to that question. But people do sometimes say to me talk about the bad publicity that these articles generate and the latest tech Tyson has said, you don’t need to go to business school. So people are going to stop going to business school and demand is going to decrease. And the schools aren’t worried about that. They have an incredibly talented pipeline of people coming through who understand the value of the experience they’re going to get and how it’s going to help them in the future. So regardless of the latest headlines and what journalists jump on because somebody has said something critical, it’s like the Elon Musk thing the other day.

 

[00:10:56.150] 

Right.

 

[00:10:56.650] – Caroline

I mean, fundamentally, it doesn’t change anything about the business school experience and what you’re going to get out of it. And candidates know that and recruiters know that.

 

[00:11:06.870] – John

That is really true. If anything, I would think that what makes the job of selecting talent at these business schools so difficult is that there are so many highly skilled people who deserve to be admitted and so many of them are turned down. It’s the opposite problem. In other words, there’s a surplus of quality applicants that cannot be served by the limited supply of seats in the classroom. So I would think the greater worry at most business schools is, are we rejecting someone who potentially could be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or could be the next big entrepreneur who’s going to shape the way things are done in his or her industry, unless about, oh, our applications might be down by two or three or four or 5%, or in the case of Kellogg 20%, which still happens to be higher than any other application volume they’ve had since 2014. I’m sure that that’s true. Now, when you were at INSEAD, you certainly didn’t worry about application volume.

 

[00:12:18.760] – Caroline

No. And when I took the role, I spent some time looking back through the statistics, and clearly there was a cycle that is correlated with the economic cycle.

 

[00:12:30.250] 

Yes.

 

[00:12:31.000] – Caroline

But what I also observed was that there’s an incredibly consistent pipeline of strong candidates coming through. And when there’s a surge of applications, for example, if there’s an economic downturn. That increased volume is not always of the same quality as that consistent volume that’s coming through year by year. So therefore, the fluctuations sometimes it’s not necessarily terribly helpful because you get people throwing their head into the ring for the wrong reasons. Right. And they’re not necessarily the best qualified candidates and the best prepared candidates. So it’s somewhat misleading to say that a huge surge in application volume is a great thing for business schools because actually they don’t necessarily need all of that additional volume. And they may be dealing with more candidates who are less well prepared. The top schools have a very loyal base. The pipeline coming through year by year, regardless of the cycle. And all those headlines are just a distraction, really. And it doesn’t really say much about actually what is going on fundamentally.

 

[00:13:38.310] – John

Absolutely. So I want to turn to another topic because it’s ever present in my mind because I’m writing about this today. So a few days ago, one of your competitors and this goes to both Maria and Caroline sent me an analysis of their rival firms and how they compare with them on the basis of one metric. How many M7 admission officers actually work for them as consultants. And this firm, it’s Stacey Blackman consulting by their own count, says they have 21 former members of M7 admissions offices, including the trio from Harvard Business School and Stanford School of Business, on their team. And we know that when Fortuna was founded, its differentiation in the market, in fact, was that Fortuna put together a team of people who had worked in ad compositions at some of the best schools, including INSEAD, Wharton, you even had as advisors, former ADCOMS at, I believe, Berkeley and Chicago booth. So my question is, do you really have to have experience, inside experience, privilege, information of being on the inside of the admissions process, having read thousands of applications, maybe interviewed thousands of students as well, having sat in dozens or hundreds of admissions committee meetings where there were conversations and discussions, if not debates about giving candidates and whether they were worthy enough to be accepted.

 

[00:15:17.880] – John

Is that a prerequisite to being a good admissions consultant? Now, Maria, you should take on this because you didn’t have ADCOM experience, correct?

