What To Expect For This Admissions Season
ApplicantLab |
May 27, 2025

As MBA admissions season ramps up, the latest Poets & Quants “Business Casual” podcast episode, featuring John Byrne, Maria Wich-Vila, and Caroline Diarte Edwards, dives into what applicants can expect this year. With economic uncertainty and shifts in visa policies under the Trump administration influencing trends, the landscape is poised for change, possibly resulting in fewer applications across top programs.

Among the key topics discussed is the evolving role of AI in both the application process and MBA coursework. Maria highlights how schools are coming to terms with AI as an indispensable tool. While applicants are advised against relying solely on AI to craft their essays, its use as a supportive tool is being acknowledged. Institutions like Carnegie Mellon, UVA Darden, and UC Berkeley are integrating AI into their curricula, offering insights into its impact on business education.

Flexibility in career planning emerges as another important theme. Maria points out that the recruiting environment is becoming more challenging, necessitating a strategic and adaptive approach to job searching post-MBA. Students might need to explore networked job searches and maintain backup plans, recognizing that initial positions may serve as stepping stones toward ultimate career goals. For MBA hopefuls, understanding these dynamics will be crucial in navigating the upcoming admissions cycle.

Episode Transcript

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

[00:00:06] – John

Well, hello everyone. This is John Verne with Poets & Quants. Welcome to business Casual, our weekly podcast with my co-host, Maria Wendt-Villa and Caroline Diarte Edwards. You know, before you know it, the new admission season will begin. Already, schools are starting to release their application deadlines along with their changes, if there are any, to the required essays to apply to a full-time MBA program. We want to do a little preview of what you can expect in the season when it begins in earnest in September. Traditionally, Harvard Business School is one that has some of the earliest deadlines. That is still true this year. I’m going to call on my colleagues, my application experts, for their views on this. Maria just came back from the AGAC conference in California, visited a number of schools, including UCLA and Stanford. And, of course, admission officials from many more schools came to talk to admission consultants. And Caroline is seeing some changes out there, including a new essay over at Columbia Business School. So what are you hearing, Maria?

[00:01:23] – Maria

Lots of talk, as always. May you live in interesting times. We are definitely living in interesting times. Some of the things that jumped out at me in particular from the conference is, first of all, the evolving role of AI, both in terms of admissions officers getting a little bit more comfortable with the fact that it’s a tool, it’s here to stay, we can’t really fight it. I got the impression that a lot of schools… I think a year ago, there was a little bit more uncertainty. We’re not really sure. Some schools, for example, if you utilize AI in your application, you disclose how you use it, but they are not really going to forbid you from doing so. Although I think everyone in this ecosystem would caution against simply using AI to, quote, unquote, write your essay for you because let’s And to base it, AI, at least as of right now, it seems like AI. When you read an essay that’s written by AI, you can usually tell. It’s very similar. It struck me as similar to when applicants write their own letters of recommendation. The applicants don’t realize how obvious it is because the applicants aren’t reading thousands of essays and thousands of bits of information a year.

[00:02:36] – Maria

But to an admissions officer, it’s very obvious when you write your own recommendation. And similarly, it’s also very obvious when you use AI from start to finish to write your essay. You can use it as a tool. That’s fine. One change has been this resignation or perhaps accept that the resignation is perhaps too pessimistic of a way to phrase it. But an acceptance that this is the new future. And so we might as well just accept it. Also, the role of AI in terms of expanding coursework. So some notable schools, Carnegie Mellon and UBA Darden, are doing a lot. I mean, every school is, of course, incorporating AI into its coursework. But those two schools are launching major initiatives. One of our other host schools, Haas, Berkeley Haas, they actually had a professor give us a very interesting lecture that he gives to some of his executive education students on AI and the different pathways within AI. It was really interesting. He likened AI to the gold rush. He drew parallels between the people who discovered the gold, the people who sold the pics and shovels, and then the people who were experts in mining and how each of them fared.

