The School of Management: Handling Admission Leakage

<p align="justify/">In 2021, the chair of the admissions committee at The School of Management in Gandhinagar, India, had only three months to prepare for the start of the school’s next master of business administration program. During these three months, prospective students who had received admission offers could decide to decline offers, even though some had already paid relevant fees. Understanding the uncertainty of those decisions was critical to estimate the number of additional offers to send out to other candidates. If the final number of prospective students joining the program was lower than the school’s available capacity, The School of Management would lose contributions toward its fixed business costs and potential profit. It would also mean that the school’s resources would be underused. On the other hand, denying admission to students who had received offers to join the program, due to a lack of space, could adversely affect the school’s brand image and future admissions. Understanding the decision-making process of prospective students was critical over the long term to develop appropriate retention strategies and encourage all candidates to accept their admission offers.</p>

<p align="justify/">This case can be used in introductory operations management courses for the first year of a graduate-level program to discuss single-period inventory models. Specifically, the case can help students appreciate real-world challenges in estimating the cost of overstock and understock issues. The case is also suitable for services operations management courses in the second year of a graduate- or executive-level program to discuss time-perishable capacity problems in the service industry. The case can also be used in an introductory business statistics course to introduce first-year graduate students to concepts of probability distribution, such as binomial distribution and normal distribution, as an approximation to the binomial distribution. After working through the case and assignment questions, students will be able to do the following:</p><br><ul><li>Describe the supply and demand dynamics of qualified management professionals in an emerging economy.</li><li>Model the service operations of a business school in time-perishable capacity situations.</li><li>Compare the unique characteristics of a business school’s time-perishable capacity model with those of other services, such as hotels or airlines.</li><li>Use analytics to make objective decisions.</li></ul>

• supply and demand
• overbooking
• overbooking model
• capacity utilization
• time-perishable capacity
• analytics
• decision uncertainty
• admissions
• service operations