The Crisis Geoffrey Garrett Leaves Behind At USC Marshall

Editor’s note: This story originally incorrectly stated that USC Marshall’s 2021 tuition was $53,806; it was actually $62,760, making the increase over five years 33.6%, not 55.8%. P&Q regrets the error. 

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.

TUITION AT USC & PEER SCHOOLS, 2021-2025

School	2021 Tuition	2025 Tuition	5-Year Increase
USC Marshall	$62,760	$83,853	33.6%
Notre Dame Mendoza	$58,030	$73,260	26.2%
Rice Jones	$63,500	$76,073	19.8%
Vanderbilt Owen	$62,750	$74,500	18.7%
UCLA Anderson	$67,737	$79,452	17.3%
Carnegie Mellon Tepper	$70,000	$81,340	16.2%
Georgetown McDonough	$60,894	$70,108	15.1%
UNC Kenan-Flagler	$66,840	$74,138	10.9%
Emory Goizueta	$70,741	$76,900	8.7%

Source: Poets&Quants analysis of B-school data

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A REASON FOR THE REVOLT: TUITION ROSE BY 33% IN 5 YEARS

What fueled the collapse in apps that, in turn, sparked the faculty revolt? A major disconnect between pricing and outcomes certainly played a role. Marshall’s annual tuition climbed from $62,760 in 2021 to $83,853 in 2025 – a 33.6% increase over five years, steepest of any school in its peer set. (See table above.) Comparable programs raised tuition more modestly over the same stretch, with only Notre Dame Mendoza coming close to Marshall’s pace.

The gap in dollar terms is just as stark: Marshall raised tuition by roughly $20,000 over five years, while Emory’s increase, for example, was about $6,200, UNC’s $7,300, and Georgetown’s $9,200.

Marshall went from being one of the cheaper options in this peer group to one of the priciest. Meanwhile outcomes for its graduates took a turn for the worse – not a unique problem, but significantly worse than at USC’s peer schools.

EMPLOYMENT RATES AT USC & PEER SCHOOLS, 2022-2025

School	2022 Average Salary	2025 Average Salary	Change	2025 Employment (3 Months)
USC Marshall	$150,314	$142,184	-5.4%	71%
Carnegie Mellon Tepper	$148,067	$154,846	4.6%	79.7%
UNC Kenan-Flagler	$133,517	$139,637	4.6%	84.7%
Emory Goizueta	$149,759	$157,691	5.3%	80.7%
Georgetown McDonough	$138,552	$146,265	5.6%	78%
Rice Jones	$142,212	$146,381	2.9%	NA
Vanderbilt Owen	$139,711	$148,962	6.6%	87.9%
UCLA Anderson	$146,727	$153,566	4.7%	76%

Source: Poets&Quants analysis of B-school employment reports

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EMPLOYMENT OUTCOMES FELL AS FAST AS TUITION ROSE

The price increase would be easier to defend if career outcomes had kept pace. They didn’t. Marshall reported 97% of its Class of 2022-2023 employed within three months of graduation, an all-time high, with an average base salary of $150,314. By the Class of 2025, that employment rate had fallen to 71% (see table above), with average salary down to $142,184 – a 26-point drop in employment and an $8,130 salary decline in three years, even as tuition kept climbing.

Salaries told a similar story relative to peers. Emory Goizueta’s average rose from $149,759 to $157,691 over the same window, Tepper’s from $148,067 to $154,846, and Vanderbilt Owen’s from $139,711 to $148,962 – while Marshall’s fell.

The broader 2025 MBA hiring market was rough across the board, with peers like Emory and Tepper also posting employment declines. But at 71%, Marshall’s rate landed well below even those battered peer numbers – Vanderbilt Owen reported 87.9%, UNC Kenan-Flagler 84.7%, Emory Goizueta 80.7%, and Tepper 79.7% for the same class year.

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.

As of Tuesday (August 11), Garrett was no longer still listed as the dean of the Marshall School at the school’s website, instead carrying the title Special Advisor to the President for Global Strategy and Engagement.

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

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