Is the GRE Really Overtaking the GMAT?

You've probably seen the headline somewhere: "the GRE is taking over MBA admissions." It's not wrong, exactly — but it's also not the same story everywhere. The GRE's rise looks completely different depending on whether you're applying to a U.S. program, a French grande école, a British powerhouse, or a Spanish business school. Treating "the GRE is rising" as one global trend can lead you to prep for the wrong exam, at the wrong school, for the wrong reasons.

Here's what the data actually shows, country by country.

United States: the clearest, best-documented shift

If there's one place where the GRE-over-GMAT narrative is fully backed by numbers, it's the U.S. Poets&Quants' analysis of U.S. News data found that seventeen of the top fifty American MBA programs now receive more GRE than GMAT submissions — nearly double the number from just two years earlier. The swings at individual schools are striking: Columbia Business School's GRE submission rate jumped from 26% in 2023 to 43% in 2025. Yale School of Management went from 12% to 41% in a few admissions cycles. At Berkeley Haas, GRE submissions reportedly reached 58% in a recent year.

ETS, which administers the GRE, states that 92% of business schools worldwide now accept it, and that at schools like Harvard, Chicago Booth, and Stanford GSB, roughly 42–44% of recent incoming classes submitted a GRE score. This is where "the GRE is winning" is closest to literally true — at least at the top of the U.S. rankings.

France: GMAT still the default at the very top

INSEAD and HEC Paris tell a more conservative story. Both accept the GRE and have for years, but candidate-facing admissions guides consistently describe INSEAD as GMAT-dominant, with GRE submissions still relatively uncommon compared to U.S. peers. HEC Paris's average GMAT sits around 690, and while the school explicitly accepts GRE scores as an alternative, there's no public data suggesting a U.S.-style swing toward it.

If your target school list includes INSEAD, treating the GMAT as your default — rather than assuming the GRE gets you equal footing — is still the safer read of the evidence.

United Kingdom: GRE demand is up, testing data is thin

London Business School has reportedly received its highest volume of applications ever in a recent cycle, part of a broader pattern: GMAC's research shows international candidates are increasingly redirecting applications toward Western Europe as U.S. visa and labor-market uncertainty grows. But LBS doesn't publish a GRE/GMAT submission breakdown the way U.S. schools do, so it's hard to say whether that surge in applicants is changing the exam mix — only that GMAT averages at LBS (~700–710) remain among the highest in Europe.

Spain: GRE accepted everywhere, but not equally embraced

Spain's three flagship programs — IESE, ESADE, and IE Business School — illustrate just how much variation can exist within a single country:

IESE accepts the GRE (median around 156 Verbal / 161 Quant), and admissions staff there have told us directly that GRE submissions have climbed from the low 20% range to close to 40% of the applicant pool in recent cycles — a jump that, if it holds, would put IESE's trajectory much closer to what's happening at top U.S. schools than the "GMAT-dominant Europe" narrative suggests. That specific figure isn't published anywhere we could find in class profiles or rankings data, so treat it as a data point straight from the source rather than a verified public statistic — but it's directionally consistent with the school's accepted GMAT range (580–750) increasingly sharing space with a GRE pool that's grown fast enough for admissions staff to notice and mention it unprompted.
ESADE has the most GRE-friendly posture of the three on paper: a lower GMAT median (~670), explicit equal treatment of GRE scores, and test-optional review for some candidates.
IE Business School goes furthest, offering GMAT, GRE, or its own ieGAT, and stating directly that it has no preference between GMAT and GRE — candidates choose whichever plays to their strengths.

Outside of what IESE shared directly, none of the three publishes a public submission split, so there's no Spanish equivalent of Columbia's or Yale's year-by-year, sourced percentages. What you can say with confidence is that policy — and, per IESE's own account, the actual mix of test-takers — varies a lot even between schools in the same city.

The pattern across countries

Two separate trends are getting conflated in most reporting, and it's worth pulling them apart:

Where applicants are going is shifting toward Europe. GMAC's Prospective Students Survey found that non-U.S. candidates' preference for the U.S. as a study destination fell from 34% to 28% in a year, while preference for Western Europe rose from 41% to 45%. That's a geography story, driven mostly by visa policy and job-market uncertainty — not a testing story.
Which exam applicants submit is shifting toward the GRE — and while the best-documented shift is in the U.S., where schools publish granular data and have actively courted GRE-takers to diversify their applicant pools, it isn't only a U.S. story. IESE's own numbers (shared with us directly, not published) suggest a jump from roughly 20% to nearly 40% GRE submissions in recent cycles — a pace that would put it closer to Columbia's trajectory than to the more conservative, GMAT-heavy postures still associated with INSEAD and LBS.

What this means for your exam choice

If you're weighing GRE vs. GMAT with an international school list, the honest strategy isn't "follow the global trend" — it's "check the specific school."

Applying mostly to top U.S. programs? The GRE is a legitimately competitive, well-documented path at nearly every level, including M7 schools.
Applying to INSEAD or HEC? Treat the GMAT as the safer default unless your GRE score is meaningfully stronger than your realistic GMAT ceiling.
Applying to IESE? Don't assume GMAT-only just because it's a European school — if the ~40% figure holds, a strong GRE score is a genuinely competitive path here, not just a fallback.
Applying to ESADE or IE? You have real freedom — both schools are built around genuine test neutrality.
Applying broadly across regions? Run an official GMAT-GRE score conversion early and take a diagnostic in both before committing months of prep to one exam.

The bottom line: the GRE isn't quietly replacing the GMAT everywhere at once. It's replacing it fastest where schools have chosen to make room for it — and that choice still varies more by school than by continent.