Exploring the evolving landscape of MBA programs, this episode brings to light significant changes at two leading institutions. Duke’s Fuqua School of Business has enrolled its smallest MBA class since the pandemic, while the iconic first-year trip abroad at Harvard Business School has been discontinued. Pola Lem, joined by Caroline Diarte Edwards and Maria Wich-Vila, delves into how international uncertainty and visa challenges are reshaping not just admissions, but the entire MBA experience.

Caroline discusses the drop in application volume at Fuqua, noting that while there’s a cyclical pattern in the business school market, the recent decline is particularly steep. Despite Fuqua admitting more students, the acceptance rate increased to 33%, revealing a decrease in yield to 35%. This indicates a broader industry issue, reflecting both domestic and international applicant hesitations, primarily driven by uncertain visa policies and an unpredictable economic environment.

Maria highlights the analytical acumen of Fuqua’s admissions team in anticipating yield fluctuations. However, she notes the persistent uncertainty among applicants, driven by concerns over future career outcomes. As business schools navigate these shifts, maintaining a robust understanding of market dynamics becomes crucial, offering strategic insights for aspiring MBA students who must weigh the macroeconomic conditions alongside their educational ambitions.

Episode Transcript

Note: This transcript was generated by AI and may contain minor inaccuracies.

[00:00:02] – Pola

2 top US business schools made it into Poets& Quants Most Read this week. Duke’s Fuqua School just enrolled its smallest MBA class since the pandemic, and Harvard Business School just killed off one of its most iconic traditions, the first-year trip abroad. 2 different stories, but when you dig deeper, there’s a common thread here: visas. Today, we’re asking what happens when international uncertainty starts reshaping not just who gets in, but also what the MBA experience even looks like once you’re there. I’m Pola Lem, and I’m joined as usual by my trusty co-hosts, Caroline Diarte Edwards at Fortuna Admissions and Maria Wich-Vila at ApplicantLab. So let’s get to it. 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?

[00:01:22] – Caroline

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 3 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 than I— because it’s coming off a peak from last year.

[00:02:40] – Caroline

So that makes a 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 2 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. 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 US.

[00:03:59] – Pola

I think to the point about the death of the MBA story. I think we must have already done at least one or two of those, so I’m sure there will be more to come.

[00:04:09] – Caroline

It comes around every 5 years like clockwork.

[00:04:12] – Pola

Yeah. So speaking, kind of looking at these numbers a bit more closely, the bit that jumped out at me was actually that Fuqua actually admitted more students than the year before. So they had just over 1,000 offers this year, Up from 862, uh, which pushed up acceptance rates to 33%, and that’s the highest that they’ve posted in the 7 years that Poets and Quants has been tracking this. But on the flip side, their yield went down to 35% from 49% the year before. So Maria, When a school as strong as this has to extend way more offers just to protect its class size and the yield still drops, what does that tell you about the applicant pool right now?

[00:05:11] – Maria

Well, the first thing it tells me is that the Duke Admissions Office, their analytics game is on point. Somehow they clearly were able to estimate or figure out that yield was going to go down this year, and as a result, they they accepted more people accordingly. So, you know, right off the bat to me, I’m like, that’s really impressive to me. What does the drop in yield tell me about the applicant pool? I think it just reflects a tremendous amount of uncertainty right now. I think that because of, you know, the application numbers and the career numbers go hand in hand, right? So when people are applying to business school, they look very closely at, okay, well, how did the recent graduating class fare in the careers space, and every business school has been struggling. You know, every business school has been having some challenges sometimes with placing people in just this current AI economic uncertainty cycle that we’re in. And so, I think that that also impacts yield. So, I think there’s international student uncertainty yield issue. And then, even with domestic candidates, I think there’s just a general uncertainty for all candidates of when I graduate at the end of the 2 years and I’ve got $200,000 of debt, What is that career landscape going to look like for me?

[00:06:26] – Maria

Am I going to be able to recoup that investment? And for the 20-ish years that I’ve been doing this, my answer has always been, don’t worry, it’s going to work itself out. And now it’s, it’s a little bit— it’s not necessarily so obvious that it’s going to work out. I, I think it will work out, but it will just be harder. I think candidates are going to have to be more resourceful in terms of their job hunt, more flexible, more open to other paths. So I would suspect that that uncertainty is impacting yield, and I would actually expect to see numbers like this across lots of business schools. I don’t think this is a Duke-specific issue.

[00:07:01] – Pola

Well, at Duke, the senior associate dean, Robert Swinney, made a point of saying that the smaller class size this year was, he said, was not a target the school set for itself. Caroline, do you believe schools when they frame this shrinking class size as quality over quantity, or is that just, you know, the public facing what you tell applicants and the rest of the world?

