Figuring Out My Odds For Getting Into Harvard, Stanford, Wharton

One of the most difficult data points to find is the actual admission rates for all of the top schools.  Most of the school rankings have incomplete data; not all schools report their rates during the ranking process.  Additionally, when you cross reference the numbers between different sources, they rarely match one another.  Furthermore, the way each a school defines it’s admissions rate can be different each time.  Did they include the part time and executive applicants as well?  Is this for the admissions year or the calendar year?  Usually these specifics are left out.

Anyway, I wanted to get a broad picture of what the admissions were, so I decided to compile a set of numbers from a single source that had stats for all the top schools.  I’ll ignore the potential data integrity issues for now and just use that as my baseline.

The source I used was Clear Admit and their newly updated MBA Planner App.  For the statistics below, the Clear Admit iPhone app only provided the figures “class size” and “admission rate” in their app.  I used those two figures to back into a number for “total applications.”  The total applications figure is only intended as a ballpark and are not accurate to the exact number. Here is the data for all the top U.S. Schools, sorted by selectivity.  Please note that I backed into the “applications” number by considering class size and admit rate only.  Since I didn’t have the data, I did not consider an “admit and decline” rate, so these are just back of the envelope estimates.  One thing I need to take note of is the fact that 4 of my 6 schools are in the top 10 of this list.  (gulp)

Finally, the last view I created is a graph of sorted by overall demand.  I was a little surprised to see some of the low numbers at the bottom of the graph.  McDonough (Georgetown) has one of the lowest levels of demand and one of the highest admissions rates.  Kenan-Flagler and Tepper are similar.  I also didn’t know that Columbia had more apps than Stanford.

What are my chances?  If I take the weighted average admission rates of Harvard, Wharton, Stanford, Haas, UCLA, and Ross, the percentage is 13.5%.

This post is adapted from Random Wok, a blog written by Mako from Silicon Valley. You can read all of his posts at Random Wok.

Previous posts by Mako at PoetsandQuants:

Why I Want an MBA

Climbing the GMAT Mountain: 630 to 710 on a Practice Test

Do Consultants Have An Unfair Edge Over Other Applicants?

Falling Behind & Stressed Out

My New Critical Reasoning Strategy

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