 

[00:15:29.990] – Maria

I do not have official Adcom experience. I am always very transparent about that. I was an admissions volunteer for a student organization that was trying to bring more applicants to campus. So at HBS, the way how it works. So different schools have different levels of student involvement in the admissions office. At some schools, the students are reading files and assessing them. At some schools, the students are doing interviews. At HBS, the students are really not involved in the admissions process. Most people who are students at HBS who do anything with the admissions office, are they’re section admissions reps? And that might sound very exciting to an outsider, but all it is is you’re a tour guide, right? Whenever there’s a visitor who’s going to come sitting on your class, you go to the admissions office, you make sure they’re happy. You do small talk, and you walk them to the classroom. So I sometimes see people at various firms say, like, oh, my name is so and so. And I was a Harvard admissions rep. And it’s like, I know what that means. That means you were a tour guide. There are also people in the Harvard admissions office, for example, who might just be processing some of the files or who might be in the interviews.

 

[00:16:39.270] – Maria

They might be the notetakers in the interviews, and yet they can still, those people can credibly say, I worked in the admissions office, but did you really like if you were just taking notes during the interview? I’m sure that you have some experience and some insight, but it’s probably not super valuable. Now, my role was a little bit different in that I was working with. There was specifically an admissions officer devoted to diversity recruitment. And so I was working with him to try to figure out how do we increase the pipeline. And when we talk about increasing the pipeline, we want a quality pipeline. And from my conversations with him, I was able to glean. What does Harvard define as a quality pipeline? Number one. And then number two, I think that you just have to have a lot of experience doing this, right. So when I started in this field for years, I did not charge anything because I was like, I’m learning. If you’re willing to learn along with me while I help you, why should I charge for that? I would not charge money for my advice. I would not be able to sleep at night.

 

[00:17:38.110] – Maria

I can’t. It was too Catholic of an upbringing for me to be able to charge money for something if I didn’t think it had value. So I think there are also other ways to get a lot of information, like those of us who are members of AIGAC, which is the Association of Independent Graduate Admissions Consultants. I think that’s what that stands for.

 

[00:17:56.610] – Caroline

Thank you, Carol.

 

[00:17:57.430] – Maria

Carol is giving me the thumbs up over the Zoom. Thank you. I just call it AGAIC, but I don’t think about what it means anyway. Every year we have a conference with admissions officers. We sit in rooms with admissions officers. We do exercises where we discuss hypothetical made up candidates with admissions officers. And so we say to them, what would you accept this hypothetical candidate with a 720 and the 3.2 GPA over this other candidate with a seven, eight? We get to learn how they think. It’s not as good as having been sitting there for years and years reading thousands. But you do start to glean information. We visit the schools every year. You start to glean information. You see who gets in and who doesn’t, you see which essays tend to work and which ones don’t. And so after you do this for several years, as long as you have the experience and you start to be able to do pattern matching, I think that’s key. And I think the other thing is also the ability to communicate. Right. There might be people out there who fundamentally have a great understanding of what a business school is looking for.

 

[00:18:58.400] – Maria

But if they don’t know how to help somebody else convey that or communicate that effectively, if they are a bad writer, for example, then they’re not going to be helpful as an admissions consultant. So I think it helps. I’m not going to pretend that it doesn’t. But I also think that there are other ways to gain that expertise.

 

[00:19:14.650] – John

That’s true. And I interviewed another person who owns a firm who does not have many former adcoms on the staff. And here’s what he said. Who would you hire a film critic or a director to get behind the camera of your film? A food critic or a chef to prepare a meal for your most critical professional dinner? Are those questions actually beside the point?

 

[00:19:40.140] – Caroline

Caroline, my perspective on this was and I started for Tuna, as you know, with Mash and June a few years back, after having worked with several years and having observed that more and more of our students were working with counselors. And after looking into this, I realized that a lot of the people that they were working with and paying for a lot of money didn’t know very much at all about integrity and what it took to get in. And when I looked at it a little bit more deeply, I discovered that a lot of people who are sort of set up shop as advisors were people who had graduated from a school, and then someone had approached them and said, oh, I’d really like to go to that school as well. Can you help me? And they sort of started advising someone. It’s snowball from there and sort of fallen into it that way. And I knew from having studied on my MBA and then gone back two years later in the admissions office that as a student, I knew nothing about how admissions worked. And it was a whole new world being behind the closed doors of admissions.

