Published: November 4, 2019
DecisionWire Insight: Qualified MBA Candidates May Be Having Success at More Programs
As we discussed earlier this admissions season, data from our MBA LiveWire tool reflect the well-publicized fact that application volume at two-year full-time MBA programs in the U.S. has been on the decline in recent years—but with no discernible impact on academic standards for admission to the leading MBA programs.
But surely the impact of declining application volume is evident somewhere in the application pipeline, right?
As MBA programs hold fast to their admissions standards with fewer candidates to choose among, we wondered whether this might translate to qualified candidates receiving admission offers from more schools. To explore this, we turned to data submitted via our MBA DecisionWire tool. DecisionWire allows MBA applicants to report the schools they applied to and the schools to which they were admitted (candidates can also report where they've decided to enroll, or seek advice from other Clear Admit community members about which program they should attend). We segmented DecisionWire entries by entry year, creating four groups: users who planned to begin an MBA program in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019. We then looked at the number of admission offers reported by users in each group to see if there were differences.
Application and Acceptance Descriptive Statistics
As a quick statistics refresher, the mean reflects the average value of a variable, while the standard deviation is a measure of the overall variability of the data. A smaller standard deviation means that scores are tightly clustered around the mean, whereas a larger standard deviation suggests more varied and widely ranging values for a given variable.
The first table below reflects the mean and standard deviation for the number of applications submitted by DecisionWire users over the past four admissions seasons. These numbers hold fairly steady over time, with DecisionWire users reporting an average of just 4 submissions.
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