While MBA programs nationwide find their graduate enrollments dwindling, the Bryan School of Business and Economics has seen an enrollment increase. A massive increase.

In Fall 2010 the Masters of Business Administration, Bryan’s largest graduate program, enrolled a total of 47 new students. In Fall 2011 that number was 91 – an increase of about 94 percent. Total MBA enrollment jumped from 154 students in Fall 2010 to 176 in Fall 2011, an increase of about 15 percent.

The increase, Bryan administrators say, is due to redoubled recruitment and marketing efforts, streamlined application processes, and a redesigned curriculum. It marks a reversal in an enrollment decrease that saw MBA enrollments drop off from 251 in 2005 to 154 in 2010.

“We are reversing that trend,” says MBA Program Director Vidya Gargeya. “And we believe that’s because of the high-touch environment we are creating in and out of the classroom.”

According to annual survey results released in September by the Graduate Management Admission Council, two-thirds of full-time, two-year programs offering the MBA saw a decrease from last year in the number of applications they received for the 2011 academic year, reversing several years of growth in application numbers.

But UNCG seems to have bucked this trend. Joy Bhadury, Bryan’s associate dean, credits the jump in enrollment to an “enviable cadre” of faculty and staff, a targeted recruitment strategy, and an overall “laser-like focus” on quality recruitment.

Before he assumed Bryan’s reins, newly-hired Dean McRae C. Banks secured additional recruitment funds from Provost David H. Perrin’s office. A basic rule is that returns to advertising are slow to build as one puts dollars in but fast to drop if dollars are removed, Banks says. “I knew it would take some time, but I also knew that we had been under-investing in marketing our graduate programs, thus my request of the provost.”

Experience has taught Banks to expect to triple – or better—his investment over two years for every advertising dollar spent. “As I said to the provost, there is not a venture capitalist alive who would turn down a 3X return in two years (the length of time it takes to earn a full-time MBA). At the price of our MBA program, we needed to enroll at least 18 additional students to earn a 3X return; we did quite a bit better than that. I am extremely gratified that Provost Perrin demonstrated his confidence in us to deliver on the additional investment in marketing our graduate programs. Clearly that paid off, and as part of the funds were diverted to international recruiting, which will not show a yield until fall 2012, I am very optimistic that we will see similarly large increases next year.”

Gargeya, a 19-veteran of the Bryan School and MBA director since 2006, says the funds have helped to boost strategies already in place within his program. So what is Bryan’s MBA recruitment strategy? Over the last few years, the Bryan team:

•Streamlined the MBA application process. The median application gets turned around within eight days, including a personal phone call from Gargeya.

•Redesigned the curriculum so that evening students can complete the MBA in as little as 28 months.

•Began offering scholarships and fellowships to talented students in the application stage rather than after they committed to the program.

•Hired a marketing director for the program.

•Launched Bryan Prelude. This initiative allows graduate students to sample a number of Bryan’s classes before committing to a degree or certificate program.

•Hired a recruiter to work in Asia, identifying and referring promising graduate students. The recruiter serves as a “first-level filter,” Bhadury says.

•Waived GMAT scores for students in the Beta Gamma Sigma business honor society. BGS inductees have already demonstrated academic excellence as undergrads, Bhadury says.

•Offered free GMAT (Graduate Management Admission Test) prep courses for applicants who had not yet taken the GMAT.

Bhadury attributes the general enrollment decline for master’s programs to three major factors: the abnormal debt load students carry, which makes attending graduate school more difficult; the necessity of being mobile to keep a job, which causes would-be students to hesitate before committing to a graduate program; and the recent media trend of devaluing education.

“What you must understand is the master’s degree is becoming the new undergraduate degree,” he says. “Nowhere is this more true than in this new economy. Those with college degrees are the most likely to emerge, emerge quickly and successfully, from this recession.”

Gargeya adds another factor to the mix. Global competition among MBA programs is increasingly fierce. Schools in places like India provide quality MBA programs at much lower rates than the average $55,000 for an MBA in the U.S.

As a public university, the cost for a Bryan MBA ranges from about $15,000 to $20,000, enabling the program to compete globally, Gargeya says. He puts in personal calls to potential students in places like China in the wee hours of the day and night; over the last six or seven years an average 30-40 percent of students in the MBA day program have been international students.

Marketing is an excellent tool, Gargeya says, but the quality of the Bryan MBA program remains his main focus. Princeton Review just ranked Bryan among the nation’s 294 Top Business Schools for 2012.

“Not only do we do a good job of marketing what we are at the front end,” he says, “we back it up with performance.”

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