Northwestern's MBA program sucks! My Alma mater on the other hand.

What a fricken joke. No test scores? Really? That hard up for money? On the other hand, I spent 2 years down in Hyde Park, with a bunch of strange quant geeks with no personality. Of course, Univ. of C still requires test scores.

Northwestern’s Kellogg School Makes an M.B.A. Play for Laid-Off Tech Workers

The business school says it will waive testing requirements for those who apply for a graduate degree after mass layoffs at Meta, Twitter and other big tech companies

By Lindsay Ellis, WSJ

Nov. 14, 2022 2:01 pm ET

Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management is making its own bid for tech talent after mass layoffs at Meta Platforms, Twitter Inc. and other big tech companies.

Recently laid-off tech employees can apply to pursue a full-time M.B.A. or other graduate degree next year without submitting standardized test scores, Kellogg officials said Monday, as part of an effort to enroll some of the many workers who have lost jobs in the industry’s bloodletting this fall.

Kellogg is offering the incentive as it and other top-tier business schools contend with a recent decline in full-time M.B.A. applications. The robust labor market, as well as concerns about the cost of the degree, have kept many would-be M.B.A. students from joining their applicant pools. Accustomed to jobs with six-figure salaries, big equity packages and other perks, many tech workers have had a particular incentive to stay on the job in recent years.

In recent weeks, though, thousands of employees in the industry have lost their jobs as big tech companies contend with a new reality of high inflation and rising interest rates and seek to slash costs. Last week, Meta said it was laying off 11,000 staffers, or 13% of its workforce, following major job cuts at Twitter, Lyft Inc., Stripe Inc. and others.

Greg Hanifee, Kellogg’s associate dean of degree programs, said that the school decided to waive tests this month, around when Twitter initiated layoffs of about half of its workforce. Technology companies have a high standard for hiring, which creates a pool of talented prospective applicants, he said.

“These folks were high performers and are now at a pivot point in their life,” he said. “If they’re considering business school, removing this barrier could benefit them.”

Kellogg’s waiver applies to employees who were laid off this quarter at a company in the tech sector and are applying to full-time graduate degrees, including the two-year M.B.A., by a mid-January deadline, the school said.

Kellogg was among many graduate business programs that waived required standardized test scores in 2020—in the first months of the pandemic—to make it easier for would-be students to apply for M.B.A.s. That year, applications to Kellogg and other top-ranking M.B.A. programs, such as University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Columbia Business School and MIT Sloan School of Management, rose significantly.

Since then, M.B.A. applications at a number of schools have fallen amid the strong job market. Applications to Kellogg’s full-time program rose to 5,831 in 2020 before falling to 4,632 in 2021 and then 3,910 this fall.

“As the economy faces uncertainty, or moves in a negative direction, we would tend to see higher applications,” Mr. Hanifee said. “The larger question right now is what’s going to happen in other industries beyond tech.”

Write to Lindsay Ellis at lindsay.ellis@wsj.com