Rising Competition Means More Business School Scholarships
MBA prospects can—and should expect to—negotiate for more, or some, money. Here’s how.
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It’s a buyer’s market for MBAs these days, and schools are ready to deal. Big and small programs, prestigious and not, dangle scholarships in front of students who need them or don’t. “The landscape of full-time MBA recruitment has shifted into a period of relentless competition,” says an administrator at a state business school who asked not to be identified so they could speak candidly about their program. “Higher-ranked institutions are now aggressively pursuing and providing substantial scholarships to well-qualified candidates who likely would not have met their admissions thresholds before the pandemic.”
“There’s a scholarship war, to put it bluntly,” says Patrik Wallén, the head of MBA admissions at IESE Business School in Barcelona. “We lost a candidate in round one that we wanted, he was really good. But he got a top American school, full scholarship, 100%, and living expenses. We kind of countered, gave him a little bit more, but it was impossible.”