Final takeaways on Ross and bschool popularity contests

Here’s our key takeaways for the “What’s going on at Ross?” question that we’ve beaten to death explored thoroughly the past few weeks (if you’re just joining us, you can start with the Ross discussion here or even further back, with the foray into bschool app trends).

What’s going on at Ross?

What accounts for their drop-off in MBA applications in 2011-’12?

EssaySnark’s conclusions after looking at six years of admissions data are:

• The patterns at Ross are dissimilar to overall bschool trends, likely due to their historically higher proportion of regional candidates compared to other U.S. schools and how the impact of the economy is more localized for them
• International interest has been fairly stable over time
• Domestic interest has slid, especially more recently, which we would attribute to those regional economic factors
• They’ve been accepting more international applicants lately – good news for some of you, yes?
• If they’re getting fewer U.S. applicants, then that actually means you American BSers should have an easier time getting into Ross too (comparatively speaking — and provided you’re qualified).

Remember, we’re totally guessing on this stuff. If anyone sees any flaws in our logic (or the adcom wants to chime in…!) we would be grateful for you to contribute. Comments are open and email is too*.

We’ll leave you with two other factoids which we think are highly relevant to this subject:

• The average GMAT score of Ross students has steadily risen in the past ten years: for the Class of 2004, it was 676, and for the Class of 2014 it’s 703.
• The yield at Ross – which is the percentage of accepted candidates who end up choosing that school – has been phenomenal for years, in the over-70% range — and as high as 79%!!! in 2008-’09. By comparison, Kellogg in the same period was around 57%. (Unfortunately the schools have clammed up and aren’t disclosing yield figures so freely anymore, so we can’t do too much with the comparisons in recent years.)

These data are both correlated with quality for us. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” and going two directions, we can see that higher-quality candidates are applying to Ross (or else, they wouldn’t be able to boost up their average GMAT); and, lots of those candidates are choosing Ross upon acceptance (else, the yield would be not nearly so impressive). Plus, we have a firsthand view of who they’re accepting – the BSers we’ve worked with in the last few years who’ve chosen Ross for their MBAs have been both impressive, in terms of backgrounds, and on the whole, super nice people – the kind you want to be in the bschool trenches with. We certainly can’t say that about all schools.

The popularity contest of sheer quantities of applications at a given school only tells us so much. It’s the quality of the applicant pool that matters, and these indicators are signaling to us that Ross is doing just fine on that count.

*gethelpnow at essaysnark to the dot com.