Chicago’s Booth vs. Northwestern’s Kellogg School

Admissions:

Despite Kellogg’s more recent fall in the rankings, it is somewhat more selective than Chicago’s Booth, accepting less than 20% of the applicants who apply to its full-time program. Booth, on the other, accepts about a quarter of all its applicants. The difference is largely due to the fact that Kellogg receives far more applications every year than Booth: 5,545 applications for the Class of 2011 versus 3,843 received by Booth. It’s worth noting that the average GMAT score for Kellogg’s entire applicant pool is an extraordinarily high 700. For admits to the Class of 2011 at Kellogg, it’s 706–eight points below Chicago which tends to get far more quants than Kellogg. The GMAT ranges for each school is based on the 80th percentile which is how both schools report the data.

.

Enrollment:

Both Kellogg and Booth are major MBA schools with very large enrollments. Of the top business schools, only Harvard, Wharton and Columbia have total full-time enrollments that exceed Northwestern and Chicago. Once you add the sizable part-time MBA programs that both Kellogg and Booth offer, these two institutions are even larger than Harvard, Wharton and Columbia. In fact, there’s only one major school with a larger enrollment: New York University’s Stern School due to its massive part-time enrollment. Both Kellogg and Booth enroll roughly the same number of full-time MBAs: Kellogg’s 1,241 is just slightly larger than Booth’s 1,185. The numbers below are for the Class of 2011.

.

Poets&Quants:

The most surprising stat here is the small percentage of students at Kellogg who have undergraduate degrees in the humanities. At 18%, it’s almost the smallest of all the major business schools. That’s a bit shocking due to the reputation that Kellogg MBAs have for having high interpersonnel skills. Obviously, the fact that Kellogg interviews all its applicants pays off. The Booth number of humanities grads is likely an overestimate due to the fact that Booth reports its number as “liberal arts and others.” Both schools admit a very high percentage of applicants with business or economics undergraduate degrees. At Booth, nearly half of the Class of 2011 has one of those two degrees. At Kellogg, it’s 46%.