The 50 Most Selective U.S. MBA Programs

A quick quiz: Which business school’s full-time MBA program is more selective? The University of Texas at Dallas or Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business? If you guessed the latter, you would be dead wrong. Surprisingly, UT’s business school accepts just 20.7% of its applicants versus Fuqua’s 23.7%.

Let’s try another one. Which business school is able to enroll a higher percentage of the applicants it accepts? Yale’s School of Management or Texas Tech’s Rawls School? If you went with the Lone Star state choice this time, you would be right. As shockingly as it seems, 57.7% of the applicants accepted into the Rawls School’s full-time MBA program enroll. At Yale, the number is 45.1%.

Who ever would have thought that the University of Wisconsin’s business school in Madison would enroll a higher percentage of its admits than only three other U.S. MBA programs: Harvard, Stanford, and Georgia Tech? Yet, it’s true. Wisconsin enrolls 75.6% of the applicants it accepts, not far behind Stanford’s 79.7%.

These are just a few of the contrarian surprises buried in an interesting table (below) on the most selective full-time MBA programs at U.S. business schools. It’s certainly a different way to look at the best schools–not by a ranking but by how selective each school is and then what percentage of the accepted applicants actually decide whether or not to take the school up on its offer of acceptance.

Even the top ten on this list is quite a surprise, with Texas Tech at number nine. Surprisingly, there are four Texas business schools in the top 20: Texas Tech, the University of Texas at Dallas, Texas A&M University, and finally what is generally regarded as the best MBA program in the state, the University of Texas at Austin at number 20.

One counter-intuitive conclusion: The best MBA programs are not always at schools with the lowest acceptance rates. There are a good number of highly ranked B-schools that fail to make the top 50 most selective list, notably Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business and Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business (with an acceptance rate of 42.5%). Yet, there are numerous schools that can afford to be a bit more selective even though they don’t have the repuation or quality of Indiana or Georgetown.

Another undeniable factor to consider when looking at the data: geography has an impact on the number of applications a school receives and, therefore, its acceptance rate. Schools in and around New York City and Boston as well as the state of California tend to be more selective because they are immediate draws for graduate students.

THE 50 MOST SELECTIVE FULL-TIME MBA PROGRAMS IN THE U.S.

School Applicants Accepted % Accepted Enrolled Yield
1. Stanford 7,204 488 6.8% 389 79.7%
2. Harvard 9.524 1,071 11.2% 903 84.3%
3. Berkeley (Haas) 3,627 422 11.6% 243 57.6%
4. MIT (Sloan) 4,782 621 13.0% 401 64.6%
5. NYU (Stern) 4,501 592 13.2% 314 53.0%
6. Columbia 6,666 1,023 15.3% 739 72.2%
7. UPenn (Wharton) 6,832 1,145 16.8% 817 71.4%
8. Yale 2,963 512 17.3% 231 45.1%
9. Texas Tech (Rawls) 275 52 18.9% 30 57.7%
10. Northwestern (Kellogg) 5,591 1,112 19.9% 647 58.2%
11. Dartmouth (Tuck) 2,528 514 20.3% 280 54.5%
12. Texas-Dallas 415 86 20.7% 63 73.3%
13. USC (Marshall) 1,983 436 22.0% 216 49.5%
14. Georgia Inst. of Tech 436 122 22.0% 93 76.2%
15. Chicago (Booth) 4,299 957 22.3% 579 60.5%
16. Texas A&M (Mays) 537 122 22.7% 63 51.6%
17. Cornell (Johnson) 2,001 469 23.4% 275 58.6%
18. Duke (Fuqua) 3,506 831 23.7% 440 52.9%
19. UC-Davis 447 107 23.9% 55 51.4%
20. Texas (McCombs) 2,259 542 24.0% 261 48.2%
21. Michigan (Ross) 2,722 691 25.4% 488 70.6%
22. Virginia (Darden) 2,515 662 26.3% 339 51.2%
23. Florida (Hough) 263 70 26.6% 36 51.4%
24. Ohio State (Fisher) 789 213 27.0% 122 57.3%
25. Carnegie Mellon (Tepper) 1,540 423 27.5% 201 47.5%
26. Illinois-Urbana Champaign 719 199 27.7% 103 51.7%
27. UC-Irvine (Merage) 802 224 27.9% 83 37.1%
28. Boston Univ. 1,387 388 28.0% 160 41.2%
29. Washington (Olin) 1,529 437 28.6% 148 33.9%
30. UMass-Amherst (Isenberg) 254 73 28.7% 36 49.3%
31. UCLA (Anderson) 2,459 714 29.0% 371 52.0%
32. Arizona State (Carey) 510 151 29.6% 79 52.3%
33. Minnesota (Carlson) 452 137 30.3% 71 51.8%
34. Wisconsin-Madison 511 156 30.5% 118 75.6%
35. Washington (Foster) 771 241 31.3% 114 47.3%
36. Northeastern 391 157 32.7% 103 65.6%
37. Boston College (Carroll) 719 236 32.8% 106 44.9%
38. Notre Dame (Mendoza) 886 292 33.0% 134 45.9%
39. Purdue (Krannert) 771 256 33.2% 108 42.2%
40. Emory (Goizueta) 1,037 345 33.3% 134 38.8%
41. Rochester (Simon) 850 285 33.5% 122 42.8%
42. CUNY (Zicklin) 379 128 33.8% 65 50.8%
43. Temple (Fox) 275 96 34.9% 50 52.1%
44. SMU (Cox) 565 198 35.0% 128 64.6%
45. Buffalo-SUNY 421 149 35.4% 94 63.1%
46. Missouri (Trulaske) 471 167 35.5% 99 59.3%
47. Rice (Jones) 544 195 35.8% 109 55.9%
48. Vanderbilt (Owen) 894 322 36.0% 186 57.8%
49. UNC (Kenan-Flagler) 1,764 636 36.1% 287 45.1%
50. Penn State (Smeal) 587 217 37.0% 107 49.3%

Notes: Applicants are the number of applications received by a school for what would be the Class of 2012; the estimated yield is based  on the number of enrolled students to accepted applicants. In some cases, however, there can be some deferred applicants who did not enroll. Harvard Business School, for example, says that its “yield”–the percentage of accepted applicants enrolled–tends to be around 91%. The table reports the number as 84.3%–still the highest of any school. The discrepancy could be caused by deferrals.

 

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