Domestic Students Feed Rise in US Graduate School Enrollment

New data from a recent study by the Council of Graduate Schools show that first-time enrollment of US students at US graduate schools increased 4.7 percent from fall 2007 to fall 2008, compared with 3.3 percent for international students. The domestic increase was the largest since an 11 percent rise in 2002.

The study also found, however, that the average annual growth rate in first-time enrollment of domestic graduate students over the past 10 years—3.4 percent—lagged the average 5.5 percent growth in international students over the same period. One-year increases in first-time enrollment had been higher for international students since 2004.

Overall, the study found, first-time enrollment in graduate schools increased 4.5 percent in 2008, slightly higher than the 3.9 percent average growth seen over the last 10 years.

Business joined engineering and the social and behavioral sciences as the three most popular fields of graduate study in 2008. Business, education, and the health sciences accounted for nearly half of first-time enrollment in fall 2008. The study found that 16.8 percent of graduate students enrolled in business, while 23 percent of were in education and 9.9 percent were in the health sciences.

Columbia Identifies Curricular Responses to Financial Crisis

A faculty committee at Columbia Business School spent part of the summer developing new curriculum in response to the global economic downturn. Specially appointed by the school’s dean, Glenn Hubbard, the committee focused on ways to use the economic crisis as a vehicle to foster integrative thinking across academic disciplines.

Recognizing that Columbia had already begun to address the crisis through symposia, course materials, lectures, and a new course, the committee recommended that the school consider the following:

• An integrative, team-taught course on The Future of Finance that would challenge students to think about how the crisis will reshape the future of finance
• An integrative case study on the collapse and future of the auto industry
• New mechanisms for encouraging integration across disciplines, particularly in the core curriculum taken by first year students

“The committee’s ultimate goal was to use the financial crisis in order to advance students’ abilities for integrative thinking,” said Columbia professor Paul Glasserman, who chaired the committee. “We wanted to create more opportunities in the MBA curriculum to address these types of interactions that cut across traditional courses and disciplines.”

Observing that the financial crisis was “the result of the complex interaction of many factors,” Glasserman said it also was “a great reminder of the value of a broad MBA program.”