 

[00:20:45.890] – Caroline

And as a student and Alum, you might even not really know exactly why you got it, never mind why anyone else would get it right. It’s not necessarily something you’re exposed to when you attend the school. So that was where we were coming from. We saw that there was a gap in the market where there were a lot of counselors out there who are not giving very good advice. And I also knew that from the fact that sometimes those coaches would approach us with questions that were incredibly basic. Right. I mean, they hadn’t even read the website. So it was concerning that people were paying them large sums of money for their advice. And therefore we set up fortunate with the idea of bringing together a team of people who had that insider expertise. And I completely agree that the insider expertise alone is not sufficient to me. There are sort of three different elements to the skills that a good admissions coach should bring to the table. So one part of it is that school insight and understanding the admissions process and the DNA of the school and who is a good fit for that school and helping people understand where they should apply and where would be a good fit for them and helping them navigate through the process and understand what is expected of them and how they can best put their best foot forward in the process.

 

[00:22:16.270] – Caroline

And then the second part is just being a good coach right there’s universal coaching skills of being a good listener, being able to hold up a mirror to someone and help them understand what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are, help them think about their future and what they want to do in the short term, in the medium term, and how they see their career evolving over time and really spending time to get to know them and give them some good advice on what they have achieved to date and what the skills are that they’ve developed. Because that’s sometimes not so obvious for someone who is in their mid twentys and they are working alongside people who have very similar profile. And it might be difficult for them to sort of figure out what is unique about my story. And often a coach who’s coming to their profiles with a fresh set of eyes and understand their full history can really see the things that stand out in a way that is very difficult sometimes for the individuals too, because it’s difficult to see the forest for the trees. Right. So there’s that sort of coaching element and then there’s being able to shape the story and help somebody articulate their story effectively and get that down on paper and help them coach them for the interviews and so on.

 

[00:23:43.670] – Caroline

So there’s the sort of the more content oriented piece as well. So I think all of those three elements are very important. And when we hire people at Fortuna, we’re not just looking at the school expertise, we’re very much looking. And we put people through their paces before we hire them to screen for those other elements as well. So all of those three pieces are super important. And I agree with Maria. Over time you can build up that knowledge of the schools through diligence and experience. We can certainly build that up. Unfortunately, too many people don’t take time to do that I think so. I think one of the tricky things for candidates these days is just the process can be a bit overwhelming because there is so much information out there.

 

[00:24:34.500] 

Right.

 

[00:24:34.840] – Caroline

When I applied to business school, I ordered the brochure. I filled out a form. There wasn’t this overwhelming wealth of information online with a lot of good advice and a lot of bad advice. And then how is the candidate supposed to know which is rich? Right. And so one of the things that we do is help people sort of navigate through that process and figure out what it is that they need to know. What are the good information sources help dispel some of the myths and take some of the anxiety out of the process. And having the experience from being behind the closed doors of admissions can give us some confidence in the advice that we’re giving people that we’re not guessing, that we actually can say with some authority how the schools evaluate candidates, what they like to see, what they don’t like to see. And through our experience of both being in the schools and now working with hundreds and hundreds of candidates, that Fortune, how an individual’s profile will stand up in comparison to other people in the pool. And we stay in touch with the schools as well. That’s very important to us to maintain, to keep our knowledge up to date.

 

[00:25:51.980] – Caroline

And I am in regular contact with my former colleagues that is here, as are many of my colleagues at Fortune, with their former colleagues. And so we do our best to maintain those relationships and stay on top of things so that our knowledge is always current.

