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TO GO OR TO WAIT: Clarifying confusion for international students 16 Apr 2025, 10:48
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Disclaimer: The article discusses most of common aspects international students have to consider when leaving their home countries. I know your personal situations would be different but I have tried to look at most of the parameters that could be useful in evaluating and coming to a decision. If your situation is more like a situation where if you don't leave immediately, things might get wayyy to dark for you, I would just recommend leaving immediately (Getting fired from your job is not one of those situations- I am talking about situations where your environment has become completely inhospitable)


With the employment reports becoming more and more concerning, especially for international students, and there is a good reason to believe that about 20-25% of the international students might most certainly return to their home country, and assuming you don't want to be one of those, you might want to be in a leveraged position.

WHAT OPTIONS DO YOU HAVE?

1. NEGOTIATE SCHOLARSHIPS
That is no brilliance of anyone's mind but common sense to ensure that your financial security comes first. It is commonly understood that the MBA is more like a sunk investment into your education. Any wise investor will analyze the market risk before putting a bet, right? That would be the same for you, you need to think of this as a sunk cost that will have to be repaid starting your graduation. Understand the worst case scenario (we all know that things will work out in the best case scenario) and see how you plan to repay your debt - family support (how much and for how long), refinancing (how much will you save on interest), working part-time as a freelancer (the income is low and you barely make your loan repayment but worth considering) etc.

There is less uncertainty, more certainty about the market towards international students, please exercise caution and choose the schools wisely.

If you need a more detailed version of scholarship negotiation please have a look at this article.

2. DEFER TO ANOTHER YEAR
This year, a few people I have known decided to wait out another year and have not been given the privilege of deferring their admit and they will be taking our help again to apply next cycle. Deferral basically means that you'll be keeping your admit but you will not go this year, you'll go the next year (Some schools that have a Jan-intake deferred it to Jan instead). However, this is not so simple, even if the schools agree to the deferral, there is no guarantee that your scholarship will carry forward to the next year and you will have to put down the deposit in many of the cases.

However, getting a deferral itself is not going to be easy. Weirdly enough, I find it easier than getting scholarship money, if you read the link above, you would agree too- the cases discussed there are fairly unique.

3. RECALIBRATE THE GOALS
I know this sounds way worse than you think but to be perfectly honest, I am aware that many of the people who want to get an MBA don't really know what to do in their career. Others have some plan B or plan C. Well, good news for you, this is the time to recalibrate your goals. Many of the people who I am seeing on the forums have finance goals into their mind but have been admitted to institutions that may not really be known for it (of course, all schools have some students going into all kinds of industries, but when the things are this risky, is it the time to think at the best case scenario?) So, it might be in your interest to see what the strengths of the school are and if your post-MBA (plan A, B, C whatever) goals are somehow aligned with those strengths. For example, if you are an international student who wants to be in the Oil and Gas industry (Finance role) with the big players (Shell, Chevron etc.)- the odds of making it in might be too less because- A. Getting a sponsorship into those is highly unlikely (most of them don't even sponsor) so your goals were anyhow unrealistic but you might have settled for a smaller company that sponsors, B. Despite going to a feeder school, you might not be eligible. So, let's shift gears to plan B- say that's to be in Big Tech corporate finance- there are tech schools within the T20 range for that. If you want to have a plan C (suggested) which is to go into the tech startups, selecting schools that are around startup hubs such as orange county, San Francisco, Austin, NYC etc and feed to some of these startups could be shortlisted. Based on these parameters, find schools that lie at the intersection of all three or most, and try to negotiate a higher scholarship from them to lower your financial risk.


As I understand, all these things revolve around scholarship negotiations, and I'd be happy to help if anyone needs it. So feel free to contact me for the same. But if you need the link again, you can check out this article.