The school’s Graduate Management Admission Test average also fell, albeit slightly, to 702 from 705. Moreover, with 838 admits and an enrolled class of 408 (the latter larger than last year’s class but smaller than 2018’s 440), Duke Fuqua’s yield dropped for the first time in at least three years going back to the 2016-2017 app season, falling to 48.7% from 56.8%, a 14.3% decline. It’s actually the second straight year the school’s selectivity rate has climbed. And I think those types of very, very high-touch, very strong communications across the board - but very individualized communications as well - show that our admissions team understands where each international student was.”Īs with other top B-schools, however, reversing the application downturn came with a cost: Duke Fuqua’s acceptance rate climbed to 25%, up more than 9% from last year’s 22.9%. There is one student who lived in Brazil, but also had a Portuguese dual citizenship, and she traveled to Portugal to fly out to the U.S. “I am just always in awe of the lengths to which our international students will go to invest in their education and to get here. “We were very intentional in recruiting internationally, so what we saw with that drop in internationals last year, we saw that reverse itself,” Hubert says, crediting the school’s admissions team for “holding multiple events, going back to cities, going multiple times to key cities around the world, as well as hosting events earlier in the season. Duke Fuqua maintained its foreign student enrollment at 38% from the last two intakes as it has for three years in a row now, Fuqua in 2020 enrolled a class with representatives from 44 countries. Hubert says Duke’s pre-coronavirus investments paid off. The 3,356 applications in 2020 are 320 more than last year, though the total is still about 200 below Duke’s 2018 mark. “About 50% of our overall application increase came in before the fourth round,” Hubert tells Poets&Quants. “So we actually were already up in applications, by about 5% overall, before we decided to create the fourth round.”ĭuke, like UC-Berkeley, Columbia Business School, NYU Stern, and others, turned around a three-year slide in applications that saw the school lose 14.6% of its app volume between 20 going back three cycles, the Fuqua School had lost one-fifth - fully 20% - of its apps.
But while it’s tempting to attribute the numbers to the school’s addition of a fourth application round as the pandemic hit in March - particularly its 10.5% jump in apps - Shari Hubert, Duke Fuqua’s associate dean for admissions, says the numbers already were trending that way before Covid-19. Duke photoĪdd another top business school to the growing group that has reversed its MBA application fortunes amid - and despite - the coronavirus pandemic.ĭuke University’s Fuqua School of Business released its Daytime MBA Class of 2022 profile this week showing a markedly better application total and improvements in a number of key areas. Duke Fuqua saw a jump in applications to its Daytime MBA this year.