For decades an MBA has been sold in China as a fast track to higher pay and a wider professional network. The degree, introduced in China in 1991 after originating at Harvard in 1908, carried an implicit promise: invest heavily in tuition and graduate into a substantially better career. That equation is breaking down as economic growth slows, tech and finance layoffs bite, and prospective students start scrutinising the return on many expensive programs.
The first signs of stress are measurable. China’s 2025 national MBA entrance threshold fell to 151 points, the lowest in roughly 25 years and 19 points below 2021; a number of prestigious schools failed to meet their expected enrollee numbers and are relying heavily on transfers. Universities are responding with sharp discounts and new lower-priced products — from Northeast Forestry University cutting an executive-format program by RMB147,000, to variants at the University of Science and Technology of China offering up to RMB150,000 in fee reductions, and Shanghai University of Finance and Economics rolling out a China-style management class priced RMB100,000 lower than the incumbent offering.
Individual stories illustrate why students are reconsidering the purchase. A Shanghai entrepreneur who took a part-time non-residential MBA after paying roughly RMB200,000 in subsidised fees says the curriculum was overly textbook-driven and that the cohort’s average income and ambition fell short of expectations. She reports that around 10% of her classmates were unemployed at graduation, and that some tech firms screen out MBA candidates outright, seeing the credential as irrelevant or a sign of career immobility.
Not all outcomes are negative, but even success stories now come with caveats. A graduate of London Business School who used an MBA to pivot from pharmaceutical R&D into consulting doubled her salary and landed at Bain, but was later caught up in industry cutbacks and now runs an MBA-application consultancy whose revenues have plunged by about 60% since 2022. Her experience underlines two realities: elite overseas MBAs still open doors into a narrow set of high-paying employers, but the number and stability of those posts have contracted.
A younger, full-time MBA from a Shanghai 985 university paid about RMB288,000 in tuition and returned to the job market with a modest pay bump — roughly RMB50,000 to RMB60,000 — but warns that cohort quality is declining as admission standards drop and schools widen intake. She says it will take several years to recoup the cost and that the calculus is very different for lower-tier programmes: for non-985/211 schools, the ROI can be negligible or negative.
Several structural trends are colliding. China’s broader economic slowdown has cooled hiring across tech and financial services, two traditional outlets for MBA talent. Universities face enrolment pressure and are cutting prices to compete, which risks diluting cohort quality and weakening the credential’s signalling value. At the same time, employers appear to be prioritising demonstrable experience, technical skills and cost-effective hires over expensive credentials, while AI-driven disruption is compressing demand for certain white-collar services tied to the business-school ecosystem.
The consequences extend beyond students and schools. A sustained slump in MBA demand threatens tuition-dependent university budgets, pushes institutions to redesign programmes and career services, and may accelerate stratification in the higher-education market: a handful of elite domestic and foreign programmes will retain outsized value, while many regional or lower-tier MBAs face an existential reappraisal. For prospective students the takeaway is increasingly binary: an MBA still makes sense for targeted goals — migration, entry into elite consulting or finance, or a deliberate lifestyle reset — but it is a poor general-purpose solution for quick salary jumps or broad career security.