We had a date with data last weekend.
Here’s the baby that was born of it. This shows you the 5-year net growth (or decline) in apps at the top schools (blue bars), along with year-over-year change in application volume from the 2010-11 season to last year (green bars).
Again, the green bars are for **last year’s** admissions season – they show how much things changed in 2011-’12, which is the Class of 2014. If you’re asking about this year, it’s too soon to tell, though we’ve heard that Darden, for one, has seen a bump-up, and we’re guessing that the New York schools will too, given how much they tanked the year before. In fact, we’d bet that pretty much all schools will see more volume, since our informal surveys are hinting that people applied to more schools this year.
The inescapable takeaway message from this chart? (Besides the whoa what’s happening with sleepy little MIT over the past few years?!?? thing.) Brand is power. Chicago has remained at the top of the BW ranking for a decade now, yet Kellogg is the one who’s increasing apps in the midwest. Don’t get us wrong, we agree with BW that Booth is a great school, but they’re not pulling kids to the Windy City; Kellogg is.
And the other thing? That the Ivy League schools aren’t growing; if anything, they seem to be sorta floundering down there on the left side of the graph. HBS is pulling in gobs more apps every year. What’s up with these other fellow Ivies?
Note also the growth trends comparing pre-recession apps against last year (blue bars). During that time, HBS grew its total apps by 1,500/year (from 7,438 for the Class of 2009, to 8,963 for the Class of 2014). Yes they lost some apps year-over-year in the past two cycles but it still nets out at impressive. For context: No other school has yet to hit Harvard’s 5-years-ago volume number. Stanford’s the closest and they’re still 700 apps shy, though they can boast of modest gains last year whereas HBS lost a bit. Apparently if someone thinks about getting an MBA they immediately think of Harvard – and these numbers are with the more daunting 4-essay apps. With fewer essays per school in our current admissions season, we’re betting that every school’s numbers are going up.
As to that unfortunate green bar streaming down the page on the left – aka Columbia – remember the discussion we had back in September about that. We’re pretty convinced at this point that this was likely a hit from that inside job — er, Inside Job.
We have a bunch of other musings about data and trends but they’ll have to wait for another day.
To any schools who might be reading this: We’re happy to share the raw data with you if anything looks off or if you have questions about what we’ll be presenting over the next week or so (or anytime for that matter – if you feel we’re ever wrong we hope you’ll reach out) – write us at gethelpnow at essaysnark.
FYI, to anyone who finds this interesting, EssaySnark is a great blog. You should definitely pop over there if you haven't.