 

[00:26:10.090] – John

All good points. And actually, in many ways, I think, like everything in life, it comes down to practice. Right. So a personal story. I recently went to a teaching hospital to have my eyes examined. I’m getting to that age when things get a little blurry here and there. And I do have cataracts. They’re not severe, but I had a surgeon look at them at the teaching hospital, and she was terrific. I loved her. And then I asked, well, how many of these procedures have you done? And she said, 25. And I said, no offense, but I want someone who’s done thousands of these. And I think the point here that I’m trying to make is that regardless of whether or not you have inside information about a particular school’s admissions processes, regardless of how far removed you are from the school and how perishable that information might be, the number of people you’ve worked with over the years and helping them with their applications and all those applications that you’ve seen and how they differ from each other and all the outcomes that you’ve seen those students get is what could make you an incredibly valuable and helpful counselor to others.

 

[00:27:25.320] – John

I’m sure both of you would agree with that. Now, Caroline, would you have someone operate on your eyes who’s done 25 cataract surgeries?

 

[00:27:35.770] – Caroline

Yeah. Well, it does sound rather early stage.

 

[00:27:40.990] – John

You’re so diplomatic. Maria, how about you?

 

[00:27:43.740] – Maria

That’s the best words. Not me, John. I want the person to operate on my eyes who ran admissions for the medical school. Oh, that’s who I want operating.

 

[00:27:59.910] – John

All right, there you have it. I don’t know if we came up with one way or the other. I think there’s both ways. You can be a great coach whether or not you have ADCOM experience. And if you do have ADCOM experience, obviously you’ve seen a lot and you see how subtle differences and nuances can make a difference in a candidacy and you see how different people in admissions committee room react to it but that may not be necessary to make you an excellent coach. In fact, I’m willing to bet on it that there are coaches out there who are as good or better than those who have admissions experience and vice versa. So there’s no one rule to apply and it may just be some differentiation. But if you don’t look for those other points that Caroline mentioned, a good listener someone who is empathetic to the process, someone who keeps in touch with the schools and knows their cultures. Someone who knows what these different schools are looking for, even though your own experience may be for one school, if you’re not doing all those other things, you’re not going to be any good at the job of helping others get into their dream school.

 

[00:29:04.360] – John

All right, Maria, Caroline, thank you, as always. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. You’ve been listening to Business Casual.

 

Business School News | General | P&Q Podcast "Business Casual"
Don’t Believe The Wall Street Journal: MBA Apps Are Up Again & It’s Been Super Competitive To Get In
Maria |
September 28, 2021

Full Episode Transcript:

John Byrne: [00:00:00] Hello everyone. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. Welcome to Business Casual, our weekly podcast. We want to talk about international students. Schools are now reporting that a good number of their international recruits who were admitted to programs this fall haven’t been able to show up or have changed their mind.

At the University of Illinois, the school, the Gies College of Businesses, lost about 200 international students in its Master of Finance and Master of Business Analytics programs causing a $7 million hit. To their budget at UC Davis Graduate School of Management, 40 students didn’t show up who were admitted, and that’s resulting in two and a half to $3 million hit on their budget this year.

Both of these things have occurred before the announcement of a hundred thousand dollars tax on H one B Visa. Which will make it more difficult for many employers [00:01:00] to hire international students and keep them in the US for an extended period of time. And we’re getting the new class reports of the, of the new cohorts of students who’ve arrived on campus in the fall of this year.

And Carnegie Mellon is. Down 30% for their international cohort over the past two years. UCLA Anderson School is down 25% over the past two years, and schools are preparing for the worst because of the H one B Visa decision which could affect future employment. Caroline and Maria, my cohosts are in the market helping people get into the best schools in the world.

And Caroline, what do you think?

Caroline Diarte-Edwards: Yeah, definitely seeing concern among international candidates and people holding off on applying for the US schools. So it’s really a shame. I think the international schools, particularly the schools like Inea and London Business School and the other top.[00:02:00]

International European programs will benefit, they’ll get talent that might otherwise have come to the us, which is great for those schools. And I’m very fond of those schools, but it is sad as from the US perspective for sure. On the other hand, you could also take the perspective that.

