The Crisis Geoffrey Garrett Leaves Behind At USC Marshall

USC Marshall School of Business Dean Geoffrey Garrett, who has said he will step down this month after a turbulent start to his second term

When Geoffrey Garrett announced his plan to step down as dean of USC’s Marshall School of Business in June, USC characterized it as an orderly leadership transition – Garrett would leave the deanship in August for a newly created role as special advisor to the president for global strategy and engagement. 

The timing said otherwise: the move landed just weeks before Marshall faculty were set to hold a no-confidence vote, following an April letter in which 52 professors – roughly a fifth of the full-time faculty – warned that the school was on a “downward trajectory.”

An MBA student at the Marshall School, speaking to Poets&Quants soon after the faculty letter was made public, echoed the concerns, citing, among other issues, dramatically declining job placement numbers under Garrett’s leadership. “In a class of about 200, only around 40% to 50% had full-time offers,” the student said, claiming to speak for many in their class. “There’s a lot of frustration. Once you’re in the program, you’re in it. You’ve already made the investment.”

A SHRINKING POOL FORCED SELECTIVITY DOWN

Now, admissions data available through U.S. News & World Report reveal one of the chief problems the faculty were responding to. Marshall received just 1,914 MBA applications in the 2024-2025 cycle, down from 3,198 the year before – a one-year decline of 1,284 applications, or 40.2%. That is the steepest single-year drop of any Poets&Quants top-25 MBA program, in a year when most peers posted increases or only modest declines. 

Widen the lens and it gets worse: MBA apps have fallen 1,252, or 39.5%, over three years at the Marshall School, from 3,166 in 2022-2023 – the only P&Q top-25 program with a three-year decline.

The consequence of a shrinking applicant pool was a rapidly rising acceptance rate. Marshall admitted 740 students against 3,198 applicants in 2023-2024, an acceptance rate of 23.1%. The following cycle, against just 1,914 applications, Marshall admitted 600 – an acceptance rate of 31.3%, an 8-point jump in a single year. A program that recently turned away 3 of every 4 applicants is now admitting nearly 1 in 3.

The gap is now stark enough to embarrass a program with USC’s extraordinary resources, which include a robust alumni network, a global brand, and a location that can’t be beat. Compare Marshall’s numbers with Rochester’s Simon Business School – ranked 30th by P&Q and well below Marshall in most other major rankings, and enrolling a much smaller class: The Simon School drew 2,256 MBA applications in 2024-2025, up 12.3% from 2,009 the year before and up a third over three years, from 1,692 in 2022-2023. Marshall, over that same three-year window, went the opposite direction, shedding nearly 40% of its applicant pool. In other words, a school outside the top 25 now out-applies Marshall by more than 300 applications.

The applicant collapse tracked a shrinking class. Marshall enrolled 176 MBA students in 2025, down from 211 the year before – the second-largest one-year class-size cut of any top-50 program, behind only UNC Kenan-Flagler.

A RANKINGS SLIDE NEARLY ACROSS THE BOARD

Marshall’s full-time MBA fell to 25th in the latest U.S. News ranking, making for a 10-spot drop over three years, and was dropped from the 2026 Fortune MBA ranking after placing 22nd the year prior. That built on a rough stretch across the major rankings: In 2024, Marshall fell from 21st to 33rd with The Financial Times, from 15th to 18th with U.S. News, and 11 spots to 41st with CEOWorld, while dropping four spots to 22nd with Fortune – losing ground in five of six major rankings that year. In the Bloomberg Businessweek ranking, USC fell from 17th to 30th in the 2024 cycle, but rebounded to 20th in September 2025 – still lower than it had been in any year since Garrett took over in 2020.

The USC faculty’s April letter connected these threads explicitly, citing a “demonstrated decline in the enrollments and quality of students at our school” and pointing to preliminary admissions data across Marshall’s MBA programs suggesting a significant revenue shortfall – concerns that, at the time, had no public numbers attached. They do now.

A DIFFICULT INHERITANCE

Garrett arrived at USC in 2020 after serving as dean of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Marshall School can point to real gains under his tenure: five new joint undergraduate degrees, an expanded global footprint, and roughly $200 million raised over the past three years. But the MBA program he left behind tells a different story – a 10-spot U.S. News decline in three years, a shrinking class, sustained faculty opposition, and now the steepest application drop of any top-25 program in the country.

It is unclear when in August Garrett will step down. As of Wednesday (August 5), he is still listed as the dean of the Marshall School at the school’s website.

When Garrett does step down, USC has named Andrew Call, dean of the Leventhal School of Accounting, as interim dean, with former Marshall Dean Jim Ellis assisting in an advisory capacity. There is irony there: Garrett’s arrival in 2020 followed USC’s controversial ouster of Ellis, Marshall’s popular former dean. Five years later, it’s Ellis returning to help steady the school Garrett is leaving behind.

Whoever takes the job permanently inherits a program that must rebuild applicant confidence before it can rebuild anything else. That work starts from the bottom of a hole no one at USC has fully explained.

DON’T MISS USC MARSHALL DEAN UNDER FIRE: FACULTY REVOLT OVER ‘DOWNWARD TRAJECTORY’ and USC MARSHALL DEAN GEOFFREY GARRETT TO STEP DOWN AHEAD OF PLANNED NO-CONFIDENCE VOTE

© Copyright 2026 Poets & Quants. All rights reserved. This article may not be republished, rewritten or otherwise distributed without written permission. To reprint or license this article or any content from Poets & Quants, please submit your request HERE.