Massive Business Ambitions: Way more people want to go to business school this year

What do NBA all-star Shaquille O’Neal, Republican president George W. Bush, and former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg have in common? They all have an MBA: the graduate-level degree that’s often billed — at least by the schools offering the programs, which can cost more than $200,000 — as a golden ticket into the global corporate elite.

The S-curve

Early classes on the programs likely cover the classic product life cycle, or “S-curve”, which theorizes that most products go through 4 phases: a slow early introduction, rapid growth, maturity, and then decline. With the first MBA introduced in Harvard in 1908, the program is certainly mature, and industry insiders were claiming we’d seen “peak MBA” as recently as February.

But, according to the Graduate Management Admission Council’s latest annual Application Trends Survey, 2024 has seen record growth in demand for graduate management education, with MBA applications soaring 13% from 2023, following 2 consecutive years of decline.

Grads around the globe are turning to business master’s programs to stand out in the somewhat chilly white-collar job market, with B-School often seen as a surefire way to bolster a resume, especially if the school in question is particularly prestigious. Per the Wall Street Journal, Columbia Business School applications are up 27% from last year, while applications at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and Harvard Business School have risen 22% and 21%, respectively.

According to the report, graduate management education programs hosted by US colleges specifically were up 8% year-on-year, driven by the number of American applicants rising almost 19%.