If you do have options for your career post MBA that don’t require that you absolutely have to stay in the US as an international candidate, then now could be a very good time to apply, right? Because definitely application volume will be down and schools will be perhaps. More open to candidates that might otherwise have been waitlisted or rejected in the past.

For some candidates, this is actually a fantastic opportunity to get into a top school, but from, for, at least from the school’s perspective, it is a shame because, I’ve experienced firsthand the value of a very internationally diverse classroom and the value that brings with a [00:03:00] diversity of perspectives that enriches the learning experience so much for everybody.

Enriches the debate and bring so much to the academic experience as well as the the network and the social experience. So it’s everybody’s loss, right?

John Byrne: Very true.

Caroline Diarte-Edwards: And I think it’s a very myopic perspective that the US government takes that. There needs to be a more of a refocus at US educational institutions on the domestic market because those international applicants bring a lot to the domestic students in enriching their learning and enriching their network.

Of course bring a huge value to the US economy when they stay. So there are very impressive statistics on the value of immigrants to the US economy. So Indian immigrants, for example, are only about one and a half percent of the US population, but they have founded to date about 8% of all the tech startups in the us.[00:04:00]

And for sure some of that top talent from India will now not come to the us. They will go to perhaps they will stay at the great schools that we’ve talked about in India, or they will go to other international schools. So for sure it will be a loss to the us learning experience and to the US economy.

John Byrne: Maria, you run applicant lab which is a platform that helps applicants get into highly selective schools. And many of the people who use your product are international students. What are you seeing?

Maria Wich-Vila: Everything Caroline is saying concern is think a delicate way to put it.

And I think it’s because as the more affordable provider in the market, I tend to get the applicants who maybe they don’t have the family business to fall back on. Maybe they don’t have, large sources of income elsewhere in their lives. And so I think the concern is very real and very merited, right?

I can’t. In good faith, tell someone, if they [00:05:00] really start, sit down and do the math and start to do, run the numbers, if they just assume that things are going to stay as is. And this is the big caveat that I’m, I want to get to in a second, but if we assume that things stay as is and if someone really is from a lower income tier from Nepal or India or some of the other countries that I work with, yeah, maybe sit down and do that math and think about, okay, if I do have to come back to Nepal afterwards, how will I pay back that loan? There, there is though some good news. Even if we assume that things stay status quo, which I hope, and I’m pretty, I’m I think it’s, I’m cautiously optimistic that they won’t.

But there are other markets as well. So I’ve had a lot of candidates, or former clients, I should say, graduate from business school, not be able to get jobs in certain in countries and then. Being able to move to Dubai. Dubai for some reason, has started attracting a ton of candidates, primarily from South Asia but from other parts of the world who might be having trouble getting some of those work permits.

You could do worse than live in, Dubai’s not perfect, but [00:06:00] you could also do worse than live in Dubai, right? The salaries are pretty high. The standard of living, if you have a white collar job there is, it’s not the worst outcome. So it’s not I can’t stay in the us. That’s it.

There’s no other it’s not a binary of, it’s either the US or it’s nothing. And then I think the second point is I, we’ve just seen. So many things, let’s take something from a different facet of policy. The tariffs, right? The tariffs were announced and the markets went crazy, and in the months that have followed, oh, actually, here’s the tariff, but this one company, their products aren’t gonna be subject to the tariff.

And then there’s this other company that maybe they’re not gonna have to pay the same tariff. And I can’t help but wonder if some of these. Some of these very large companies that are getting tariff exemptions, their ability to lobby for. The H one B, maybe lowering of the H one B fee. If they’ve been able to successfully lobby tariffs, they might be success, able to successfully lobby against these, true, these [00:07:00] visa fees.

And a lot of these big companies, these big tech companies are in fact some of the largest employers of post MBA talent in the us. So I am cautiously optimistic that. This could be, hopefully right now it’s the big, the flash and storm and the, the making, the big splash, right?

