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So far, nothing has escaped the global economic crisis.

Every job market from Spain to Japan has suffered; people everywhere are scurrying to find work and money. Today, even the most successful professionals in Manhattan feel the financial burden. Nightclubs and restaurants are swarmed with doctors and investment bankers, begging for part-time waitressing jobs and bartending gigs.

Needless to say, MBA Applications have also been hit by the wave. As the unemployment rate increases and work opportunities decline, people everywhere start looking for other options -- and going back to school is the first to come to mind. The solution seems easy enough: after all, graduate school serves as a kind of buffer: a permissible suspension from the desperate need to acquire a reasonable income.

In short: people can buy time. Spend a few years in school, study in the library for exams, and you can avoid the job market altogether.

The result? Graduate schools, particularly B-schools, get flocked with applications left, right and center. The weeding out process then becomes tougher: programs have to become more selective, and admissions become more competitive.

Isser Gallogly, Executive Director of MBA Admissions at NYU’s Stern School of Business provides a firsthand account of this insight.   Since 2009, “Our applications...were incredibly robust. To give you some context, the prior year, we experienced a nearly 20% increase in applications to our full-time MBA program, the second highest number of applications received on record. We maintained this application volume this year,” he reports.

But the pattern in MBA applications is not the same everywhere.

Since 2009, applications in India have decreased by 34%, and Korea also experienced a reasonable downfall. According to Blair Sheppard, Dean of Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, “Last year’s worldwide financial crisis bought about severe restrictions on credit with many lenders reducing or cancelling loan programs and student loans have not been immune to the problems of the credit crisis. Fuqua began exploring other loan options for international students after we discovered the new terms for loans offered by our previous provider were less favourable than we hoped.”

So in the United States, many are going back to school; but elsewhere, the applications are declining, because students are unable to afford the b-school tuitions. As mentioned above, many programs are trying to create alternative financial plans so that students can afford to seek higher education. However, since these plans are still experimental and in the beginning stages, their effects are still being determined. 

As J.J. Cutler, Admissions Director at The Wharton School recently reported, “Because of the crisis, on the financial aid side everyone is evaluating the timing and the decision to get an MBA much more carefully, much more surgically and precisely, than they have in the past.”

As of now, exact predictions about MBA applications in 2011 are widespread and all over the place. Boston University expects a slight decrease, as witness in 2010 at 6%. Duke University hopes that new financial plans will encourage more students to apply. The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania expects minimal change -- as one of the premiere business institutions in the United States, this program believes its  applicants are more careful, planned, and serious when it comes to b-school, rather than merely responding to a financial crisis.