[00:03:41] – Maria

And so he was drawing parallels between that and the current AI ecosystem Awesome. Ucla is also incorporating AI in a way that I thought was really interesting. So there’s this very famous management case that I think even I did at HBS 20 some years ago on this this underperformer who’s… I mean, sorry, I apologize. He’s an overperformer, but he’s a poor cultural fit for a role. The question is, how do you handle that? You don’t want to fire him because he’s doing really well, but at the same time, he’s a jerk. So UCLA, I believe it’s a former HBS professor who’s now there, she created a AI chatbot that lets you practice giving feedback to this employee. I thought that was a really clever use of AI within the curriculum. So you can really try to practice giving feedback. I thought that was really great. Another theme that emerged was around the need for flexibility in the career search. As we have discussed several times now in the podcast, the recruiting landscape is not what it once was. It’s not that you simply roll out of bed in the morning and you’ve got four consulting offers by noon.

[00:04:46] – Maria

It was never that, but it’s certainly getting a lot more challenging. So students need to be much more flexible. They might need to consider a networked job search. They might have a plan B or a plan C, realizing that Maybe that first job out of business school might not be the one they were hoping for, but it could be a baby step or a stepping stone towards that ultimate job that they want. And then another final bit of information is that many of the top schools will not be changing their essays, at least not in a substantial way. This year, Kellogg did indicate that they may make a change to, I believe, their essay one. And as Caroline can mention in a second, Columbia did make a change to its essay two. But for the most part, the schools are in fact, keeping their essays the same.

[00:05:32] – John

What about stamping out DEI in light of the Trump administration’s war on diversity, equity, and inclusion? I mean, there are a number of essays out there that have DEI mentions or DEI overtones. And I would think given how nervous university officials are about losing funding and getting astray from the administration, that they’re likely to remove any possibility of a DEI, any acceptance of DEI, let’s say, right, Caroline?

[00:06:05] – Caroline

Yeah. I think what we’ll see is there will be fewer explicit references to DEI in applications and in essay prompts, and it will be still… I don’t think the school’s values have necessarily changed, and they will still welcome examples where you have fostered inclusion, but they might not be quite so explicit in requiring responses that that fit with those criteria. So one example that we’ve seen already is at Columbia Business School. So they had a question which was the essay 2. They have the Phillips Pathway for Inclusive Leadership, which is a co-curricular program giving students the skills and strategies needed to develop as inclusive leaders. And this is all part of the old essay prompt. So they’re really making this quite explicit that this is part of the curriculum, and this is what you should be motivated to learn. Through various resources and programming, students explore and reflect on the following five inclusive leadership skills, which are mitigating bias and prejudice, managing intercultural dialog, addressing systemic inequity, understanding identity and Perspective Taking, and creative and inclusive environment.

[00:07:29] – John

Trump would love I love that stuff.

[00:07:31] – Caroline

Yeah, well, exactly. That has gone as part of the prompt where you need to describe a time or situation when you had the need to utilize one of these five skills. They did also have an alternative question to that if you didn’t want to respond to that last year. They said you could also share an example of how you’ve made a team more collaborative or fostered a greater sense of community within an organization. They have dropped the the entire first part of that question. Now the essay prompt is simply, please share a specific example of how you made a team more collaborative, more inclusive, or fostered a greater sense of community within an organization. You have 250 words, about a half a page to address that. So they are still welcoming stories of how you have been inclusive, and they’re still signaling that this is something that value, but they have taken out those values that they had spelt out very clearly. And you don’t have to talk about something that is inclusivity or DEI related. You could talk about how you’ve made a team more collaborative, and the tech that you take with that could be quite different from how you would tackle an essay that is more focused on DEI.

[00:08:54] – Caroline

So they’re giving you greater scope.

[00:08:57] – John

And it’s clear. It’s a much clearer, actually, prompt.