Everything’s about showmanship and making the big splash. And maybe in the aftermath of the storm, that initial PR media storm, maybe the reality will start to calm down a little bit. Yeah, the other good news is that if you’re applying now, that means you would enroll in 2026. You would, if it, if you’re talking about the US two year program, you would graduate in 2028.

At that point, who knows what might happen. I like to think that what we have seen so far in terms of the Visa policies, hopefully. Roughly the floor about as bad as it can get. I think if they start implementing a similar thing to OPT, that could be the same thing. But if we just assume that okay, right now what’s been announced is that these foreign students all have to do, you can’t stay here, you have to [00:08:00] go someplace else.

It, we assume that’s like the initial negotiating position. It’s just gonna chip, it’s just gonna get, it’s got nowhere else to go. It’s even worse. So we’ve, we now have two and a half years roughly until. People applying now would have to really implement, or be really affected by this in a.

In a pragmatic and tangible way. And so that’s why I’m hoping that the little chipping away and the chipping away things will start to get a little bit better and a little bit better and a little bit better like we’ve seen with other facets of policy. Didn’t like a bunch of the CDC employees that were all fired under Doge didn’t more than half of them I think were recently rehired.

Yes. Back again true. Whatever you think of the policy, it seems like some of the policies are. Being slowly walked back. And so I think if you. If you’ve got an adventurous spirit, I, and by the way, if you apply now, sorry. I know I keep going, but I like, if you apply now, let’s say you get accepted, you don’t have to show up until August of 2026.

So that will give you [00:09:00] time, like definitely. Apply now and see what happens between now and August of 2026 to make the decision to not apply now, because you’re rightfully scared. I’m not blaming anyone, but to not apply now, maybe by maybe six months from now he’ll be like, ha, just kidding. I’m doubling the number of H one Bs.

Yeah, we have no idea what’s gonna happen. So things are So give yourself that optionality.

John Byrne: Yeah. And things are so uncertain that could very well happen because, one day at tariffs are on one country the next day they’re not one day they’re pausing the ab the interviews for student visas, the.

Say they’re not there’s litigation all over the place, challenging many of the presidential actions that have been taken that have put them in limbo despite all the headlines. So it’s, it, there’s more uncertainty than there is certainty about any of these things. And as you point out, you, if you [00:10:00] did apply this year, the odds are gonna be in your favor if you’re an international student, frankly, because there is no question.

That international applicant volume will be down at all the top schools in the us, which means that to maintain some semblance of a global class. Admission directors are going to have to dig a little bit deeper into their international applicant pools to select candidates. In a way, if you play the long term and in the BA, in, in many graduate degrees or long term bet, I think you’re gonna be.

Oddly better off. And it may even be that the schools will really even go out of their way to help international students in ways that they haven’t in the past because of these actions in Washington. And what do I mean by that? Just a more welcoming reception than the already welcoming reception you would get hiring immigration lawyers and people that can help you.

If in fact there is a [00:11:00] challenge of one kind or another. I think the takeaway is not to be discouraged and throw up your hands to say, ah, I always dreamed of coming to the United States and getting an MBA or a graduate degree in business. Use this as an opportunity to actually increase your odds of getting into a better school with the understanding that when you get out there, probably most likely be an administration change and a change in these policies if they even get completely adopted as Maria points out.

Wouldn’t you think that’s the best strategy, Caroline?

Caroline Diarte-Edwards: Yes, I agree. I think that it’s good to take a longer term perspective because it is such a long timeline, right? If you’re applying to a top two year program as you say, you’re gonna be coming out of the program at the end of the Trump presidency and things may look very different.

And Maria rightly points out that. Everything is very volatile, right? So one thing gets announced and the next week it [00:12:00] gets rolled back, right? They’ve done so many things where they’ve realized, oh, actually that was a really bad idea after all. So

They’ve changed things. So things may not it might, may not turn out to be as bad as we fear.

And then I would also encourage candidates. To apply to the US schools, but why not hedge your bets and apply to an international program as well? Agreed in a time of uncertainty. As Maria said, create options for yourself. And so I would encourage candidates to apply to the top US programs, but also apply to top international programs as well and see what offers you get.

