GRE Exams, Grad School Applications Down

INSIDE HIGHER ED -- When the economy tanks, graduate school applications go up. That’s one of the few bits of good news in which educators could have reasonably taken comfort this year. No more.

The number of students taking the Graduate Record Examination will decline in 2008, the first time ever that the GRE has seen a fall in test-taking during an economic downturn (see chart above). Because the GRE is required for the vast majority of graduate school programs, its numbers closely correlate with trends in applications.

On Friday, David G. Payne, associate vice president of ETS for college and graduate programs, said that the “current hypothesis” is that the credit crunch is discouraging some people from considering graduate school, especially if they think they will not receive substantial financial support from the programs they might consider.

Payne noted that the projected decreases this year come both from the United States and the rest of the world. Volume in the United States is expected to fall to 449,000 from 456,000. Volume outside the United States is expected to fall to 172,000 from 177,000. Looking outside the United States, the shifts are not consistent. The two countries with the largest volume of GRE test takers — and of foreign graduate students in the United States — are China and India. Both have seen their GRE numbers rising steadily, and China will still go up this year, but India will see a sharp decline.

However, the number of people taking the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) is up this year — both in the United States and abroad.