GMAC’s Bluntest Survey Yet: U.S. Losing Global Talent, Candidates Want Proof Not Promises

The prospective business school candidate of 2026 is not the MBA applicant of a decade ago. They’re less interested in reinventing themselves and more focused on protecting what they’ve already built. They’re watching U.S. immigration policy with alarm – and quietly updating their spreadsheets to include programs in Frankfurt, Barcelona, and Singapore. And half of them now consider AI fluency a non-negotiable part of any business school curriculum worth their time.

Those are among the headline findings from the 2026 GMAC Prospective Students Survey, released today (March 24), which draws on data collected throughout 2025 from 4,253 individuals across 145 countries – 46% of whom are women, and 75% of whom are Gen Z.

The picture that emerges is of a candidate market under real structural pressure: from geopolitical disruption, from a post-Great Resignation labor market that has swung back toward employers, and from a generation of applicants who have been raised to scrutinize return on investment before they sign anything.

“The direction of the future candidate pipeline is being reshaped by what, how, and increasingly where prospective students choose to study,” says Joy Jones, GMAC’s CEO, in an introduction to the report, which is available at GMAC.com. “Candidates are becoming ever more disciplined in how they assess return on investment, challenging programs to demonstrate clear relevance and concrete outcomes. Success in this environment will hinge on how effectively schools communicate measurable value and build trust with prospective students navigating an increasingly complex global landscape.”

See P&Q’s report on last year’s GMAC Prospective Students Survey.

THE CAREER PIVOT IS OUT. THE SKILLS UPGRADE IS IN.

Perhaps the most significant long-term trend in the report is a fundamental shift in why candidates want a graduate business degree at all.

In 2022, 58% of global candidates cited changing industries or job functions as a motivation for pursuing graduate management education. By 2025, that figure had fallen to 42% – a 16-point drop that held across every age cohort. Candidates aged 40 and older showed the steepest decline, falling 19 points over the four-year period. Even 25-to-30-year-olds – still the most likely age group to seek a career change through a degree – dropped 13 points.

What replaced career-switching as a motivator? Skill acquisition and economic self-defense. Nearly three-quarters of candidates in 2025 reported wanting to pursue graduate school to gain business knowledge – actually surpassing the desire to increase income, which has historically been the dominant financial motivator. And nearly a quarter of all candidates said the prospect of an economic recession triggered their application plans, making it the third-most commonly cited trigger globally.

This shift toward ROI-consciousness is showing up in what candidates actually research. Among full-time MBA candidates, career outcomes and ROI have climbed to the top of the research list at statistically significant rates since 2023 – while interest in researching program rankings has seen a statistically significant decline among both full-time MBA and non-MBA business master’s candidates. The old logic of “get into the best-ranked program you can” is giving way to “show me what happens to your graduates.”

WHY THE U.S. IS LOSING THE GLOBAL TALENT COMPETITION 

The most politically charged findings in the report concern study destination preferences, and they make uncomfortable reading for U.S. business schools.

The United States remains the top preferred study destination among global candidates overall – but that lead is narrowing, and among non-U.S. citizens specifically, the trend line is hard to ignore. Among this population, Western Europe has already overtaken the U.S. as the most preferred destination. From 2024 to 2025, preference for the U.S. among non-U.S. citizens fell six points, while preference for Western Europe rose four points. The declines were most pronounced among candidates from Central and South Asia and Latin America.

The data gets more granular – and more alarming – when GMAC tracks application plans over the course of 2025. Among all global candidates, there was a statistically significant 10-point decline in plans to submit applications to U.S. programs from Q1 to Q4 – dropping from 63% to 53% over a single calendar year.

Among Central and South Asian candidates specifically, that drop was 21 points – from 72% planning to apply to U.S. programs at the start of 2025 to just 51% by year-end. Over the same period, this cohort’s application plans to East and Southeast Asian programs statistically doubled. Their plans to apply to programs in the Middle East grew from 2% to 9% – a small but striking number that signals candidates are exploring destinations that barely registered on their radar before.

