Darden Sets Earlier App Deadline For MBAs

Virginia’s Darden School of Business

‘THE NEW INCOMING CLASS WILL BE THE MOST DIVERSE EVER’

Neher says that the quality of the pool remained extremely high. “I am very excited about the incoming class,” she says. “It’s the most diverse class ever. We have more women in all three MBA formats. We have the highest number of African-American students in many years and almost a high for Hispanic students. We have lots of Latin Americans and Europeans.” The new class also will experience a newly refreshed MBA curriculum that now includes a required experiential course in the first year along with a weekly first-year class to discuss and debate topical issues (see Darden’s New Refresh To Its MBA Program).

Last year, Darden enrolled a class composed of 36% internationals, 32% female, and 16% domestic minorities with an average GMAT of 706 and an undergraduate grade point average of 3.5. Neher expects a similar percentage of international students to enter the full-time MBA program this year.

Only five years ago, Darden trailed many other schools in international enrollment with only 27% of the school’s full-time MBAs from outside the U.S. One reason was the school’s case study approach to teaching which requires not only fluent English speakers in the classroom but students who can speak with confidence and authority.

INCOMING DEAN TO FOCUS EARLY EFFORTS ON INCREASING DARDEN BRAND’S APPEAL IN EUROPE

A major effort to to recruit more international students has lifted international enrollment to 36%, in line with most other U.S. business schools. “The faculty has spent a lot more time outside the U.S. than we had and that is really because of our Executive MBA program,” says Neher. “Now that we have people on the ground in China and Brazil for two weeks, interacting with applicants and alumni, it has made a big difference.”

The school also partnered with a local Charlottesville, Va., company called Speak! Language Center to both assess and provide English language instruction to some international applicants to get them up to speed before they arrive on campus. Darden has been using B-Speak!, the name of the one-on-one instruction program, on conditional offers to international applicants who are take lessons via Skype. “We want them have strong professional English and this company can tailor the instruction to the individual,” she says. “That has really helped with people I would have been concerned about before.”

Neher said Darden’s incoming dean, McKinsey & Co. partner Scott Beardsley, who starts on Aug. 1, has taken “a particular interest in Europeans and in-bound consultants to the school. We are doing a big event in Paris on his first Darden trip in September, along with a regional alumni reunion and an investing summit.

DON’T MISS: 2015-2016 MBA APPLICATION DEADLINES AT TOP BUSINESS SCHOOLS or DARDEN’S NEW REFRESH OF ITS MBA PROGRAM