Wharton MBA Applications Rise

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The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School posted a 1.2% increase in applications to its M.B.A. program this year, a bright spot of admissions news after some years of declines.

The profile for the class that started this fall and will graduate in 2016, published online, reported that 6,111 people applied for admission to the full-time M.B.A. program, compared with 6,036 for the fall 2013 entering class.

The application figures are still far below those the school saw in the wake of the financial crisis, when young professionals flocked to business schools to boost their credentials in a brutal job market. In 2010, Wharton reported receiving 6,819 applications. Some other schools also reported brief declines in the years since the downturn, as prospective students shied away from debt and rethought their career plans as Wall Street opportunities disappeared; Wharton, long a training ground for finance elites, was particularly hard hit.

Yet Wharton’s admissions team has said it places more focus on applicant quality than on quantity. In recent years, its students are becoming a more high-achieving group. The average GMAT score for enrolled students this fall was 728–on a scale of 200 to 800–up from 725 last year and 718 for the class that enrolled in fall 2012.

Application volume has likewise gone up at other top-tier schools, including Harvard Business School (up 2.4%) and the New York University Stern School of Business (up 6.2%). Many institutions reported that their application growth was buoyed by interest from international candidates.