Read our top five business school stories of 2015.
2015 was a busy year on the MBA front. From record starting salaries to salacious scandals, there’s plenty of business news to look back on. Here are the top five stories from our year in review.
1. Higher starting salaries for business school grads
If you graduated business school in 2015, it’s been a good year, with great employment stats and higher starting salaries. From Wharton reporting an average $146,000, to Dartmouth Tuck’s 99% employment rate, to McKinsey & Company doubling their recruitment figures at Duke Fuqua. Many other top schools also reported record starting salaries for their graduates. Are happy days here to stay? With the employment rate at its lowest level since before the Great Recession and MBA hiring up, they just might be.
2. The Stanford GSB scandal
Stanford’s Graduate School of Business had a decidedly mixed year. On the one hand, the school remains one of the most competitive MBA programs in the nation. Starting salaries for its graduates are among the highest anywhere, and the tech industry has really warmed up to hiring MBAs. On the administration front, however, the school has become tabloid fodder because of a scandal involving the departing dean and a professor—the two were caught having an affair. To make the matter even more dramatic, the professor was married to a fellow Stanford GSB faculty member. Prospective students, however, seem unruffled by the drama. The story is still unfolding. (Vanity Fair)
3. Business schools warm to Integrated Reasoning
The GMAT’s newest section, Integrated Reasoning—which was added to the exam in 2012—is finally beginning to get some love from business schools. In Kaplan’s 2015 survey of admissions officers at more than 200 business schools across the United States and the United Kingdom, 59% say an applicant’s score on the GMAT’s Integrated Reasoning section is an important part of their evaluation of a prospective student’s overall GMAT score. This represents a big change of opinion from Kaplan’s 2014 survey, in which only about 40% said an applicant’s Integrated Reasoning score was an important part of their overall GMAT score evaluation. Watch for this number to keep increasing over the next couple of years. (Top MBA)
4. GMAT or GRE?
Kaplan also did some research into another hot topic on the MBA admissions front. Should you take the GRE or the GMAT? Here’s what we found: 90% of business schools now allow applicants to submit a GRE score instead of a GMAT score, which once the only admissions test option for MBA programs. This is a 5% increase over 2014 and a huge jump from 2009 when our survey found only 24% of business schools allowed students to submit a GRE score. Additionally, 42% of admissions officers in 2015 reported an increase in the number of applicants submitting GRE scores. The caveat? Many business schools say there’s still an admissions advantage to submitting a GMAT score. (Poets & Quants)
5. Slashing tuition
Here’s something you don’t see often… One of America’s top-ranked programs, the University of Rochester’s Simon Business School, announced earlier this year that it would be slashing tuition by nearly 14% for the entering class of 2016—from a hefty $106,500 for two years to a still hefty $92,000. This pricing change made sense for the school, which had charged more than other, similarly-ranked programs with comparable average GMAT scores. As the dean of the business school admitted, “The higher ranked the school is, the higher the price. And the lower ranked the school is, the lower the price. So we were a bit of an outlier. We sort of looked at it as an economic problem.” A sensible course correction. (Inside Higher Ed)
Thank you being such loyal readers. Enjoy the rest of the holiday season, and we’ll see you in 2016!
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