GMAC Advisor

To stay focused on your goals, multitask smarter by thinking “optimize” over “maximize.”

The MBA application process is a time of uncertainty for prospective students and schools alike. Students wonder “Will I be accepted?” and “How will I afford an MBA?” while schools are faced with questions such as “How do we attract the best and brightest to our program?” “To whom should we offer scholarships?” and “Will we meet our (sometimes ambitious) enrollment goals?”

The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) has acquired the UK-based online publishing company BusinessBecause. 

Starting on April 16, the exam will be shorter by 30 minutes to give candidates a more streamlined test-taking experience and help increase their confidence. The total test time on the updated exam will now be 3.5 hours instead of four hours, including breaks and instructions.

Graduate management education (GME) is more global than ever before. In today’s GME landscape, building an incoming class that reflects the future of global business leadership means proactively making recruitment inroads in both established and emerging candidate markets. This work depends on reliable market intelligence to maximize impact with limited travel and outreach budgets.

Deciding to pursue a graduate management education is a big decision in candidates’ lives, and like any big life decision most candidates depend on the opinions of others to help guide their choices. Understanding who is influencing the decisions of different types of candidates can give business school admissions and recruitment professionals insight into candidates’ mindsets and behaviors, and help them better position the value proposition of their programs to align with candidates’ goals.

In GMAC Research’s annual Forward-Looking Review webinar in January, we discussed how an important trend we’d be continuing to watch closely in 2018 is international student mobility, which in 2017 saw significant shifts that impacted many programs’ overall application volumes. A new data brief from GMAC Research, published on gmac.com this week, shows that halfway through the current admissions cycle many U.S. business school programs are continuing to see declining interest from international candidates.

For many business school candidates, the investment they make in their graduate management education will be among the most substantial investments they make in their lives. The implication of this fact for school admissions and recruitment professionals is not only that you should have an appreciation for the financial importance of a candidates’ decision to pursue business school, but also that you should have a sense of how various kinds of candidates plan to finance their degree.

The mba.com Prospective Students Survey—the largest data resource of its kind available to the graduate management education community—provides business schools around the world with reliable survey data to inform their understanding of candidate demand.