[00:07:30] – Caroline

I think that schools do genuinely care about maintaining the quality, and that’s really critical. I mean, they could play a short-term game of just maximizing class size and therefore maintaining their revenue, but it doesn’t do them any favors because if people see that the quality has slipped, then It will potentially have implications then for application volume later on, their ability to attract high-quality candidates, and then potentially issues with recruitment and job placement and recruiter feedback as well. So, a school like Fuqua is in this for the long game. They, I don’t think they want to damage their brand in any way by admitting candidates who are below par. And so they would prefer to contract the class size a little bit. then admit people who they wouldn’t have admitted otherwise. And when you look at the class profile, I mean, it looks like at least on the academic metrics that it is a strong class, right? So, I mean, it’s possible that they maximized a little bit more for academic metrics because those are so visible, but I would imagine that this class has just the same quality as previous classes. And it’s also, I mean, we’ve talked about this before, but when there are swings and roundabouts in application volume, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it makes it easier or more difficult to get into a school because actually what happens is when there’s a big increase in application volume, some of that increase is from candidates who are more speculative and therefore not necessarily the best quality candidates.

[00:09:13] – Caroline

And so top schools tend to have a pretty loyal pipeline that come year in, year out of strong candidates who have been planning to do an MBA for a long time. It’s part of their career plan. They have been thinking about this for a number of years. They’ve been working towards it and they are not necessarily, their decision is not necessarily swung by short-term factors. So, when the application volume increases, often that is from candidates who are more speculative and therefore slightly below the average quality. And so therefore, I think that Fuqua still had a, even though the pool had shrunk a bit, the quality, they still had a very high-quality pool to draw on. And so they were able to maintain the quality of the class. But yes, I mean, those yield figures do look a bit painful, and I’ve been hearing that from other schools as well that are struggling more with yield right now than they have historically, and who are coming to us for ideas on, you know, what do you see other schools do to maintain their yields? Because yield is a critical metric for admissions, and it’s very painful for them when the yield slips because it just Creates so much more uncertainty in the class profile and the class size for the school to manage.

[00:10:38] – Pola

Yeah, I also thought it was really interesting that you don’t necessarily have a higher chance of getting in just because they’re admitting more students. You know, maybe the schools are putting more emphasis on the academic side of things. So there goes my chance.

[00:10:54] – Maria

Oh well.

[00:10:57] – Pola

So one more, we’ve, we’ve gone over a number of data points, but there’s one more buried in there, which is women actually fell to 44% of the class. And that’s the second straight year of decline after Fuqua became the first class in school history to cross 50% women in their MBA. So that associate dean attributed this to competition, including for scholarships and for women applicants, not any particular change in strategy on their part. Maria, is that plausible to you, or does that 2-year slide actually start to look a little bit more structural?

[00:11:40] – Maria

I don’t think it looks structural to me. I think these are just, again, every year there’s just going to be these swings up and down between the number of total applicants and the people who get accepted and the people who then decide to enroll. I have no doubt that they probably accepted. Probably they were looking for gender parity and acceptances. So this could be an issue of yield, as, as the, the dean did mention. It was perhaps there were scholarships, perhaps other schools just made it more financially attractive to attend their school. I’d also be curious, when we talk about those overall drops in applicant numbers, perhaps women dropped proportionally more. Perhaps fewer women as a proportion were, you know, they were applying fewer women were applying. So that also could have led to just perhaps just fewer women. There just might be fewer women, period, in the applicant pool. We don’t, I don’t think we have insight into that level of granularity. So I’m not concerned. I think, you know, 47% to 44%, it’s not a huge, you know, we’re talking a handful of people. It’s not a huge number. I’m not concerned. If it were like 47% to 10%, I’d say, whoa, what happened?

[00:12:48] – Maria

But I think I’m not, I’m not concerned as an overall story. I think that the, you know, the work that, for example, the Forté Foundation is doing and that other schools are also doing to attract and retain female candidates is still there. I would suspect that this is just more of a blip.

[00:13:02] – Pola

So that does it, I think, for our discussion about this news story. And following with our mixed bag of things, which are tied together, hopefully, as you’ll see, we will continue to talk a little bit about Harvard getting rid of its field global capstone. So this one, I’m told, is a genuinely big deal if you know Harvard Business School. Maria might have different things to say, but that’s what I’ve heard. So for 15 years, just to give a little background, every single first-year MBA student has been required to travel abroad for this capstone project. It’s called CAP now. But this descends from the Field Global Immersion. And this is this kind of long-running program that sent 900 students to a dozen-plus countries in a single week when it launched in 2011. So as of this September, that requirement is gone. Maria, for people who don’t know Harvard’s culture that closely, how big a deal is this? And what does it mean to end something that’s really this central to the Harvard Business School ground.

