University of Virginia, Darden School of Business

 

University of Virginia

 

13. Darden School of Business

100 Darden Boulevard

Charlottesville, VA 22903

Admissions: 434-924-7281

Email: darden@virginia.edu

Website: http://www.darden.virginia.edu/web/MBA/

Apply Online: http://www.darden.virginia.edu/web/MBA/Admissions/Home/

The Bare Stats

 

2014-2015 Tuition & Two-Year Fees: $123,526 (resident)

2015-2016 Tuition & Two-Year Fees: $127,526 (non-resident)

School Recommended Two-Year Budget: $168,874 (resident)

School Recommended Two-Year Budget: $174,866 (non-resident)

Average GMAT: 706

GMAT Range (10th-90th percentile): 640-750

Average GPA: 3.5

Undergraduate GPA Range (10th-90th percentile): 3.10-3.95

Acceptance Rate: 26%

Full-Time MBA Enrollment: 635

International: 36%

Female: 32%

Domestic Minority 16%

Mean Age: 27

Application Deadlines

 

Round	Deadline	Interviews Begin	Notification	1st Deposit Due	2nd Deposit Due
One	10/8/15	Mid-November	12/17/1	2/19/16	6/3/16
Two	1/8/16	February	3/25/16	4/30/16	6/3/16
Three	4/8/16	Late April	5/6/16	6/3/16	6/3/16

Source: Darden School of Business (school has not yet announced its new 2015-2016 deadlines, though there are usually only slight changes from year to year)

Reputation

 

Ranking	2015	2014	2013	2012	2011
Poets&Quants	NA	13	13	12	11
U.S. News	10	11	12	13	13
Businessweek	NA	20	NR	10	NR
Forbes	NA	NR	15	NR	9
Financial Times	32	27	35	38	41
The Economist	NA	3	4	3	4

Source: P&Q analysis

Notes: NA = Not available, NR = Not ranked. The ranks by the FT and The Economist are global, while the rankings by P&Q, U.S. News, Businessweek, and Forbes are for non-U.S. schools.

Parsing The Rankings: A quick glance at Darden’s rankings will reveal just how scattered and silly the whole business school rankings game has become. The Economist puts UVA’s Darden School at number three in the world, behind only Chicago and Dartmouth Tuck. Rival British publication, The Financial Times, has Darden at a rank of 32nd in the world. Both results lack any credibility, largely due to the severely flawed methodologies followed by those two lists.

Just as troubling, however, is Darden’s 10-place fall in last year’s newly revamped Bloomberg Businessweek ranking. The school plunged to 20th place in 2014 from 10th in 2012 in what had been a biennial ranking (BW changed to an annual ranking effective this year). Of course, nothing of substance changed about the Darden program in the two years between the two rankings. What did change was Businessweek‘s methodology. The magazine overhauled its system of ranking schools and the changes severely biased its results. Among the alternations, BW for the first time allowed alumni recruiters to rank the schools they graduated from. Not surprisingly, schools that had more recruiters who returned to their old campus simply did better in the ranking than those that didn’t. It all led to truly wacky results, even allowing Duke University’s Fuqua School to finish in first place.

We would throw all those results out and look more closely at U.S. News, which ranks schools on a variety of measures, such as GMAT, GPA, acceptance rates, starting pay and employment, that more truly judge the quality of an MBA program. Over the past five years, Darden has done well by U.S. News, moving to 10th in 2015 from 13th in 2011. Of course, the school’s best showing comes from U.S. News and you can’t completely discount the noise from the other surveys.

Forbes, which ranks schools solely on the basis of their MBA program’s return on investment, put Darden 15th best in the U.S. P&Q, which is a composite look at the five most influential rankings, has Darden at 13th. In effect, the high Economist ranking and the low FT showing–both clearly statistical or methodological anomalies–cancel each other out. We think that 13th is a relatively fair assessment of this world class MBA experience which boasts the best and most consistent teaching quality of any program.

The Outcome

 

Average 2014 Base Salary: $112,257

Average 2014 Signing Bonus: $28,419

Average 2014 Base Salary & Bonus: $136,474

Highest 2014 Base Salary: $160,000

Lowest 2014 Base Salary: $28,000

Percentage of Class of 2014 MBAs with Job Offers at Graduation: 89%

Percentage of Class of 2014 MBAs with Job Offers Three Months Later: 94%

Payscale Estimate of Total Pay over a 20-Year Career: $2,705,000

Darden’s Class of 2015 was among the most highly compensated MBAs in the world. The average starting salary and bonus was $136,474, up 14.4$ from $119,278 five years earlier. The 2015 pay numbers make Darden MBAs the 11th highest paid graduates out of U.S. business schools,  with Chicago Booth and Duke Fuqua just ahead of the school’s graduates and Northwestern Kellogg, NYU Stern just below the Darden numbers. In the pay sweepstakes, UVA is behind only two other public university business schools: UC-Berkeley, whose MBAs got $140,935, and Michigan Ross, whose grads took home $140,497 to start in 2015. The highest paid MBAs of the years were at Harvard where the average base and bonus was $144,750.

And when it came to employment, Darden did even better. Some 94% of the Class of 2015 had jobs three months after graduation. That was seventh best among the top 25 U.S. MBA programs, with Wharton, Emory, and Dartmouth Tuck just slightly higher.

Where Darden’s Class of 2015 Went To Work:

Consulting — 28%

Financial Services — 22%

Technology — 16%

Consumer Products — 9%

Manufacturing — 9%

Healthcare/Pharma — 5%

Energy — 2%

Real Estate — 2%

Retail — 2%

Government — 2%

Darden no longer publishes in its employment report its top employers, preferring to list all of the firms that hired the school’s graduates. That’s why the below table has not been updated.

Top Employers of Darden MBAs

2011 Top Employers	MBAs Hired	2014 Top Employers	MBAs Hired
Microsoft	10	Amazon	13
Bank of America	10	Boston Consulting Group	13
Amazon	8	PwC	11
McKinsey & Co.	7	Accenture	8
Bain & Co.	7
Accenture	7
BCG	6
Barclays Capital	6
Deutsche Bank	6
Samsung	6
Johnson & Johnson	5
IBM Consulting	5
J.P. Morgan Chase	5
Citigroup	5
Wells Fargo	5

Source: Darden School of Business Employment Reports