Playing The International Card

ā€œTo succeed in an English-based business environment and to succeed in our classrooms, international students need to speak English well enough to understand irony and to think quickly on their feet, to be able to debate and to sell,ā€ says Robert Bruner, dean of the Darden School. ā€œFor so many international applicants, there is a mastery of English which helps them complete applications and TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) exams and the like and then there is another level that actually helps them learn in our active learning classrooms. I believe that the profession we serve is looking for internationals with the latter kind of mastery of English.ā€

Even so, Darden, along with many U.S. schools, is working hard to attract greater numbers of international applicants.

International Enrollments at Leading U.S. Business Schools

School International Asia Europe Latin America Oceania Africa
Carnegie Mellon (Tepper) 40% 28% 4% 3% NA 1%
Columbia 38% 14% 13% 6% 1% 1%
MIT (Sloan) 38% 18% 8% 9% NA 1%
UPenn (Wharton) 37% 19% 7% 6% 1% 1%
Berkeley (Haas) 37% 19% 9% 9% 1% 1%
UCLA (Anderson) 36% 19% 7% 5% 1% 1%
Indiana (Kelley) 36% 33% 1% 2% 0% 1%
Harvard 34% 13% 10% 4% 1% 2%
Dartmouth (Tuck) 34% 18% 8% 5% NA 1%
Northwestern 34% 20% 4% 4% 1% 1%
Cornell (Johnson) 34% 27% 3% 2% 0% 0%
Emory (Goizueta) 34% 27% 1% 6% 0% 0%
Chicago (Booth) 33% 19% 6% 10% 1% 2%
Michigan (Ross) 33% 19% 4% 7% 1% 1%
Stanford 32% 11% 6% 5% 1% 2%
Yale 32% 17% 4% 5% 2% 1%
UNC (Kenan-Flagler) 32% 28% 2% 1% 0% 1%
Duke (Fuqua) 30% 15% 3% 8% 0% 0%
NYU (Stern) 28% 16% 6% 3% 1% 1%
Virginia (Darden) 27% 15% 6% 3% 0% 1%
Texas (McCombs) 24% 18% 0% 5% 0% 0%
USC (Marshall) 21% 17% 2% 1% 0% 0%

Source: Business schools reporting to Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

Notes: Latin America includes the Caribbean.

 

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