What B-School Applicants Want

In a strange twist, tech savvy Millennials show little enthusiasm for content being delivered to them online. Take Millenninals who are considering a two-year program, for example. Just 19% of the sample wanted to receive content over the internet, compared to 31% of Millennials. In one-year and part-time programs, Baby Boomers actually prefer online content by 44%-to-22% and 48%-to-29% margins (respectively) compared to Millennials. Even in Master’s programs, Gen X was often twice as open to online content delivery as Millennials.

For Keating, this is a case where form fits lifestyle. “The baby boomers and the Gen-Xers – we’re older. We tend to have careers. We have major lifestyle issues where we can’t take two years off and go get a full-time MBA. So I can see why they would be more amenable to being online.”

At the same time, Keating, a former media relations director at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, is heartened by Millennials being more partial to immersive full-time experiences than online ones.  “I understand why Millennials, if they can take the time, would want to do that. They’re younger in their careers. They’re transforming their careers completely, going from making $70,000 a year to making $170,000. It is a chance to completely transform yourself now in their late twenties and early thirties. I don’t think you can get the same kind of network, life-long friendships and alumni networks, and the one-on-one professor-classmate experience online.”   

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ACTIVE LEARNING AND SMALL CLASS SIZES PREFERRED BY ALL GENERATIONS 

Despite these differences, Millennials, Gen X, and Baby Boomers were relatively homogenous when it comes to what they value in a business school culture. At most, only 16 percentage points separated Millennials from Boomers, with Gen-X consistently scoring in the middle.

Overall, Millennials preferred a small class, active learning atmosphere with a close-knit, heterogenous group that is taught with a more personal style (with an active learning approach and small class size being most important to Millennials). This was relatively consistent among all generations.

What were the biggest differences between generations? Start with teaching style, where 33% of Millennials favored a more authoritarian teaching style compared to Baby Boomers (33% vs. 17%). Surprisingly, Baby Boomers were more likely to favor a collaborative structure than Millennials (75%-to-64%), while more Millennials favored a research-oriented pedagogy (45% vs. 30%). Compared to Millennials, Boomers were more attracted to environments with an individual emphasis (44%-to-32%), loosely connected structure (40% vs. 21%), casual environment (68% vs. 58%), and a small class size (93% vs. 81%).

Generally, these numbers align with last year’s findings. However, a teaching-orientation, which was preferred by 67% of respondents last year, has ceded some ground to more experiential and research-driven models that are becoming increasingly popular with Millennials.

Motivations to Pursue a Graduate Management Education

Source: 2015 GMAC Prospective Student Survey

Source: 2015 GMAC Prospective Student Survey

DON’T MISS: A CONSCIOUS CAPITALIST’S VISION FOR BUSINESS SCHOOL

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