[00:09:01] – Caroline

It is, yeah.

[00:09:02] – John

By removing this woke word salad that they had before. It was a bit of a word salad. I mean, they’re getting to the point now, and it’s much easier to respond to, actually.

[00:09:12] – Caroline

Yeah. So I think it’s actually a better question because it’s much cleaner, as you say, it’s much simpler. And so I think candidates will prefer this question in any case. But it’s definitely in the context of what has been happening at Columbia, and they are under Trump’s come and need to be seen to be stripping out the elements that are too DEI oriented.

[00:09:39] – John

Yeah, definitely. And Columbia is a good example of a squal that was originally targeted early by the Trump administration and actually bent and responded in the best way it possibly could to appeal to his demands and make nice, even though the consequence of all that wasn’t all that positive for the University. And Harvard took the stronger, more courageous stand to say, No, we’re not going to stand for this. We’re going to fight you like hell. We’ll see you in court. Totally different perspective. Now, do we think, because this is all in the context of what’s going on in America today, that applications, this coming cycle will be down, particularly from international applicants? Caroline, do you think that?

[00:10:31] – Caroline

Well, we definitely see hesitation. So I do think that there will be a drop in the volume of applications, especially from international applicants, because they are quite rightly concerned about visa choose and whether they’ll be able to actually stay. Even if they get into the country, will they be able to stay and complete their degrees, given the number of visas that have been canceled? Domestically, I think that there is also potentially some hesitation to apply because of concerns about the economy. We might be heading into a recession, right? We’ll have to see how things pan out over the next few months. But what we’ve seen in the past is if there is a recession, then more people apply to business school because they may have lost their jobs or things are not much fun at work. So it’s a great time to head off to graduate school if there is a recession, and you then hope that by the time you get out the other end, then the economy will have picked up again. But prior to recession, and we may be in that period right now where there’s just uncertainty. We don’t know which way things are heading.

[00:11:48] – Caroline

And in periods of uncertainty, what we’ve seen in the past is that candidates tend to, they put, they’d rather hang on to their seats at work than to take the risk of heading off to business school in such an uncertain environment. So I think that quite a few candidates right now are taking a wait and see approach. So we’re seeing quite slow inquiry volume this year. It may be that people are just hesitant and things will pick up as the year goes on. And so perhaps it will be a slow round one, but a bigger round two, especially if the economy improves. And if we don’t head into a I think either way, there’ll be clearer signals. Right now, I think just the uncertainty is quite damaging to application volume because people are just taking a wait and see approach. It may just be a slow start to the year, or it may be a signal that actually there’s going to be lower application volume this year, which does mean, of course, that it could be a less competitive season for the candidate. For people who are motivated to apply, then it could be a great year to go ahead and apply.

[00:13:02] – John

Right. So you could argue that actually some of this is good news for applicants who want to get into really good schools because they’re going to have to be slightly less selective than they have been in the last couple of years. The other part of this is something that Maria picked up at the AGAC conference among several admission officials from the different schools in regards to international applications, right?

[00:13:28] – Maria

Right. So several of the schools mentioned that in anticipation of perhaps some issues with getting student visas or having to defend the student visas, that they are, in fact, providing legal help for their international students to help them secure the visa at a level that perhaps they have not had to in the past. So if international students are concerned, rest assured that the schools are on your side. They accepted you because they want you to attend. And so several of the schools explicitly said, Look, we are hiring. They’re either hiring outside counsel or they are doubling down on their existing international offices who might have some legal assistance within that. I thought that was an interesting and a positive bit of information to learn.

