But with an improving global jobs market, many schools are now seeing a fall in full-time MBA applications.
In the recent Financial Times ranking of the top 100 full-time MBA schools, the Northeast had 13 schools, as did the South.
One of the reasons behind the diminished number of applications for full-time MBA programs from 2004 to 2009 was that jobs were plentiful.
This is one reason why, over the past two years, Canada has seen a bigger increase in applications for full-time MBA places than any other region.
Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, for example, tops the latest full-time MBA rankings of BusinessWeek and the EIU, and heads the FT's executive education open programs.
The British Treasury has its own list of the top 50 full-time MBA programs from around the world, with Harvard, Columbia, Wharton and IMD leading the way.
The top 250 business schools in the United States account for about 50, 000 full-time MBA students, but almost 7, 000 of these are housed in just five schools.
The University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business has claimed top spot in the Economist Intelligence Unit's 2007 ranking of full-time MBA programmes ( full report and methodology).
David Simmons, the director of the full-time MBA programme at Cranfield School of Management, says comments telling prospective students to forget about coming to Britain are rife on Indian MBA blogs.
Nyenrode (see profile), a Dutch school, has announced that it is postponing the start of this year's full-time MBA because it can no longer secure bank loans for its foreign students, blaming the recession.
In the interests of transparency, we can confirm that, had the data been included in the calculations, Temple's full-time MBA programme would have rated in the top 100 globally and the top 50 in America.
ECONOMIST: Which MBA? school profiles: Temple University��Fox School of Business | The
The Financial Times recently reported that women make up 37 percent of those who attend a full-time MBA programs in the US, an increase from 33 percent five years ago and 30 percent a decade ago.
"As reflected in the latest FT rankings, 84 percent of the participants in the HKUST full-time MBA program are international students and it is one of the most international programs in the world in terms of student diversity, " he said.
The full-time MBA ranking published last month by BusinessWeek brings the 2012 season of media rankings of business schools to a close, and the results were met with the usual mix of joy, despair and skepticism by the business school community.
FORBES: The Best Business Schools of 2012 - The Ranking of MBA Rankings
Drake is a Stanford MBA, former McKinsey consultant and a full-time primary care physician.
Warwick Business School, on the other hand, insists on the same rigorous academic entry criteria for all its MBA programmes, whether distance learning, full- or part-time.
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