This may be true for almost all university courses, not specifically the MBA. International students' top choice is to immerse in English. The US primarily teaches and lives in English; Europe doesn't.

Some of the factors you mention also count. Private schools have more schaolrship funds. Most top business schools are private in the US and public in Europe. That means there's less money for scholarships in Europe outside of the Erasmus schemes. However, according to the FT's MBA ranking, some of the best value for ROI comes from inexpensive (relative to similarly-ranked US MBAs) European options like Audencia, Cambridge, Cranfield, Durham, EDHEC, EMLyon, ESCP, HSG, SDA Bocconi, TCD, and UCD. There are fewer US schools than European in the top 20 for value.

Up until I would say 2022-2023 the overwhelming majority of my clients (US based and international) was primarily interested in US based MBAs only. These past couple of years I I've seen an increased interest in European schools among prospective applicants (even among domestic candidates) LBS, INSEAD and IESE are really emerging as competitors!

Thanks both of you for your replies. It's an interesting topic and I wonder if this imbalance will eventually even out and Europe will sort of catch up / catch on. In places like Germany, it seems like MBA graduates are really not very much in high demand. It's interesting because, in Europe, doors may open for several countries at once, especially within the EU (barring language differences, of course, but DACH, Ireland, etc.), while the US functions as its own separate thing, for the most part.

There are three factors there.
- Like most countries, Germany can't do much with people who don't have the language skills needed for work. Many people start MBAs in Germany unable to work in German, and then they spend the year working in English.
- Germany (like Britain and France) has very good business schools and a strong use of study formats that integrate working (Dual Studium in German, stages in France and the apprencticeship and sandwich placements in the UK). I taught honours undergraduates at Edinburgh, for example, and they are as good or better as the MiM students. When I took a course at HHL, I also felt that the pre-experience students were higher quality than the MBAs (once you corrected for their experience). The need for MBAs is lower when the MBA is seen as a cut-down undergraduate degree rather than a more advanced qualification.
- Wage expectations. Salary expectations are a bit flatter in the DACH region: Top MiM and MBA programmes might not have the big different in earnings that you'd expect. Firms tend to want to reward people with training, development and earning their progression. That makes them more likely to grow their own talent rather than hire it in.