[00:14:14] – Maria

So I think the reason why this is such a noteworthy thing as part of the Harvard experience is that Harvard is traditionally— the primary pedagogy is the case method. Case method is, I don’t know, 90-plus percent of the education that you get at the school. And these experiences were a chance to actually get more hands-on, more of a consulting, consultative type of role. Harvard basically introduced this as many other business schools had had something similar. The one that most immediately comes to my mind is the Ross— University of Michigan Ross Business School MAP program. So lots of schools have this hands-on activity— or activity— or offering where outside of class, you and a group of your fellow students do a consulting assignment. A company will come to the school and say, hey, we’ve got this problem. We’d like some of your students to work on it. The students will spend several weeks, usually anywhere, you know, 7 weeks, a semester. It varies from program to program. But then they then present their findings to the company in question. One of the reasons why, you know, Harvard’s was noteworthy is that it did have sort of this international component.

[00:15:30] – Maria

But again, you know, as much as I do love Harvard Business School, they’re not the only game in town, right? Tuck, you know, Dartmouth Tuck also has something called the Tuck Go requirement. University of Virginia Darden Business School also offers international travel types of experiences. So, you know, this is— as much as I do love Harvard, I can’t pretend that this was some sort of, you know, magical thing that only they offered. And I also wonder, you know, I think the visa concerns are a primary driver of this, of why this is being changed. And I also can’t help but wonder if we’re gonna see perhaps some other schools may need to end up following suit if they are also worried about their international students’ ability to participate in a program like this?

[00:16:16] – Pola

Hmm. Yeah, I mean, so Harvard’s curriculum chair, Charlie Wang, gave 2 reasons in his email to students for this. The first one he said was academic. So basically, they concluded from a review that the immersion would be better situated, they said, in year 2 rather than year 1. And the second reason was that Up to 12% of students in recent years couldn’t complete the trip, which— and then he said this year we know the percentage would be much larger. So visa is the key word here. But Caroline, when a school with as many resources as Harvard says a requirement’s becoming logistically impossible, what does that tell you? Is that—

[00:17:07] – Caroline

I think that they are very concerned that there will be a substantial proportion of the international students who are not able to easily come in and out of the US. And that is a fact, not just for Harvard, but for all of the schools in the US. So, it’s a very practical and real constraint. And regardless of the resources that you have, there’s not much the school can do about it. So, I think this is inevitable. At the same time, I mean, they do emphasize that for any student who wants to do this, it will still be available and that they also, I believe, support it financially. So it’s not— if the students can’t afford to do it, then they get support from the school. And so students who are able to travel in and out of the US without an issue will still have this opportunity. And It sounds like also they have quite a broad range of immersive field courses, and this was one of them, but they have others on other topics on innovation, climate, entrepreneurship, AI. And so probably students also felt that there were other field courses that they wanted to take rather than this particular one, that perhaps there are other courses, other experiential opportunities that were more relevant for their career plans.

[00:18:32] – Caroline

And so, I think there’s also just a general movement to be more flexible in MBA programs and give students a lot of flexibility in the courses that they take. And so, this could also be read in that context as well, but I’m quite sure that the immediate trigger was the visa concern.

[00:18:52] – Pola

So, Maria, Caroline already started telling us about these field courses, but Harvard is framing this as an expansion rather than a cut. So it’s saying, actually, we’ve got this growing menu of immersive field courses in places like Silicon Valley, Ghana, Saudi Arabia, Japan, which are now available in year 2. And they say they’ve got generous financial support for anyone who wants to go abroad. But my question is, does an elective in year 2 really deliver the same thing as a mandatory trip abroad in year 1?

[00:19:37] – Maria

There are definitely pros and cons to either way of doing it. I suspect that the, the pushing to year 2 was more like, we just need time to figure out what this is going to look like. And instead of hurrying up and doing a half-baked version for For this year’s class, we don’t know, you know, the visa ban, they come, they go, they get implemented, they get struck down. So I have no insight into this, but I would guess that it’s sort of like, look, let’s just, let’s give this some time to figure out what it’s going to look like, what we’re dealing with. And that way, if we push it to year 2, that the logistics— I think it was more driven by logistics, in other words, or just wanting to try to figure out like, okay, there’s so much variability and uncertainty right now, like, let’s push it. But the benefit to pushing to year 2 is not only is it going to give them more time to really pin down some really cool projects, but I think by your second year of business school, you know more where you want to be focusing your energy in terms of what you’re learning.

