Should more business schools freeze MBA tuition fees? Admissions officers' answers are surprising.

Discover why many business schools are freezing MBA tuition, despite rising overall costs. New data shows surprising support among admissions officers for tuition freezes, especially for virtual programs.

Should more business schools freeze MBA tuition? Admissions officers' answers are surprising.

Newly released data from a survey of business school admissions officers suggests that support for a tuition freeze is surprisingly high among school leaders, as long as courses are held virtually.

This month, Dartmouth College Tuck School of Business announced that it will freeze MBA tuition for the 2021-2022 academic year - a move that will certainly be welcomed by incoming students of the top-10 program, where a small percentage of classes are expected to be taught in person until spring. Tuck - which had the highest tuition of any top-25 business school in the U.S. last fall at $77,500 annually - is just the latest leading business school to freeze its tuition; eight other schools, including Harvard Business School, Stanford Graduate School of Business, and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, already froze tuition last year. In Harvard's case, the freeze has now lasted three years.

Even though tuition is no longer rising at many schools, overall MBA costs have continued to increase. This is because living expenses, which schools can only partially influence, almost always increase year after year, especially at schools in urban areas. Although tuition at HBS has not increased since 2018 at $73,440, the total cost of a Harvard MBA is an estimated $223,636 for a single student and more than $300,000 for a married student with two children - huge sums that are only partially offset by Harvard's generous scholarships. An MBA at the nearby MIT Sloan School of Management is even more expensive for a single student: more than $240,000 over two years, while the degree at three other schools costs more than $235,000: Stanford GSB, NYU Stern, and Columbia Business School.

What annoys many MBA students is the fact that at many top schools, the progressive distance learning has hardly slowed down the relentlessly rising costs of the two-year MBA program. This was already the case when Poets&Quants conducted a survey in March last year, when the coronavirus pandemic broke out, and it remained so when Bloomberg Businessweek asked the same questions last September. Now, newly emerged data from the testing company Kaplan shows that within school leadership, many agree with the students: tuition should not be increased as long as classes remain virtual.

A Kaplan survey amidst virtual instruction found that among current admissions, one-third supported a tuition discount

A Businessweek survey of 3,532 first- and second-year students from 95 business schools last fall found that about half believed that what they were getting in MBA programs was not worth the cost. This is especially true for the highest-ranked and most expensive MBA programs. At schools where tuition exceeds $70,000 per year, 54.4 percent of MBA candidates expressed regret. 28.5 percent disagreed that their education was worth the cost, another 25.9 percent disagreed. Overall, 74% of the surveyed students rated the impact of Covid on their MBA experience as "very negative" or "somewhat negative." At business schools charging less than $40,000 per year in tuition, 49.5% of students disagreed that their education was worth the cost.