Despite national downward trends, Georgetown graduate schools increased enrollment by 3.3 percent from 2009 to 2010, rising from 9,059 students to 9,358, according to statistics from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. National graduate school enrollment decreased by 1.1 percent during the same period, according to a report from The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Admissions representatives attributed the national trend to various factors, particularly the still-fragile state of the U.S. economy. But reports from various graduate programs at Georgetown indicate that while some programs are seeing a decrease in applications, these same programs report an increase in applicant quality.
“While our application numbers have decreased, the strength [and] quality of our applicant pool has increased,” assistant dean of full-time MBA admissions Kelly Wilson wrote in an email.
The Graduate Management Admissions Council’s 2011 Application Trend Survey reported that 67 percent of full-time MBA programs experienced a decrease in number of applications. Wilson attributed the drop in applications to the extended economic downturn.
“If the global economy continues to falter, I expect that we will continue to see a downward or flattening trend at best in application volume,” Wilson wrote.
Meanwhile, Georgetown Law Center application numbers remained volatile, rising by 10 percent in 2010 to an all-time high of 12,500, but dropping by 19 percent in 2011. This year’s numbers are in line with national law school applications, which dropped 12 percent in 2011.
“Applications to almost every top law school, for the entering class of 2011, dropped 15 to 25 percent,” Andrew Cornblatt, Dean of Admissions at the Law Center, said. He attributed part of the decrease in applications to “an economy that creeped the tiniest bit better, so a few more jobs were out there for … college seniors and people who have been out a year or two.”
He gave two more reasons for the decrease in applications, citing “the incredible focus on the cost of law school education and how much money people would have to borrow to invest in” a law education. “I think that helped to dissuade some fence sitters about whether or not to apply to law school,” he said.
Another worry for potential applicants is the difficulty of the schoolwork at Georgetown, as well as increasingly-slim prospects of graduate job placement.
“The publicity [concerning] the difficulty for all law schools, not just Georgetown, in terms of jobs, placing their graduates in jobs [affects admissions],” Cornblatt said. “I think you add all three things together resulting in many fewer applicants.”
The weeding out of less dedicated law school applicants might explain why Georgetown Law, like the MBA program, saw an increase in applicant quality. Though applications decreased, the mean applicant GPA and LSAT score increased. According to Cornblatt, this rise in quality is rare after a drop in applications.
Though the application numbers are a drop-off from 2010’s historic high, this year’s applications are still relatively high.
“Down 19 percent at Georgetown sounds like an oh my gosh moment, but the truth is the number of applications we had last year, 10,000, is the sixth or seventh highest we’ve ever had at Georgetown,” Cornblatt said.
Unlike the MBA program and the Law Center, Georgetown’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences saw an increase in applications. James Schaefer, the Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, used the distinctiveness of Georgetown’s graduate school programs to explain the continuing high number of applicants.
“Just as with the undergrad program, a fair number come because they want to be the next Bill Clinton, that sort of thing,” he said. “The fact that we are here attracts a lot of students from abroad—the closeness to the seats of power, all the ancillary agencies and technologies that support that.”
Georgetown may have defied the trend of an enrollment decrease on the whole due to its private status, according to Schaefer. As a private institution, Georgetown is immune to the state budget cuts that have forced public universities to increase tuition and lower research funding.
Schaefer warned, however, that Georgetown’s location and ongoing issues with the local Advisory Neighborhood Commission will affect its graduate student enrollment. ANC’s new university enrollment cap would count graduate students as well as undergraduate students. He said that opening another campus elsewhere in the city could be necessary for enrollment to continue to increase.
“We are locked into a certain amount of head counts in practical terms, and we want the headcounts to be productive as possible,” Schaefer said. “There is a question of [whether] there will be a preference for full-time graduate school students.”
Deans from the School of Foreign Service did not respond to requests for statistics on MSFS enrollment.