And then you can make a decision. As Maria said, it will be closer to the time when you would be starting the program and there may be more clarity about the situation in the US and what your options are in international markets as well. So I think that given the current circumstances, a good strategy is to hedge your bets and apply more widely than you might [00:13:00] have otherwise done.

John Byrne: Plan Bs are good. Let me just say business schools in the US have for years advised international students that those should have a plan B in the event that they can’t get with a US company. The other thing to, to keep in mind incidentally, in terms of MBA employment is that most of the companies.

That basically employ the lion’s share of MBAs are all global concerns. So you can be hired here and if there’s any challenge in getting you employed here in the us you can simply start in an office outside the United States with a hope of coming back when things clear up. So that is also another important thing to keep in mind.

And I’ll just say this. Despite whatever messaging you’re reading in your local newspapers or on your streaming platforms or television stations about how immigrants may not be welcome in the us that’s not true at all. Universities are diverse places. Welcoming. [00:14:00] Embracing loving the diversity of their students and particularly those from different cultures and backgrounds that enrich the educational experience.

There is no Dean that I’ve ever encountered who said they want fewer international students. It’s the exact opposite. They’re putting out message after message, telling people that they’re still welcome and wanted. Needed in the classroom. Now, Maria, in the past we’ve seen applicants who try to say, okay, can I time my application and my enrollment in a program to what I think might be the next recession?

And we know that in recessions applications go way. In part because some people lose the opportunity to gain advancement in a recession. Some people get unemployed. Some people just realize, hey, a recession is a good time to take a time out and get a new educational credential, which may allow me to do things I otherwise can’t do.[00:15:00]

But it’s almost impossible to time a recession and I’m imagining it’s impossible to time what’s going on here now.

Maria Wich-Vila: Yeah. I mean if we could all time, when everyone’s been talking about a stock market crash that to, not to bring another disparate topic in, but like everyone’s been talking about, it’s a bubble.

It’s a bubble. I’ve been hearing ’cause a bubble for a year and a half. True. Yeah, you can’t time or ask, for example, ask the people who enrolled in business school, like who got into business school in 2020. Like there’s always gonna be these external shocks. We can try to predict a recession, but who knows if it’s going to happen?

Who knows if there’s going to be some sort of virus or the opposite of a virus. Maybe there’ll be a virus that helps us all live healthily forever. Who knows? There’s so much uncertainty out there that who knows what to do. So I think. I think yeah, have that optionality. I think go ahead and apply.

Now if there is a recession though, which everyone seems to think is coming at some point, at that point, it’s going to be harder to get accepted. And as Caroline has pointed out, so rightfully, if other international, high quality international students are [00:16:00] spooked by the current H one B talk, now is your chance.

International candidate. Jump in there, shoot your shot like you might be able to get into a school, assuming of course that you’re qualified, but. You might have a lot less competition now than you normally will, so this could be a golden opportunity for you. And one final as one thing that I wanted to point out was that I was thinking, okay, Maria, let’s say that, you just said that maybe there’s gonna be walk back of some of these and there’s gonna be, maybe he’s gonna change.

But even if there isn’t a change, right? Let’s think about this. The companies themselves are gonna have, and you started to alluded to this John, when you mentioned that a lot of them are global concerns. They’re gonna have now a two year window in which to say. Okay. We know that we’re not gonna keep these people in the states, so let’s open a huge office in Vancouver.

Let’s open a brand, an enormous new office in Toronto. Whatever that is. Because I was thinking back to over the summer when it looked like maybe a bunch of international students wouldn’t be able to get any student visa at all. And I know that some of the business schools we’re looking [00:17:00] at, do we rent out some space in Toronto and do Zoom classes?

We do a hybrid. What we did during COVID. I’ve heard that. I think Rice, I was actually having dinner last night with a dear friend who was, say he’s from Texas and he was saying that Rice has some sort of a campus in Paris and that they are leaning really heavily on their global campuses around the world to still be able to service these students who had gotten accepted.

