NEW DELHI: Amid all the bad news worldwide around the Covid-19 situation, the application trend for global business education in the US has rebounded with a record 21% growth for the 2020 cycle. Applications for the Graduate Management Admission Test during the pandemic for 731 global management programmes not only registered a growth but also bucked the negative growth trend of 2019.
An increased mobility of Indian students to the US for management education due to the changes in the policies by the new administration is also being predicted.
This even as surveys of the Graduate Management Admission Council also reveal that 88% of the corporates are planning to accelerate hiring of MBAs. The total application growth in 2020 registered a 2.4% growth as against –3.2% in 2019.
Sangeet Chowfla, president and CEO of GMAC said: “In the second quarter of 2020, we saw a lot of concern on study, travel restriction, visa availability. In 2020, application to US business schools actually grew to a record amount of almost 21% and obviously the biggest growth was domestic (29%). There was lower growth in international applications, but there was still growth by about 14%. We saw similar pictures for business schools in Europe and Asia”.
The pandemic did impact the business schools hiring strategy, as B-schools from Canada (63%), Europe (51%) and the US (49%) sought to recruit more domestic candidates and majority of the schools in these places and Asia Pacific significantly increased their budget for online initiatives.
According to Chowfla, “The yield rate, the number of gap between the people who actually joined and people who were offered, had declined because some international students chose to defer into the next year. Also we see a decline in application domestically in places like India and China, maybe candidates are putting their plans on hold.”