Declining Google Search Trend For B-Schools: Is MBA On The Wane?

Harvard Business School (HBS), topping Google search for long, has been showing a declining trend over the years. Surprisingly, in search, Wharton school of the University of Pennsylvania comes second and INSEAD third according to Google Trends.

Does this mean a drop in peoples’ interest in MBA? Or has it something to do with the way Google Trends operates in analysing search results?

Google Trends is a public web facility of Google Inc., based on Google Search that shows how often a particular search-term is entered relative to the total search-volume across various regions of the world, and in various languages.

According to the data, HBS is getting nearly eight times the volume of Google search than Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. It is roughly ten times more than MIT’s Sloan School of Management or Columbia Business School.

HBS has maintained its position at the top for more than a decade. In February 2004, Google search users enter the school name eight times more than that of Stanford Graduate School of Business.

However, all along these years, there has been a steady fall in the number of searches for Harvard Business School. It dipped down to an index level of just 31 recently from a high of 100 in February 2004.

The catch lies in the interpretation of the data. The decline is the result of the increased volume of overall searches on Google search, rather than a reflection of the total searches for HBS or any other school.

Google Trends analysis is based on the popularity of a search term relative to all other searches. A search term may show a relative decline on Google Trends but the number of nominal searches for the information could have actually risen.

The explosive growth of Google search queries and the increasing number of topics covered by web content would have led to such a situation.

But then, how does it explain the popularity of Wharton, over and above that of Stanford that often figures second after HBS in the B-school rankings?

One reason could be the large number of undergraduate programs offered by it. Wharton also runs more MOOC courses in business that any of its more well-known competitors.

This school also registered a drop in overall search volume, down from an index level of 81 in the month of February, 2004 to only 18 in August, 2016.

INSEAD, with campuses in France, Singapore and Abu Dhabi, is an unexpected contender for the third spot. It gets almost three times the search activity as Stanford which fell from an index of 13 in February, 2004 to only four in August, 2016.

This could be because of INSEAD’s size as it enrols more than 1,000 students a year, more than twice the intake at Stanford. Yet another factor in the school’s favour is that having no variants to its name. Other schools like London Business School can also be searched under LBS on London B-School as in the case with HBS.

Since Google Trends does not aggregate search terms, or measure aggregate interest in a school or program, it works in INSEAD’s favour.

The interest in the MBA peaked in June 2008 with an index score of 100 and has fallen to just 32 in August 2014, based on overall volume of Google searches. Regarding the interest in a joint MBA and Law degree, it seems to have flattened to the extent that searches for MBA degree are 32 times more than those for law degree. (Image Courtesy: pixabay.com)