Wharton vs. Harvard Business School

Admissions:

The admission stats for both schools show that they attract among the very best MBA candidates in the world. Harvard and Wharton’s average GMAT scores differ by just a single percentage point. HBS can more easily afford to make exceptions and does: at least one applicant got in with a GMAT score of 490. You can bet that a high percentage of applicants make up the pool of candidates for both schools. The yield numbers, which reflect the percentage of accepted applicants who agree to go to the school, suggest that when candidates are sent invitations to Harvard and Wharton, they tend to go to HBS and turn Wharton down. Nonetheless, these are remarkable numbers that demonstrate the vastly superior quality of the student bodies here. It’s worth noting, for example, that the best full-time MBA program outside the U.S., London Business School, has an average GMAT score that is a full 24 points behind Wharton and 25 points behind Harvard–and that gap may have widened a bit more because the average GMAT score for Harvard’s Class of 2012 hit a new record of 724, a full 29 points ahead of London’s average.

Admission Stats	Harvard	Wharton
Average GMAT	719	718
GMAT Range	490-800	540-790
Average GPA	3.67	3.50
Selectivity	12.2%	16.9%
Yield	89%	68%

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Enrollment:

Harvard and Wharton have massive full-time MBA programs, two of the biggest in the world. Harvard’s total enrollment is 1,837 students, while Wharton comes in at 1,674. Wharton is doing better with women, who represent 40% of the latest class versus 36% at Havard. It’s also doing much better with minorities, with 29% of the class versus Harvard’s 22%.  The numbers below are for the Class of 2011.

Enrollment Stats	Harvard	Wharton
Total MBA Enrollment	1,837	1,674
Women	36%	40%
International	36%	37%
Minority	22%	29%

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Poets&Quants:

You wouldn’t expect a school known largely for its financial prowess to openly embrace as many poets as Wharton, but the school surprisingly takes in even more applicants with undergraduate degrees in the humanities than Harvard, 42% versus HBS’ 40%. By and large, the makeup of the students is very similar. Besides the slight difference on liberal arts undergrads, Havard accepts a slightly larger number of students with engineering and math backgrounds, a difference of three percentage points over Wharton, while Wharton accepts a slightly higher percentage than Harvard of business and economics undergrads, 28% versus HBS’ 26%.

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Undergrad Degrees	Harvard	Wharton
Humanities	40%	42%
Engineering/Math	33%	30%
Business/Economics	26%	28%

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Jobs and Pay:

No school was immune from the severe recession of 2009, especially schools that have historically placed a lot of their students on Wall Street and in other financial jobs. Shockingly, more than a third of Wharton’s Class of 2009 failed to have a job at commencement. At Harvard, nearly one in four students was in the same boat. Grads from both schools fared much better three months after commencement, but these numbers are rare lows for two of the best business schools in the world. The estimates of median pay 10 and 20 years after graduation as well as over a full career come from a study by PayScale done for BusinessWeek and do not include stock options or equity stakes by entrepreneurs. In that study, it’s worth noting that Harvard was number one in compensation and Wharton was right behind it as number two.

Jobs & Pay Data	Harvard	Wharton
Starting salary & bonus	$131,219	$123,741
MBAs employed at commencement	76.8%	65.8%
MBAs employed 3 months after commencement	87.3%	74.6%
Median pay & bonus 10 years after commencement	$182,000	$161,000
Median pay & bonus 20 years after commencement	$230,000	$203,000
Median pay & bonus over a full career	$3,867,903	$3,491,372

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