[00:20:35] – Maria

And so the benefit of pushing to year 2 is you’re going to have a lot more education under your belt. You’re going to have the growth that you got from your summer internship under your belt. You’re probably going to have some elective curriculum. under your belt. So you’re going to be able to contribute a lot more. You’re going to be able to get more out of it. And you’re probably going to be able to pick a project that you’re like, okay, this is definitely something that is helpful for me. But I can see, I mean, there’s definitely pros and cons to doing it first year versus second year. I just think, I don’t, I don’t think that this is second year because we think, we truly believe that second year is the optimal way to do it. I think it’s, look, the world is a mess right now, and we would rather just take our time and get it right. As opposed to putting— throwing something together slapdash only to have to cancel it or only have it be a suboptimal experience if we put it together right now in 3 months.

[00:21:28] – Pola

Which is fair enough. I mean, that’s a very good reason, I think, to move it to second year.

[00:21:35] – Maria

Absolutely, yes.

[00:21:37] – Pola

So, looking at the common thread here, both Duke and Harvard have spent a lot of effort to reassure people. Duke telling students that it’s going to support them if they’re international students through the visa process. Harvard promising generous financial support so that no one misses out on this global experience. Caroline, from where you sit, is that reassurance— and not limited to Duke or Harvard— but, you know, is reassurance by US schools to international applicants, landing with applicants?

[00:22:16] – Caroline

Well, I think it’s great that they’re doing that. And it was interesting to read in your article the details of how Duke is doing more outreach to international students and really being as proactive as possible in supporting them and also trying to move the timeline for visa processing as early as possible to try to make sure everything goes smoothly. So, I mean, it’s a lot of work for the schools to do all of that. It’s a big investment of time and effort. And it shows that they are truly committed to the international pipeline, that they really value what the international students bring, and they want to do as much as they can to make it feasible for international students to come and study at their schools. But it’s a difficult— it’s a very difficult context, and it’s understandable that despite all of that, students are also hesitant and concerned about whether it is the right time to come to the US. So, it’s really tough for both the students and for the schools, but I’m at least, you know, it’s great that the schools are clearly doing everything they can to communicate with international students and support them as much as possible.

[00:23:27] – Pola

I’ve got a question for both of you, a sort of quickfire last question. So, if a year from now, visa policy stays this unpredictable, What’s the next domino that you’d expect to fall? Will there be another curriculum change, another enrollment dip, something else entirely?

[00:23:46] – Maria

I mean, depending on how draconian these visa policies— if they, if they don’t change, or if they, heaven forbid, if they get worse, I think the most sort of dramatic endgame of how this plays out is I, I wonder if some business schools may need to open international satellite campuses and somehow find a way to provide that same Or at least a variation of that educational experience, but perhaps someplace else. Perhaps they find a place in Canada where students who can’t come into the US, but they can come into Canada and they can sort of, I don’t know, Zoom their way in. Hopefully, it won’t come to that. But if you had to say, like, what would be the sort of ultimate— if things keep getting worse, I think that’s what business schools might have to do is, okay, you can’t come to the US. OK, how do we still give you that educational and community experience, or at least some flavor of it, given our constraints? So that’s the sort of extreme case, but that’s what I think might have to happen at some point.

[00:24:50] – Pola

Carolyn?

[00:24:51] – Caroline

Yeah, I think HBS did have some exploratory discussions with institutions outside of the US about possibly doing something like that. But I think that that plan is on hold for the time being. So who knows? I think that’s potentially feasible for a large institution with deep pockets like HBS, but I fear how this may play out for other institutions that don’t have that level of resources. And if international student, the international student population continues to decline, then I think that we could see some program closures. among the tier 2 and tier 3 schools. I think it’s going to be very hard for the sector as a whole, and the top schools will continue to do well as they always have. But I think beyond that, schools may have to make some very tough decisions.

[00:25:50] – Pola

And on that grim note, we finish up today. Sorry to leave our listeners on a sort of downbeat end, but I don’t think I think we have been talking about sort of the worst-case scenarios, so that’s the silver lining there. And if you like this episode, if we cheered you up in the process, please come again for more episodes of Business Casual and to Poets and Quants for some of our coverage. So, you can find that on our website, and you can also find our podcast, across the various streaming platforms. So, thank you again to my co-hosts, Caroline and Maria, and thank you everyone for listening.