Insights from the 2024 GMAC Report

Discover key insights from the 2024 GMAC report: MBA applicants prioritize diversity, sustainability, and AI. The 2-year MBA is back, and flexibility & consulting careers are top trends.

4 Takeaways From GMAC’s 2024 Prospective Students Report

The Graduate Management Admission Council’s annual survey of prospective students is bursting with data. So much, in fact, that a single report can never hope to capture everything it contains.

The biggest takeaway from this year’s report is that graduate business school applicants want diversity, demand sustainability, and crave more artificial intelligence content. More than two-thirds of the 4,000-plus respondents said they consider equity and inclusion important or very important to their academic experience; more than half said they would not consider a school that doesn’t prioritize these aspects.

Sustainability, as we know from numerous other surveys (see here and here), is also a major component: More than two-thirds of respondents to the latest GMAC survey confirmed that it’s important to them to attend a school that actively incorporates sustainability into the academic experience. And in the classroom, no surprise: Applicant demand for AI is up 38% from last year, with two-fifths of respondents saying AI is an essential part of a B-school curriculum.

4 MORE KEY TAKEAWAYS FROM THE GMAC REPORT

But in a report as comprehensive as GMAC’s annual survey, there’s always more data that gets overlooked when focusing on the big numbers. Here are four more — but still important! — conclusions.

1. The two-year MBA is once again the preferred program type, reclaiming the top spot from the one-year MBA; and the Master of Management has grown in popularity.

The two-year full-time MBA: a clunky dinosaur? Far from it! Over the last five years, the traditional MBA has been consistently stable in popularity, even in the face of increasing competition from online programs, specialized master’s degrees, and alternative credentials. Last year, the one-year MBA unseated its big brother for the first time in the GMAC survey — but that was only a short-lived change. Prospective students are once again seeing the two-year MBA as the best for their career prospects.