GMAC is direct about the cause. The survey tracked international candidates’ attitudes toward U.S. study on a monthly basis throughout 2024 and 2025. Following Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, the share of non-U.S. candidates reporting deterrence began climbing steadily. By December 2025, roughly 40% of non-U.S. respondents said U.S. government policies and practices had made them less likely to pursue graduate management education here – a figure that had stood in the low teens just a year earlier. The report specifically cites announcements around global tariffs, potential changes to the H-1B visa program, and the “informal chilling effects that accompany these formal policy positions.”

Jones framed it in strategic terms: “Business schools should factor in the elasticity of evolving patterns in global student mobility as candidates explore a broader array of study destinations worldwide.” For admissions teams, that means rebalancing recruitment targets and yield strategies toward geographies where application intent is rising, rather than relying on historical sending markets.

AI IS NOW A BASELINE – AND THE NUMBERS ARE REMARKABLE

The survey’s AI findings deserve attention. In 2022, the year OpenAI launched ChatGPT, just 17% of prospective B-school students said using AI tools should be part of their ideal curriculum. In 2023 that figure was 40%. In 2024, 46%. In 2025: 50%.

AI is now the third-most desired curricular topic among global GME candidates overall, surpassing leadership, corporate finance, and international business. It has broken into the top five curricular expectations across nearly every degree type – including 56% of full-time MBA candidates, 50% of professional MBA candidates, 64% of Master of Business Analytics candidates, and 56% of Master of Marketing candidates.

Candidates aren’t looking for AI as a bolt-on. Two-thirds want hands-on integration through business simulations and practical applications, 62% want courses exploring how AI informs business strategy, and 58% want AI applied to decision-making processes. Prompt engineering and personalized learning paths are the least popular applications – a useful signal for curriculum designers tempted to lead with the flashiest material.

WHERE EMPLOYERS & CANDIDATES DIVERGE – AND WHAT SCHOOLS SHOULD DO ABOUT IT

One of the report’s most practically useful sections maps the gap between what candidates want to learn and what employers actually value when hiring.

The alignment at the top is strong: both groups rank strategic thinking and problem-solving as the most important skills to develop in business school, and more than half of both candidates and employers also value communication skills. Expected, perhaps – but worth confirming.

The divergence below the top line is more instructive. Candidates are significantly more interested than employers in developing global business skills, cross-cultural competence, and human capital management – capabilities candidates may view as markers of leadership readiness, but which employers may expect to develop on the job rather than in the classroom.

The more useful gap runs the other way. Employers consistently place greater value than candidates on initiative, coachability, and emotional intelligence. The gap on coachability is particularly wide: 38% of employers rate it as a top skill to develop in business school, versus just 23% of candidates. On emotional intelligence, 40% of employers versus 29% of candidates. On initiative, 44% of employers versus 31% of candidates.

These are not soft-skills talking points. They are capabilities that employers report candidates are actually showing up short on – and that candidates appear to consistently undervalue in their own development planning. For business schools, the opportunity is real: use employer testimonials and outcome data to help candidates understand why these interpersonal capabilities matter as much as technical fluency. Graduates who don’t grasp the value of coachability before they hit the job market are likely to be caught off guard when it becomes a performance factor.

“When building new strategies, business schools should factor in the elasticity of evolving patterns in global student mobility,” Jones says. “Insights from the GMAC Prospective Students Survey suggest that success in this environment will hinge on how effectively schools communicate measurable value and build trust with prospective students navigating an increasingly complex global landscape.”

MBA VERSUS MASTER’S: THE AGE-BASED DIVIDE WIDENS

The report documents a continued and sharpening split in degree preference by age. The full-time MBA’s core pipeline – 25-to-30-year-olds – has maintained consistent preferences since 2019. More than half of candidates in that cohort still prefer the full-time MBA.

