Stanford Winning Dual Admit Battle With HBS

Admits to Harvard and Stanford are more often than not going west, according to Bloomberg Businessweek data

Harvard Business School will send out invites to its Round One applicants next week on Dec. 9th. How many of them will ultimately go to Harvard?

If you can believe a new data sort from Bloomberg Businessweek’s latest surveys of MBA graduates, only 63.8% of those admitted to HBS and at least one other school ended up enrolling at Harvard. Some 17.3% headed West to Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, while 5% chose Wharton and 2.3% enrolled at Columbia Business School.

Never mind that HBS typically reports a 90% yield rate, meaning that 90% of the people it accepts enroll as students at the school. That’s more than 26 percentage points higher than Businessweek’s data, based on a sample size of 260 students. Of course, Harvard’s yield rate would include candidates who either only applied to HBS or were not accepted elsewhere.

STANFORD CAPTURED THE HIGHEST PERCENTAGE OF ITS ADMITS

In Businessweek’s sample, there were 97 students admitted to both Harvard and Wharton. The magazine said that only 70.1% went to Harvard, while 13.4% enrolled at Wharton. The remaining 16.5% took seats in other MBA programs. The magazine relays all these results with some jazzy graphics.

Businessweek also found that of the 436 students in its sample who said they were accepted by Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and at least one other school, 29.4% picked Kellogg. Some 10.6% went to Wharton, while another 10.6% signed up at Chicago Booth. Some 8.3% took Harvard, while 6.4% enrolled at MIT Sloan.

The school that captured the largest percentage of its admits, according to Businessweek? Stanford. Some 68.8% of the applicants accepted to Stanford—five percentage points higher than Harvard—enrolled at the school when they were also accepted to another school. The sample size here was just 125 students.

STANFORD’S 66.9% VS. HARVARD’S 17.6%

And when it came down to the HBS-Stanford rivalry, there were 68 students in the sample admitted to both Harvard and Stanford. According to BW, Stanford handily won the vast majority of these dual admits, bagging 66.2% of them versus Harvard’s 16.2%. Some 17.6% went elsewhere.

That huge margin of victory over Harvard is based on decisions made more than two years ago–before the recent leadership crisis at the school and increased fears that the tech bubble is beginning to lose some air.

DON’T MISS: WHY STANFORD IS BEATING HARVARD ON DUAL ADMITS or RARE PRIVILEGE: DECIDING BETWEEN HBS & STANFORD