[00:14:15] – John

Yeah, exactly. All right. If you want to apply, really, the race starts in early September. Harvard Business School’s round one deadline is set for September third of this year. You apply by then in the first round, you’re guaranteed a board’s decision by December 10th. Round two at Harvard is January fifth, with decisions on March 25th. And what happens After that is the deadlines fall like dominoes at one school after another. The deadlines for many of the international programs are slightly different because some start at different times and some are one-year programs, and that changes the order of things. But check the website for our MBA application deadlines. For changes in essays and requirements, I think it’s going to be a good time to apply because I do anticipate a recession. Rather than wait for the hammer to drop and then everyone starts applying and the applications go way up because historically, the Application volume runs contrary to the economy. When things go down, applications go up. When the economy goes up, applications go down. So getting in early is to your advantage. The fact that there’s going to be some worry and probably lower numbers of international applicants applying to come to the US.

[00:15:51] – John

I think that that also opens up a few more doors. And incidentally, a recession is defined as two quarters of GDP decline. And recessions can last two quarters. They can last a year, but they’re unlikely to last throughout the time that you’re in an MBA program in the US for two years and you graduate, at which time the economy would be on an upswing and a change in administration. Let me put it that way, or just about. Good time to apply. Then you would matriculate, obviously, in the fall of 2026 and graduate in 2028. Boy, time moves fast, doesn’t it? It’s remarkable.

[00:16:39] – Caroline

Certainly happy if the next four years move fast.

[00:16:43] – John

Yes. So true. All right, for all of you out there, good luck on your journey to business school. Take a look at these deadlines. Take a look at the essays and what’s required. Get a head start and plan your journey now. This is John Byrne with Poets & Quants. Thanks for listening.

P&Q Podcast "Business Casual"
What To Expect For This Admissions Season
ApplicantLab |
May 27, 2025

Video transcript, for you skimmers out there: 

I love the fact that they. Report on this metric, right? The salary percentage increase, I think is an incredibly valuable metric because there are so many business schools out there that are great for so many people. And at the end of the day, these programs are in fact able to do what a lot of business school applicants are hoping for.

They are in fact able to provide a real change in the trajectory of someone’s career. They are, in fact, able to help people leapfrog. Into a higher career stratum than they would’ve otherwise been able to be in. So from that perspective, I love the fact that the FT reports on the salary percentage increase.

So valuable. I think it helps, when sometimes I talk to people at the beginning of the business school journey, I will frequently hear something like, well, it’s M seven or bust, you know, it’s Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, or bust.

And I’m often like, look, slow your roll, man. There are so many programs out there that are going to get you. They might not be the first ones that you think [00:01:00] of, but wow, does that even matter? I mean, whew. Look at some of these numbers. $170,000. That is nothing to sneeze at, especially if it’s one and a half times more than what you were making before business school.

I mean, wow. , That is life changing. , And these schools can really change people’s lives. And I think it’s important to have this metric available because I think it helps open people’s eyes. To, To be a little bit more open-minded. , And I think that’s wonderful.

Where my little quibble is. Is that I believe this is an important metric to report upon. However, I do not believe that it is a metric that should have significant amount of weight in the rankings because if we think about what is the purpose of a ranking, it is meant to be some sort of a representation of relative quality.

Now rankings. The entire concept of them is flawed the entire, for me, the entire concept of an ordinal ranking is ridiculous. Like school versus two versus four, versus seven versus six . You know, like, there, there’s sort of [00:02:00] these tiny miniature marginal differences. I think that school rankings should instead be in buckets.

Like, here is the top bucket, and then here is the also very good, but just underneath the top bucket, the next bucket. Um, but no one, no one listens to me. Uh, but so anyway, to the extent that a ranking. Is intended to be some sort of a measure of a program’s quality. I don’t think that this metric is one that should be included in the weighting.

Look, again, . Life-changing levels of improvements in salary. But when I look at, okay, so these were the top five programs by the salary percentage increase, but now when I look at it by the weighted salary, right, the top five US programs, by weighted salary, it’s not entirely accurate to say that.