Among candidates 22 and younger, the story is different. 69% of the youngest candidates now favor business master’s over MBA programs – a figure that has grown significantly compared to pre-pandemic levels. MBA preference among 23-to-24-year-olds dropped sharply in the most recent data, falling from 41% in 2024 to just 33% in 2025.

The Master of Accounting deserves particular attention. U.S. candidates’ interest in the degree has surged from just 4% in 2023 to 19% in 2025 – with much of the recent growth driven by women and pre-experience candidates. In Western Europe, meanwhile, full-time MBA preference dropped from 28% to 21% in a single year as business master’s preference climbed from 53% to 63%.

On career ambitions, pre-experience candidates are showing declining interest in technology jobs – down to 24% among candidates 22 and younger – and growing enthusiasm for financial services, where that same cohort now reports 54% interest, up from roughly 30% in 2019. GMAC’s qualitative Gen Z research suggests this reflects a generation prioritizing career stability and financial security above sector prestige. Candidates aged 25-39, by contrast, are more interested in technology careers than in 2019, even amid prominent layoffs.

A 12-POINT GENDER GAP – AND STRUCTURAL CONCERNS UNDERNEATH

The modality findings contain a number that should give admissions deans pause. In 2025, there was a 12-point gender gap in preference for full-time, in-person study – the largest recorded since at least 2019. Men’s preference for in-person learning grew from 2024 to 2025; women’s dipped. 79% of men now prefer full-time, in-person study versus 67% of women.

GMAC stops short of framing this as a simple preference difference. The report notes that women’s interest in flexible formats is likely tied to “structural economic and social factors such as outsized familial obligations,” and flags recent research showing return-to-office mandates are pushing women out of jobs due to caregiving responsibilities. “Business schools offering full-time and flexible modalities alike should be wary of labor market trends like this spilling into the classroom,” the report states.

First-generation candidates tell a parallel story: 64% prefer full-time, in-person learning versus 77% of non-first-generation candidates, with the remainder spread across online, hybrid, and part-time formats.

The gender and first-generation gaps have direct enrollment consequences. Women candidates plan to submit fewer applications than men on average (4.32 versus 4.58) and report a median willingness to pay of $30,000 – versus $45,600 for men. First-generation candidates report a median willingness to pay of just $22,200, compared to $45,000 for non-first-generation candidates. U.S. underrepresented candidates report a median willingness to pay of $30,000 versus $50,000 for their non-underrepresented peers.

Full-time MBA candidates, by contrast, report the highest cost tolerance of any degree type – with a median willingness to pay of $64,200, nearly double that of professional MBA candidates ($33,300) and more than triple that of Master of Entrepreneurship candidates ($20,000).

THE EARLY PIPELINE PROBLEM

One of the more actionable findings in the report concerns the gap between candidates who are early in their decision journey and those who are close to applying. Early-stage candidates – those more than two years out – are seven percentage points more concerned about program cost than near-term applicants, and significantly more worried about career disruption and time demands.

The practical implication for admissions teams: by the time a candidate is ready to apply, many of their biggest fears have already been worked through – often through exposure to concrete information. Schools that wait until the late funnel to address cost, ROI, and lifestyle questions are leaving early-stage candidates with unresolved concerns that may push them toward other pathways entirely.

Social influence is also playing a larger role in triggering application plans than before the pandemic. Compared to 2019, candidates are now significantly more likely to say their parents, friends, or professors prompted them to explore graduate school – with 20% of candidates reporting that their friends’ plans to pursue a graduate degree influenced their own thinking. That influence grew across every age cohort, not just younger candidates.

See the complete GMAC report here. 

AND DON’T MISS OUR REPORT ON THE 2025 GMAC PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS SURVEY and 2025 MBA ADMISSIONS ADVICE: THE COMPLETE COLLECTION

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