By Dave Wilson
GMAC® President and CEO
The School as Audience
As those who are responsible for the strategic vision and course of your schools, you also have the full weight of burden associated with the tactics needed to effectively run your institutions on a day-to-day basis. A substantial component of the information that you need is “information of the day,” information that informs your tactical decisions. What is happening to applications today? How is my school measuring up against our competition today? Do I have to make any mid-course adjustments in my plans for the incoming class?
Our obligation to you is to provide an unvarnished look at today. Our channel for doing so is Deans Digest. It reaches deans, program administrators, and admission directors. And, more importantly, it is not a public forum. It is your forum.
The unvarnished message to you today is that the entering class this fall will still be one that comes from a declining base of applications. Our application trends surveys clearly indicate that. Moreover, our lead indicators, GMAT® registration and test-taker volume, have indicated the same during the past two years.
There is another less simple but equally important message that has been lost in the focus on applications. Applications, in and of themselves, are not the important measure for schools; applicants are the important metric. Applications are the surrogate for the underlying applicants.
Since 2002, there has been a dramatic shift in the number of applications each applicant has indicated he or she is likely to submit. In 2002, applicants indicated their intention to submit an average of five applications to graduate programs. In 2005, applicants indicated their intention to submit only three applications. What this means is that a hypothetical group of 100,000 typical applicants in 2002 would generate 500,000 applications to your schools, but that same hypothetical group would generate just 300,000 applications in 2005.
There is no denying the decline in GMAT® test takers (another surrogate measure for applicants) since the 2002 peak. But the shift in the underlying relationship between applicants and applications exaggerates the case.
The Public as Audience
Another of our roles at GMAC® is to provide information to the public. We often we are asked by schools to be the advocate for management education—to extol the virtues and values of MBA study.
This mission is markedly different from that of provider of the unvarnished day of the moment. It is one that looks to the future. It is one that denies the reports of the early demise of the MBA. It is the role that speaks to tomorrow’s class. It is the one that observes that an increase in starting salaries in the spring of 2005 will translate into a growth in GMAT® registrations in 2006 and 2007. It is the one that extols the growth in GMAT® test registrations since March of this year as a leading indicator of the recovery of the MBA.
The channel for this information is the media. And would that it were a pure channel. Alas, unlike Deans Digest, where GMAC® writes the entire story, the media slice, dice, chop, and shave data as they choose, keeping always in mind the mantra, “If it bleeds, it leads.”
The Medium is the Message
I recall that as a youngster I discovered my father’s hammer. At that moment, everything became a nail; including the dining room table. Some modest but memorable corporal punishment clarified for me the role of the hammer and the role of the dining room table.
We all need to use the medium that carries the message we need. Deans Digest is the insider’s story on today’s market. Our objective is to give schools information that is useful to them in their decision making and their planning.
On the other hand, the message we will deliver to the media will be as cheerleader and advocate for graduate management education. And today, when the corner seems to have turned, we will talk about tomorrow.
In times of change, those two messages should not be expected to be the same.
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