Acceptance Rates At The P&Q Top 50 MBA Programs

Acceptance Rates At Top 50 MBA Programs

An MBA program’s acceptance rate is very important. The percentage of applicants who successfully gain admission to a school gives others some idea of their chances of getting in, and for the schools, the level exclusivity — or lack of it — is an important signal of their culture and the level of talent they attract. The more selective a school, the more highly talented students it draws in, which allows it to be more selective — and the virtuous cycle continues.

No. 1 Wharton (19.2% acceptance rate)  

No. 2 Harvard (11%) 

No. 3 Stanford (6%) 

For years now, acceptance rates for the most elite programs have been falling.  

1. Stanford Graduate School of Business, Harvard Business School, and MIT Sloan School of Management are still the three hardest schools to get into, in that order.

2. They are harder than a year (or five years) ago. 

3. Acceptance rates fell or remained the same at 14 of the top 20 MBA programs, and where they rose, they rose only by an average of 1.1%. 

4. There is leveling-off in the size of the applicant pool. 

- Enrollment for 2017 was 104,704 total applications to the top 49 business schools in 2017, only a 0.82% rise from the year before.

The biggest drop in the acceptance rate of any school was at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, which cut its rate 14% to 31.2%. Last year, No. 31 Carlson saw a jump in applications to 665 from 606, but admitted far fewer students — 208 compared to 274 in 2016 — and enrolled fewer, too: 88, compared to 104. In so doing, however, the school saw its yield rise more than five points, to 42.3%.

No. 49 Rutgers Business School of Newark and New Brunswick also shaved some points off its acceptance percentage, dropping 8.5% to 36.6%. But Rutgers enrolled only 49 students last year after having 76 in 2016, despite a jump in applications (from 377 to 443), and its yield fell by 14.5% to a paltry 30.2%, lowest of any school in the top 50.

Back at the top, seven of the 10 most elite MBA programs accept fewer than 20% of applicants. Applications are up year-over-year at all but one, No. 7 Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, which saw a slight drop to 2,610 to 2,623. Only at the Wharton School (from 1,306 to 1,285) and Columbia (from 1,025, to 1,019) did the number of admits drop, and only at four is enrollment down, at HBS, No. 4  Chicago Booth, MIT Sloan, and Columbia — and then only by small amounts: six students at Harvard, Chicago, and Columbia, and five at MIT.

At a few schools, applications were up but enrollment fell, and yield suffered. 

This occurred most notably at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where enrollment dropped from 586 to 580 and the yield fell from 60.2% — in the upper tier among all schools — to 52.8%, despite Booth admitting more than 100 more students. 

Harvard remained the gold standard in yield at 91%, with Stanford — which shaved an inconsequential .02% off its acceptance rate because of a slight increase in apps, thereby effectively remaining static at 6.0% — also in the conversation, registering a remarkable 85.3%, same as last year.

1. Penn (Wharton) -0.4%

2. Harvard Business School +0.3%

3. Stanford GSB —

4. Chicago (Booth) -0.1%

5. Northwestern (Kellogg) +0.1%

6. MIT (Sloan) —

7. Dartmouth (Tuck) +0.6%

8. Columbia +2.4%

9. UC-Berkeley (Haas) —

10. Yale SOM -2.0%

11. Michigan (Ross) -1.3%

12. Duke (Fuqua) -0.1%

13. Virginia (Darden) -2.0%

14. Cornell (Johnson) +2.4%

15. UCLA (Anderson) +1.3%

16. NYU (Stern) -2.1%

17. CMU (Tepper) -0.8%

18. Texas-Austin (McCombs) —

18. UNC (Kenan-Flagler) +0.6%

20. Emory (Goizueta) -0.9%

21. Indiana (Kelley) +3.6%

22. Washington (Foster) -1.9%

23. Georgetown (McDonough) +3.2%

24. Notre Dame (Mendoza) +1.0%

25. Rice (Jones) +0.4%

26. USC (Marshall) -4.3%

27. Georgia Tech (Scheller) -1.0%

28. Washington (Olin) +10.3%

29. Michigan State (Broad) -0.9%

30. Arizona State (Carey) +9.7%

31. Minnesota (Carlson) -14.0%

32. Wisconsin +3.1%

33. Vanderbilt (Owen) -2.5%

34. Ohio State (Fisher) +5.3%

34. BYU (Marriott) +2.8%

36. Penn State (Smeal) +2.3%

37. Rochester (Simon) -0.6%

38. Purdue (Krannert) +1.8%

39. UC-Irvine (Merage) -3.6%

40. Maryland (Smith) -0.5%

41. Boston (Questrom) +1.7%

42. Pittsburgh (Katz) +3.2%

43. Texas-Dallas (Jindal) +4.3%

44. Texas A&M (Mays) +6.8%

45. Iowa (Tippie) -0.8%

46. Boston College (Carroll) +1.5%

47. SMU (Cox) +6.9%

48. Temple (Fox) NA

49. Rutgers -8.5%

50. Georgia (Terry) +2.5%