The Selling of the American MBA

In December the University of Rochester’s Simon Business School introduced loans that don’t require co-signers for international students entering its full-time MBA program this fall. Simon is also cutting its tuition by almost 14 percent and strengthening career services to help foreign students land jobs. The school recruited in more than a dozen countries last year, holding events in Buenos Aires, Cairo, Taipei, and Istanbul, among other cities. The efforts reflect the school’s “very strong commitment to global diversity within its student body,” says Rebekah Lewin, assistant dean of admissions and financial aid at Simon, where about half of the 98 full-time MBA students in the class of 2017 are from overseas.

As the U.S. appetite for the MBA degree wanes, many of the country’s more than 700 B-schools are stepping up recruiting abroad, where regard for this American invention appears undiminished. (Harvard was the first institution to offer an MBA, in 1908.) The number of U.S. citizens taking the main business school entrance exam, the GMAT, dropped by a third from the 2010 to 2015 testing years, which run from July 1 to June 30, while the number of foreign nationals taking the test rose almost 19 percent, according to the Graduate Management Admission Council, the organization that administers the exam. International candidates accounted for 58 percent of the applicant pool at full-time MBA programs in the U.S. in 2015, according to GMAC.