The School of Management is getting more popular, specifically with other Yalies.

In the coming year, the ascendant business school plans to continue its efforts to open and advertise its courses to students from the University at large — continuing a trend established over the past five years. Since the 2010–11 academic year, the number of joint degree applicants to the SOM already enrolled in another Yale program has increased from 34 to 51. Meanwhile, the number of applicants from students and graduates of other Yale schools has increased from 40 to 54.

But the biggest increase has come in the number of non-SOM students enrolled in SOM courses — while there were 503 in the 2010–11 year, there are now 1029. SOM Dean Edward Snyder described the figures as encouraging because they reveal that the SOM is becoming a more central resource for all kinds of Yale students.

“What a school of management does is of interest to a lot of people and having a high quality naturally can lead to this outcome. People want to understand how organizations work, how markets function, and the business school is the place to go,” Snyder said.

SOM Associate Dean Anjani Jain said he thinks this crossover is due to the school’s rising status among business schools in addition to new steps to further integrate the SOM into Yale curricula more broadly. For example, he cited the SOM’s collaboration with the School of Public Health to create a health care management track, adding that similar efforts have taken place in other areas of the University. Jain said he has talked to his counterparts at all of the other graduate and professional schools to encourage students to take courses at the SOM, especially those that do not require many prerequisites.

However, although Yale College students have taken more advantage of SOM courses, this does not mean that these students have also been more inclined to apply to a SOM degree program after completing their own.

Although Yale College has been the top feeder for the SOM’s MBA program since 2012, applications from Yale College graduates to the SOM have decreased from 52 in 2010–11 to 42 for 2014–15 Snyder said he is not concerned about the drop. However, he acknowledged that this is it an area in which the SOM should improve, as it hopes to maintain Yale College students as its number one source of talent.

One area in which the SOM has seen a lot of cross-over from other areas of the University is in its Executive MBA program — designed for students who have already been in the workforce for several years. Out of 52 students in total, the EMBA Class of 2016 has seven students with another kind of Yale affiliation, which SOM Associate Dean David Bach said is noticeably high.

One of these students, Sorin Fedeles GRD ’10 SOM ’16 said he decided to make the transition from academic research in the biomedical sciences to the SOM in order to go into an industry setting. He said that because teamwork is highly emphasized at the SOM, he has not had a difficult time transitioning back into the school setting from doing research.

However, when it comes to interacting with students who are enrolled at other schools throughout the University, collaboration can be more challenging, Rob Wu SOM ’15 said. Wu said that while some professors do a good job of randomizing groups within classes to encourage interdisciplinary banter, other professors do not.

“I’ve been in classes where I’ve benefited from the different perspectives that, for example, the [School of Forestry and Environmental Studies] students bring as opposed to the SOM students, but I’ve also been in classes where we don’t interact as much because we didn’t have to and if you don’t have to then people do what’s comfortable,” he said.

Tyler Godoff SOM ’16, who has had a positive experience interacting with students from other schools, said he finds students from outside of the SOM have a notable presence in the SOM. He said he is taking a class on global catastrophes in which only roughly half the students are from the SOM. The other students come from FES, Yale Law School, the School of Public Health and the School of Medicine.

Since 2010, the number of SOM students taking classes at other schools within Yale has also increased. For the 2010–11 school year, this number was 380 students, and it has now grown to 509 students.