Well, these programs, you start with people who have lower incoming salaries and they end up in the same place as the other programs. The numbers do not [00:03:00] really, , the numbers would tell a slightly different story. So if you look at the weighted salary a few years out for the top five programs by salary,

we’re talking about a $70,000 a year difference, roughly 240 a year versus 170 a year. That’s about a 40% difference, which I don’t think is a small, you know, if we were talking 5%, even 10%, I’d be like, yeah, 10%, that’s nothing. It’s, you know, nothing but 40% I do think is a pretty, I think it’s a pretty significant difference, uh, that is worth noting.

And so. Your point about like, well, they were letting in the people who were already on a, you know, if you were making, let’s see if we can, if we figure out, okay, so if we take this, these numbers, then we can sort of back into what’s an implied pre MBA salary, you know, that would indicate maybe something in the mid sixties before MBA versus, you know, one 10 something, [00:04:00] 1, 1 10, 1 15, for these other programs.

I get your argument. Your argument is like, look, these people were already clearly high achievers prior to business school, and so, mm-hmm. Is it not true then that the business school, like they would’ve continued to be high achievers And in fact, this is true, some of the most successful, financially successful people I know skipped business school altogether and they didn’t need it.

, However, I think GMAC often does, polls or surveys of MBA graduates, and I think the vast majority of them, at a minimum say that they’re glad that they went to business school, that they do feel that it was worth, their time. So. How much of this is,, nature versus nurture.

We, we will never know. , But I would gently push back on the fact that I, because these numbers essentially to the extent that they’re lower than say these numbers, it effectively penalizes thes e schools in this ranking. And for that reason, I don’t think that it should be part of the ranking because you’re penalizing a school for letting in more successful people.

But there’s a benefit. [00:05:00] To attending. Like, first of all, if you are a more successful person, think of the opportunity cost that you’re giving up. So the fact that these schools are able to lure away people to give up two years of their salary, in order to go to business school in the first place, I think is a pretty good indicator of the desirability or the perceived desirability of those programs.

Also, I do think that there is merit to thinking about like, who are my peers going to be in a business school? and. If a school is attracting people who were more successful prior to business school, I actually think that that is an indicator of the quality of the school, not only because it shows the people that are willing to give up those two years of salary, but also think about who the peer group is once someone is in the school.

Right? That means that if you are attending one of these schools. This percentage isn’t as high, but you’re surrounded by people who, prior to business school, were already achieving on a different level. And also after they graduate, they continue to achieve on a different level. True. The slope is not as sharp.

Right. But the.

[00:06:00] Result is a larger number. So I think that this implies that perhaps at the school itself, you might be surrounded by people who are driven. some people might say more competitive, which might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but people who are more driven and also after they graduate, they continue to be driven.

And so I think that also implies something pretty powerful about the ultimate benefit of the network because business school isn’t just the two years you go there and it’s not just that first job you get out of school or that third job you have five years out of school.

it’s also who’s your network gonna be and, and who are you gonna call 10, 15, 20 years after graduation? To invest in your company or to partner with your company or to start a company with. so I do think that there is value to attending a school and to have your peers during school and after school be people who were, for lack of a better term, high performers.

[00:07:00] I don’t think that this should be punished because I do think that this does yield a better business school. Experience and a better result in the long term. And so my quibble, again, I love this metric. I think this is an amazing metric to provide, but my quibble is that this should not be given honestly, any weight at all, and certainly not the high level of weight that it’s given, because again, you’re punishing the schools that, you know, you’re basically indicating that I, what I would say is an indication of quality.

An indirect indication of quality, but an indication of quality all the same. You’re basically punishing the schools that have sort of higher quality, quote unquote, coming in. And, and that to me is. Counterintuitive and kind of wrong. And so that’s why I continue to think that this should not be, uh, reported upon.

Absolutely. Tell us. It’s important. I think it’s great to know. I love using this information, but I don’t think it should be used in terms of like, let’s figure out which programs are the , [00:08:00] quote unquote highest quality programs. But what do you think? What did I miss? let me know. Thanks.

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