For Prospective B-School Students, It’s All About ROI
Vague ambitions, about leadership and earnings, recede in new applicant survey.
Illustration by Oscar Bolton Green. Photo: Getty Images
It’s a longstanding debate: Is an MBA worth the ever-rising tuition? In just the last four years, as Bloomberg Businessweek reports, MBA tuition has increased an average of 11% in the US. Now a study from the Graduate Management Admission Council, an organization that supports business school marketing and admissions efforts, highlights how cost has come to dominate prospective students’ thinking around earning an MBA or other B-school degree.
The survey of thousands of likely B-school applicants worldwide, conducted throughout 2025, reports that prospective students from a wide swath of countries say the cost of programs or the lack of financial aid is their top obstacle to applying. This in itself isn’t new; applicants have fretted about the cost of programs for years. But the survey suggests that if prospects once took the worth of these programs for granted, they no longer do—especially when it comes to full-time MBA programs. GMAC has administered versions of the survey since 2009.