MBA Class Of 2024: Apps To MIT Sloan Down By A Quarter

From 2019 to 2021, MIT Sloan School of Management had the highest growth in MBA application volume of any M7 school, and among the highest of any business school anywhere.

Those were the days.

As part of its Class of 2024 profile released Thursday (October 13), the Sloan School reports that MBA applications in the 2021-2022 cycle returned to pre-pandemic levels, down more than 1,700 apps from last year to 5,349. That’s almost a 25% drop, the steepest loss of any top-25 B-school for which data has been reported.

But this is MIT, so the Sloan School’s class profile is still filled with historic benchmarks — notably a record enrollment of women and underrepresented minorities.

APP VOLUME RETURNS TO LEVEL OF 2019 INTAKE

MBA applications to full-time MBA programs declined across the B-school landscape in 2021-2022. The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania saw a 14% decline, and Harvard Business School was down 15.4%. Stanford was down 16.5%, second-worst among M7 schools (though one M7 school, Northwestern Kellogg, declined to report an application total this year). Chicago Booth saw a 13.6% decline, while fellow M7 school Columbia was down 5.5%. Yale SOM's apps were down 16.5%. At Michigan Ross the loss was 9.3%; at NYU Stern, 10%. One of the largest-reported app declines so far has occurred at UCLA Anderson, which lost 20% of its total year to year; declines on the milder side have occurred at Duke Fuqua (6%), Georgetown McDonough (5.4%), and Virginia Darden, where they fell just 3.5%. Texas McCombs dropped 11.2%.

Nor was the downturn confined to the U.S.: London Business School's apps were down this year by 15%.

Nearly all the Class of 2024 profiles have now been publicly released, and only three top-25 U.S. B-schools have reported increases in applications from 2020-2021 to 2021-2022: Cornell Johnson Graduate School of Management, where apps were up by more than 21%; UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School, where they were up an incredible 32%; and USC Marshall School of Business, where they were up nearly 10%.

With 1,763 fewer apps this year than last, MIT Sloan's drop-off was 24.8%, which surely contributed to the school shrinking its class size by 42 seats to 408. Still, the Sloan School made some history, enrolling a class that sets new school records with 46% women and 32% under-represented minorities; the latter figure (up from 23% in 2021) is another school record and places Sloan first among the M7 and the top 10 of U.S. B-schools. Sloan's 54% U.S. minorities is also an M7 best. MIT also posted its best undergrad GPA average in years at 3.62, maintained its 730 median Graduate Management Admission Test score and maintained its levels of work experience (five years), mid-80% GMAT range (690-760), Graduate Record Exam Quant 80% range (158-169), and GRE Verbal 80% range (157-168).

NO MAJOR SHIFTS IN STUDENT BACKGROUND

Once again there were no major shifts in the pre-MBA industry or undergraduate major makeup of the new Sloan MBA class compared to previous years. Most new Sloanies usually come from the consulting industry, and that was again the case this year (23%, up 1 point from 2021), but for the first time since at least 2018 students with financial services backgrounds were just as plentiful, with that industry increasing 2 points from last year. Tech and government/nonprofit were tied at 14% apiece.

Engineering continues to be king among Sloanies' undergraduate majors, but slipped to 29% from a full third of the class of 2023. Business surged 5 points to 23%, and economics slipped 2 points to 17%. Both Math & Science and Social Sciences majors jumped significantly, the former by 6 points to 15% and the latter by 4 points to 10%.

 

DON'T MISS LAST YEAR'S STORY ON THE MIT SLOAN MBA CLASS OF 2023 and HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL MBA CLASS PROFILE: APPS DOWN 15%, BUT HBS AGAIN ENROLLS LARGEST-EVER MBA CLASS