MBA Scholarships At Top Business Schools

This year, the average need-based scholarship comes to $32,000 a year—a tidy sum but under the $58,875 in annual tuition and significantly under the $95,100 that Harvard says a single student should budget for their annual MBA experience. The higher $95,100 number includes program fees, health care, and room and board. That’s why Harvard, even with the largest scholarship fund for MBAs, is setting aside some of the $1 billion in its latest capital campaign toward even more scholarship support. After all, last year the average student debt load for a graduating MBA from the school was a hefty $78,991.

One of the primary reasons Harvard is raising more money is to help its MBA students is because the school doesn’t want all of its graduates to chase the highest-paying jobs in finance and consulting out of necessity–to help pay off their debt. Dean Nitin Nohria believes that the high cost of an MBA can impose limitations on career choices, unless the school can help with the burden.

The numbers shown in the table (below) are for scholarships and do not include the total financial aid budgets of the schools. The University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, for example, devotes $19.2 million a year to financial aid, a significant portion of which is used to cover the interest payments of students while they are in the MBA program. Some 61% of the MBA students receive aid, but a smaller percentage gets scholarship funding, in all likelihood just under 50%. The actual amount of scholarship support at Ross is estimated at $15.4 million.

SCHOLARSHIP FUNDING AT TOP BUSINESS SCHOOLS FOR MBA STUDENTS

School	Total Scholarships	% of Gross Tuition	Average Grant	% of MBAs on Scholarship
Harvard Business School	$31.5 million	28.6%	$32,000	50%
Penn (Wharton)*	$16.9 million*	14.8%	$30,500	33%
Chicago (Booth)*	$16.3 million*	22.6%	$30,000	60%
Stanford GSB	$15.7 million	31.0%	$35,830	52%
Michigan (Ross)*	$15.4 million	27.5%	$22,360	48%
New York (Stern)	$12.8 million	26.8%	$26,400*	62%*
UCLA (Anderson)	$12.1 million	22.4%	$25,860	65%
Northwestern (Kellogg)	$11.8 million	27.9%	$22,800	35%
Columbia Business School*	$10.1 million	12.5%	$20,500	46%
Virginia (Darden)*	$8.4 million	23.4%	$30,800	43%
MIT (Sloan)*	$8.1 million	15.6%	$28,220	35%
Duke (Fuqua)	$7.1 million	14.2%	$20,950	33%
North Carolina (Kenan-Flagler)	$6.8 million	22.2%	$35,370	35%
Rice (Jones)	$6.7 million	59.0%	$33,320	94%
Indiana (Kelley)	$6.4 million	34.0%	$25,757	70%
Yale School of Management	$6.2 million	13.0%	$23,028	31%
Vanderbilt (Owen)	$6.0 million	36.6%	$25,797	65%
UC-Berkeley (Haas)	$5.8 million	23.0%	$29,060	50%
Cornell (Johnson)	$5.7 million	17.5%	$12,000	33%
Washington Univ. (Olin)	$5.5 million	39.0%	$30,990	64%
Notre Dame (Mendoza)	$5.5 million	36.9%	$29,283	60%
Dartmouth (Tuck)*	$5.4 million	15.6%	$27,550	35%
Carnegie Mellon (Tepper)	$5.3 million	21.5%	$21,853	57%
Emory (Goizueta)	$5.0 million	29.6%	$24,905	57%
Georgetown (McDonough)	$3.3 million	11.6%	$30,000	27%
Texas-Austin (McCombs)	$3.0 million	13.8%	$13,494	44%
Univ. of Washington (Foster)	$1.3 million	13.8%	$17,700	47%