Applications to American business schools, including MBA programs, have fallen for five straight years according to this recent WSJ article.

Compared to last year, business school applications to US schools are down about 9.1%; whereas they have been rising in other parts of the world. If you look at the change in applications from international students, the drop is even more significant -- about 13.7%.

Here are two charts from the WSJ:

There are a couple of possible explanations for this. Tech is/has been hot. I would imagine that space has been absorbing many people who would have historically gone to do an MBA.

But perhaps more significantly, stricter immigration policies are making it harder for international students to come to the US. At the same time, top tier alternatives are emerging around the world, such as in China.

China exports more business school students than any other country and they are by far the largest international student base in the US. But the numbers are coming down. At the peak in 2015, the US issued nearly 275,000 student visas to people from China. By 2017, that number had more than halved to 112,817.

Out of curiosity, I decided to look up the class profile for the most recent Rotman MBA cohort (my alma mater). 70% of the class was born outside of Canada. That's not surprising.

Charts: WSJ

“Like the United States, and thanks to the United States, MIT gains tremendous strength by being a magnet for talent from around the world. Faculty, students, post-docs and staff from 134 other nations join us here because they love our mission, our values and our community.” -L.Rafael Reif, MIT President

The MIT Senseable City Lab recently analyzed nearly 20 years of ethnographic student data in order to visualize the origins of its international faculty, students, and researchers from 1999 to the present.

The above chart may be a bit small (larger version here), but it shows all students (undergraduate, graduate, and visiting/others) by country. The top 5 countries are China, India, Canada, South Korea, and France.

To give you some sense of the math, there are 3,808 international students at MIT as of 2017. 888 of them alone are from China – mostly at the graduate level (688 out of the 888). So China represents almost ¼ of MIT’s international student population.

Another thing that stood out for me was the drop off in Canadians in 2009. You can see that “V” roughly in the middle of the chart. Canada went from 233 to 144 students. I wonder if this had something to do with the economic climate at the time. Not sure.

Click here to see all of the visualizations. 

Note that you can toggle by region and country, as well as by “Trump’s EO Countries.” That feature, as well as the quote at the beginning of this post, should give you an immediate appreciation for some of the motivations behind this exercise.

Images: MIT Senseable City Lab

Applications to American business schools, including MBA programs, have fallen for five straight years according to this recent WSJ article.

Compared to last year, business school applications to US schools are down about 9.1%; whereas they have been rising in other parts of the world. If you look at the change in applications from international students, the drop is even more significant -- about 13.7%.

Here are two charts from the WSJ:

There are a couple of possible explanations for this. Tech is/has been hot. I would imagine that space has been absorbing many people who would have historically gone to do an MBA.

But perhaps more significantly, stricter immigration policies are making it harder for international students to come to the US. At the same time, top tier alternatives are emerging around the world, such as in China.

China exports more business school students than any other country and they are by far the largest international student base in the US. But the numbers are coming down. At the peak in 2015, the US issued nearly 275,000 student visas to people from China. By 2017, that number had more than halved to 112,817.

Out of curiosity, I decided to look up the class profile for the most recent Rotman MBA cohort (my alma mater). 70% of the class was born outside of Canada. That's not surprising.

Charts: WSJ

“Like the United States, and thanks to the United States, MIT gains tremendous strength by being a magnet for talent from around the world. Faculty, students, post-docs and staff from 134 other nations join us here because they love our mission, our values and our community.” -L.Rafael Reif, MIT President

The MIT Senseable City Lab recently analyzed nearly 20 years of ethnographic student data in order to visualize the origins of its international faculty, students, and researchers from 1999 to the present.

The above chart may be a bit small (larger version here), but it shows all students (undergraduate, graduate, and visiting/others) by country. The top 5 countries are China, India, Canada, South Korea, and France.

To give you some sense of the math, there are 3,808 international students at MIT as of 2017. 888 of them alone are from China – mostly at the graduate level (688 out of the 888). So China represents almost ¼ of MIT’s international student population.

Another thing that stood out for me was the drop off in Canadians in 2009. You can see that “V” roughly in the middle of the chart. Canada went from 233 to 144 students. I wonder if this had something to do with the economic climate at the time. Not sure.

Click here to see all of the visualizations. 

Note that you can toggle by region and country, as well as by “Trump’s EO Countries.” That feature, as well as the quote at the beginning of this post, should give you an immediate appreciation for some of the motivations behind this exercise.

Images: MIT Senseable City Lab