At the University of Texas McCombs School of Business, applications are down 10 percent from the same period last year on a rolling basis. But MBA program director Elissa Ellis said that she has received a disproportionate number of applications in recent weeks. Despite the earlier decline and the increasing average GMAT score for admitted students, she said, the number of applications may be equal to or even slightly higher than the number last year after the final deadline on April 15.
"Usually the number of applications is in reverse correlation to the state of the economy," Ellis said. "It might be that the downturn happened too late in the admissions cycle for us to see the trend in the first part of the cycle. Now we're wondering if we're going to get hit with a huge number of applicants in the first half of April."
The sour economy has even helped Stanford, which has been losing applicants for two years. The number of applicants to the Graduate School of Business (GSB) in 1999-2000 declined by 17.8 percent from the number in 1998-1999--one of the biggest drops for any b-school in the country. By contrast, the number of applicants in the first two rounds of the admissions period in 2000-2001 declined by only 6 percent.
"We are still down," a GSB representative said. "But the slide seems to have pretty much stopped."
Although applications are up and many dot-commers have high hopes for what their MBA can help them achieve, an MBA is no guarantee that dot-com refugees will find better employment prospects upon graduation. Top-tier schools usually charge roughly $50,000 per year in tuition and living expenses, for a total of nearly $100,000 for a two-year program--and that doesn't include the opportunity costs of two years without salary. The cost is not insignificant for many students, who spend a decade in debt to pay off their MBA.
And getting an MBA is especially risky for workers who hope to return to the technology sector upon graduation. Tech recruiters are renown for prizing speed, intelligence and creativity over degrees, experience and a polished resume, said Ilya Talman, president of Chicago-based technology recruitment firm Roy Talman & Associates.
"Tech employers don't value an MBA job very much--they just don't," said Talman, who holds an MBA from the highly selective business school at the University of Chicago. "At a tech company, it's much more about what you can do for me, as opposed to your pedigree. It's like sports: Can you throw the ball 95 mph? If so, I don't care what school you went to. Tech employers think the same way, except the question is not how fast you can throw the ball but how quickly you can build me a router."
