MBA Debt Burden Rises Again: A Record $117,200 Average At Wharton

Where MBA Debt Looms Largest

School	2012 Debt	% With Debt	2011 Debt	% Change
UPenn (Wharton)	$117,200*	68%	$114,339	+2.5%
Columbia	$114,800*	69%*	$100,000	+14.8%
New York (Stern)	$105,782	69%*	$89,040	+18.8%
Virginia (Darden)	$105,490	65%*	$90,949	+16.0%
Duke (Fuqua)	$102,054	72%	$96,805	+5.4%
MIT (Sloan)	$100,212	77%	$86,688	+15.6%
Michigan (Ross)	$95,720	66%	$93,602	+2.3%
Cornell (Johnson)	$95,600	68%*	$90,194	+6.0%
Yale	$95,235	70%*	$93,723	+1.6%
Dartmouth (Tuck)	$94,512	70%*	$96,346	-1.9%
Northwestern (Kellogg)	$88,740	68%*	$90,200	-1.6%
Thunderbird	$88,195	41%	NA	—–
Carnegie (Tepper)	$88,156	57%	$83,388	+5.7%
Pepperdine (Graziadio)	$85,672	56%	$66,111	+29.6%
Vanderbilt (Owen)	$84,342	67%	$87,587	-3.7%
UNC (Kenan-Flagler)	$82,784	70%	$82,747	—–
Texas (McCombs)	$80,589	57%	$76,351	+5.5%
Stanford	$79,049	70%*	$77,559	+1.9%
Indiana (Kelley)	$76,685	78%	$67,562	+13.5%
Chicago (Booth)	$72,959	68%*	$70,839	+3.0
UCLA (Anderson)	$71,995	65%	$73,417	-1.9%
Harvard	$70,731	60%	$77,880	-9.2%
Fordham	$69,637	87%	NA	—–
Washington (Olin)	$68,732	52%	$67,361	+2.0%
DePaul (Kellstadt)	$64,074	56%	NA	—–
UC-Berkeley (Haas)	$63,652	49%	NA	—–
Emory (Goizueta)	$62,716	68%	$68,078	-7.9%
Minnesota (Carlson)	$61,916	50%	$60,473	+2.4%
Boston College (Carroll)	$61,400	70%*	NA	—–

Source: Business schools reporting the average indebtedness of the 2012 and 2011 graduating classes to U.S. News & World Report

Notes: An asterisk indicates an estimate by Poets&Quants based on reporting. An earlier version of this story incorrectly noted Stanford’s average debt load because it was incorrectly reported to U.S. News by the school.

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