So things like that, like if. Even if our sort of my very cautious and perhaps irrational optimism turns out to not be true, let’s say the things get, the OPT is banished and all, everyone is banished and it’s the worst case scenario. Again, there’s gonna be two and a half years for these companies. To quickly find, okay, fine, we’re gonna open up an office in Mexico City and we’re gonna pay people really well and we’re gonna what?

Whatever that is. ’cause they’re, the companies are still gonna want the talent, right? Just because the political administration doesn’t want the global talent in the country. That doesn’t mean that the country’s employers don’t want that talent. They [00:18:00] want that talent, they want that intellect, they want that energy and that drive to make their companies better and to make more money.

So they have a very strong incentive to not only be lobbying for these. Visa changes to go away, but if they don’t go away, they have a very strong incentive to come up with some way to provide, to provide those incomes and to provide those perks and some sort of a compromise type of situation.

So again I think if you’re applying now, if you’re going in with eyes wide open, shoot your shot. That’s my, I would absolutely tell people to to try that.

John Byrne: Yeah, I totally agree. And, generally this is my rule of thumb and Maria and Caroline, you may or may not agree with this, at the top MBA programs, they’re so selective that the people who apply to them generally are very self-selecting group.

So I always say that roughly 80% of the school’s applicant pool. Is qualified to actually get accepted, get in, do [00:19:00] well, and land a good job. And yet we know that at Stanford, the acceptance rate is 6%, that Harvard is 12 Wharton and Columbia is, a little under 20 or so. So there are a lot of really good candidates who aren’t getting in.

Which leads me to this, if you’re an international student who thinks okay, so these US schools just might dip a little more into the domestic pool to make up for the offset of international candidates. As it turns out, there is a little notice. Clause in the big beautiful tax bill that was passed here under Trump that places severe limits on federal loans for graduate students.

Now, the current grad plus loan program allows students to borrow up to the cost of their graduate programs. That comes to an end in July of next year. After that, grad students borrowing will literally be capped at [00:20:00] 20,500 bucks a year with a lifetime graduate school loan limit of a hundred thousand. That’s a big deal because, at the top MBA programs it’s not on typical.

For a student to borrow over a hundred thousand dollars easily. And so these caps are also going to affect domestic enrollment. So again, that, that contributes to your ability as an international candidate to get in both. The likely decline in competition not only from internationals but also from domestic students here, interestingly enough, that Bill, which passed has different limits for a professional graduate degree, but the bill basically says that only med school and law school qualify as professional degrees and not business school.

That’s another wacky thing that’s happened that will affect. Domestic enrollment as well. So I, I side with Maria and [00:21:00] Caroline to me the advice is, look long term. Don’t be affected overly affected by the change in policies in the US or the climate here. Understand that if you apply now and you matriculate next year and you graduate in two years after that you’re gonna be facing probably a very different environment.

Also understand the odds are in your in your favor, in getting into a highly selective, really good program in this coming year. And know that, while people too often calculate the value of an MBA based on short term variables, like what’s my starting salary gonna be? What is my sign-on bonus?

The truth is the MBA has enduring value over your lifetime. So it rewards you over your entire career and not just for the first or second years. And you can’t go wrong by graduating into a network of helpful and supportive people from a great school and [00:22:00] receiving a great education. So I think bottom line, we’re telling you apply.

Don’t get convinced by your colleagues or anyone else that this is a bad time to come to the us. Opportunity. Some of the best opportunity come comes when people perceive there to be significant challenges. And I think this is really true with business school. We hope we convinced you to come and try and hedge your batts too, as Caroline noted.

I think that’s really super important to have a plan B when you apply and toss a bunch of apps to the European schools which have excellent superb world class MBA programs and real international cohorts. 90% of the students not from the countries where the schools reside. Toss a bunch of them in your mix for your target schools to give you these different options at the end of the day.

This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. Thanks for listening.

Maria

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