Posts by Alex Kelly

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, we wanted to take a moment today to celebrate the good luck that our community members have shared on MBA DecisionWire this season. For the uninitiated, MBA DecisionWire is a social tool that allows posters to share their admissions results (complete with scholarship offers), and get feedback from the Clear Admit community as they decide where to enroll. Here are some stats about DecisionWire posters starting an MBA in Fall 2021: The median number of acceptances is 3 (average 2.75) 😎 29% reported acceptances to four or more schools 👀 77% reported at Read more

The global pandemic has shut down campus visit programs and in-person admissions events, changing the ways candidates are learning about and engaging with MBA and other graduate management degree programs. Clear Admit and our partner schools want to learn about the information that’s most important to you as you’re researching graduate programs and deciding where to apply. We also want to understand where you’re looking for that information, and how business school admissions teams can best meet your informational needs. This survey will take you 10-15 minutes to complete. The questions will touch on your preferences for virtual Read more

As Fall 2020 MBA admits have had some time to get their heads around the potential impact of COVID-19 on their MBA experience, we’ve continued to survey our audience to keep our finger on the pulse of prospective students’ preferences and plans. Today, we’re reporting the findings of our latest survey, which focused on admitted MBA students’ feelings about the possibilities of online instruction and reduced international student representation due to social distancing requirements and potential travel bans related to the novel coronavirus. Four hundred ninety people responded to this survey, which was in the field between May 4th and Read more

Another week, another survey! We’re very happy to continue supporting schools and incoming students alike through our survey research, and as always we appreciate your input. At this point, Fall 2020 MBA admits have had some time to get their heads around the ways their business school experience might impact COVID-19 and related social distancing measures. To keep our finger on the pulse of students’ evolving preferences, this latest survey explores prospective students’ current thinking related to two key areas: the possibility of online curriculum delivery at the start of the Fall 2020 term, and the possibility of reduced Read more

Following up on our quick survey about how prospective MBA students expected COVID-19 to impact their b-school experience, we conducted some additional survey research a few weeks ago to better understand the nature of prospective students’ coronavirus-related concerns. As promised, we’ve crunched the numbers and are sharing our findings with the Clear Admit community today. The vast majority of respondents were hoping to enroll at full-time MBA programs in the United States. Because U.S. citizens and non-U.S. citizens are likely facing different barriers related to matriculation, all findings are presented separately for these two groups of Read more

Business schools, admitted students, and prospective applicants alike are wondering how best to move forward amidst the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic. As you likely know, we launched an exploratory survey a few weeks ago about how applicants and admits expect COVID-19 to impact their MBA experience. We’re now conducting a follow-up survey of Fall 2020 MBA admits to dive deeper into the nature of their coronavirus-related concerns. We’ll be sharing the results directly with MBA programs to help them understand and address admitted students’ concerns. And of course, we’ll also publish our findings Read more

Yesterday, we shared the results of our COVID-19 MBA Impact Survey, which asked Fall 2020 MBA admits how the novel coronavirus outbreak is influencing their decision-making about matriculating, and how much they anticipated COVID-19 to impact the educational experience and career outcomes for MBA students starting this fall. Today, we’re sharing some additional analysis to help our readers better understand the relationships among these three variables as they interpret the survey findings and what they mean for incoming students and school stakeholders. A Quick Note About Correlation Correlation is simply the relationship between two variables. For Read more

COVID-19 and the extreme measures required to slow its spread have had a profound impact on workers, students, families, and the global economy. With established day-to-day routines being wildly disrupted, major life changes—like enrolling in a full-time MBA program—can seem even more daunting than usual. After seeing some lively conversation on LiveWire among members of the Clear Admit community earlier this month, we put together a quick survey to get a sense of how the novel coronavirus pandemic is factoring into prospective students’ decision-making about pursuing an MBA. Most of our respondents had already applied for Read more

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. Read more

At this point in the summer, many MBA applicants are prepping for the GMAT, reflecting on potential recommendation-writers, and deciding which schools to target in the fall. Some are even getting some initial feedback on their candidacies via MBA ApplyWire. Our team of experts loves hearing about your plans and sharing their thoughts on your schools and application strategy. We have another Wire tool that can be tremendously helpful to MBA hopefuls who are just starting their application processes – though its usefulness may be a bit less obvious. MBA DecisionWire allows Read more

Last week, we shared our LiveWire data-based hunch that 2018-2019 was another slow year for applications to full-time, two-year MBA programs. Based on those results, we were curious as to whether we would see this reflected in the GPA and GMAT scores of applicants who report good news from leading business schools. Specifically, we wondered if schools have needed to ease their academic standards given that they seem to have had fewer applicants to choose from over the past few years. To examine this, we again segmented LiveWire updates by admissions season, looking at results submitted Read more

Declining application volume for full-time, two-year MBA programs was a trend of significant interest—and some concern—among graduate management education stakeholders during the 2017-2018 academic year. With another admissions season drawing to a close, we wondered what data from Clear Admit’s LiveWire tool might be able to tell us about application volume for 2018-2019. LiveWire allows MBA applicants to post updates about admissions process milestones in real time, sharing news about school-specific outcomes like interview invitations, acceptances, waitlist decisions, and rejections with their fellow prospective students in the Clear Admit community. While each Read more