One of the most common issues in graduate business school education is the relative scarcity of female MBA students at the top schools. At most of the highest ranked institutions, it’s almost rare to find more than a third of the students female.
Of the prestige, highly-ranked B-schools, NYU’s Stern School of Business is at the top of the pack, with 39.6% of its full-time students female. Harvard Business School is up there, too, with 37.2% women, while 34.7% of Stanford’s Class of 2011 being female.
Then, there’s Carnegie-Mellon University’s business school with only 22.8% of the class composed of wome and Notre Dame’s B-school with 23%.
So which U.S. schools have the largest representation of women in their full-time MBA programs? The top schools on this list will surprise you. None of the top 25 are highly ranked schools that pop up in the various surveys. Instead, you see the likes of Appalachian State University’s Walker School of Business in Boone, N.C., , where women represent 72.3% of its full-time students, and the University of West Florida’s business school in Pensacola, Fla., where women make up nearly 67% of the full-time MBAs.
MBA PROGRAMS WITH THE MOST FULL-TIME FEMALE STUDENTS
| Schools | Percentage of Women |
| 1. Simmons College (Boston) | 100% |
| 2. North Carolina A&T State | 76.5% |
| 3. Appalachian State Univ. | 72.3% |
| 4. Univ. of West Florida | 66.7% |
| 5. Rochester Institute of Technology | 65.7% |
| 6. Univ. of South Dakota | 65.1% |
| 7. College of Charleston | 65.0% |
| 8. South Carolina State | 63.6% |
| 9. Montana State Univ. | 63.5% |
| 10. William Paterson Univ. | 59.5% |
| 11. Clark Atlanta Univ. | 58.3% |
| 12. San Jose State Univ. | 57.1% |
| 13. California State Univ. | 56.7% |
| 14. Morgan State Univ. | 56.5% |
| 15. Indiana Univ.-Kokomo | 56.2% |
| 16. Southeastern Louisiana | 55.2% |
| 17. Univ. of Southern Mississippi | 55.0% |
| 18. UNC-Greensboro | 54.5% |
| 19. George Mason Univ. | 54.4% |
| 20. St. John’s Univ. (Tobin) | 53.5% |
| 21. Univ. of Texas-Pan American | 53.0& |
| 22. University of Maine | 51.4% |
| 23. Clark University | 50.9% |
| 24. Howard University | 50.6% |
| 25. Pittsburg State Univ. (Kelce) | 50.4% |
Data: Provided by schools for the Class of 2011
