The Ten Best Schools For Career Services

Schools with the Highest Acceptance Rates

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”

That said, if you can’t get into Northern Arizona’s MBA program, maybe you should consider law school.

Why? Consider this: Of the 50 students who applied at the W.A. Franke College of Business, 49 were accepted. That’s a 98% acceptance rate – the closest to a sure thing in education as you’ll find. Even more, it is way up from Franke’s 89.4% rate last year.

Don’t kid yourself: You still need to take the GMAT to get accepted at Franke, a school whose rank isn’t published in U.S. News’ latest ranking. Here, the average student produces a 568 GMAT score (and a 3.34 undergrad GPA). While Franke didn’t release salary information for its 30 graduates in 2014, 83.3% of its graduates held jobs within three months of graduation – a placement rate better than the University of Arizona (Eller) at 82.9%.  For in-state tuition, students just pay $10,745 for the whole program. That’s quite a bargain!

And that’s the dichotomy of programs with high acceptance rates. They may have poor name recognition. And they may not be particularly selective, either. Often, they are public programs that won’t break the bank.

…But not always. Take Duquesne University, a private Catholic program in Pittsburgh, for example.  Here, you have an 83.6% chance of being accepted (51 out of 61). Despite its rank being unpublished (the rankings equivalent to a gentleman’s C), the school charges $51,039 for its full program, $10,000 more than the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz Graduate School of Business (which ranks 48th overall, but maintains a stringent 24.9% acceptance rate).

The University of Tennessee is the highest-ranked program on U.S. News’ acceptance list. At 63rd overall, Tennessee managed a 73.8% acceptance rate (110 out of 148), with incoming students averaging a 605 GMAT and a 3.32 GPA (both slightly lower than the schools below them). However, the program’s placement rate (91.2%) was actually higher than many higher-ranked schools (including Kellogg, Haas, Ross and Fuqua). And Tennessee’s starting salary for graduates — $78,695 – was also higher than seven programs ranked above them. However, its in-state tuition – $22,602 – is much higher than the in-state costs of similarly-ranked public MBA programs like the University of Georgia and the University of Alabama.

Overall, seven of the ten schools with the highest acceptance rates were public programs.

Among schools with the lowest acceptance rate, tiny North Carolina A&T is actually more selective than Harvard or Stanford at 5.9% (thought it only enrolls 24 students at an in-state tuition of $4,346 per year). Stanford ranks second with a 7.1% rate, accepting only 521 out of 7,355 applicants. They were followed by Harvard (11%), Berkeley Haas (13.2%), MIT Sloan (13.8%), and (surprisingly) 48th-ranked California-Davis (15.3%). Wharton’s admission remains above 20% (20.7%, actually), while Booth and Kellogg both have less stringent acceptance rates than Northeastern University (22.2%) and the University of California-Irvine (22.7%). In addition, both Fuqua (25.1%) and Darden (26%) come with a higher acceptance rate than 74th-ranked University of Massachusetts-Amherst (24.8%). And would you believe that unranked Tampa (27.4%) and Long Beach State (28.6%) are (technically) harder to get into than Cornell (30%)?

To see the acceptance rates for the top 10 (and bottom 10) MBA programs, see the tables below.

Lowest Acceptance Rates

School	Full-Time Applicants	Full-Time Acceptances	Full-Time Acceptance Rate	U.S. News Rank
North Carolina A&T State University	378	22	5.9%	Unranked
Stanford University	7,355	521	7.1%	1
Harvard University	9,543	1,053	11%	2
University of California-Berkeley (Haas)	3,475	459	13.2%	7
MIT (Sloan)	4,735	652	13.8%	5
University of California-Davis	359	55	15.3%	48
UCLA (Anderson)	4,129	734	17.8%	15
New York University (Stern)	3,890	706	18.1%	11
Columbia University	5,799	1,056	18.2%	8
Wharton	6,111	1,283	20.7%	3

Source: U.S. News & World Report

Highest Acceptance Rates

School	Full-Time Applicants	Full-Time Acceptances	Full-Time Acceptance Rate	U.S. News Rank
Northern Arizona University (Franke)	50	49	98%	RNP
Truman State University (MO)	34	29	85.3%	RNP
Duquesne University (Donahue)	61	51	83.6%	RNP
University of Kentucky (Gatton)	120	100	83.3%	91 (Tie)
Coastal Carolina University	61	50	82%	RNP
University of California-Riverside (Anderson)	241	191	79.3%	RNP
University of St. Thomas (MN)	91	70	76.9%	RNP
University of North Carolina-Greensboro (Bryan)	97	72	74.2%	RNP
University of Tennessee (Knoxville)	149	110	73.8%	63 (Tie)
Bentley University (McCallum) (MA)	229	168	73.4%	RNP

Source: U.S. News & World Report

DON’T MISS: THE MOST AND LEAST SELECTIVE INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS SCHOOLS

Source: U.S. News & World Report