Acceptance Rates & Yield At The Top 50 U.S. MBA Programs

The B-school with the lowest acceptance rate in the lower half of the P&Q top 50: Simon Business School at the University of Rochester at 14.7%. The Simon School is one of just four schools ranked 26-50 with a rate below 20%

CLASS SIZES SHRINK AT MOST MBA PROGRAMS

Most of the top 50 business programs in the U.S. saw a decline in enrollment in 2022. Compared to 2021 figures, only seven of 49 schools reported an increase in enrollment. And the declines were often dramatic.

UCLA Anderson School of Management dropped 50 seats in 2022, to 322. Duke Fuqua School of Business dropped 48 seats, to 399. UC-Berkeley Haas School of Business was down 44 to 247; MIT Sloan was down 42 to 408; Texas-Austin McCombs School of Business was down 50 to 220; and Emory Goizueta was down 52 to 113. The biggest decline in raw numbers was at UNC Kenan-Flagler, which dropped 54 seats to enroll 242 MBA students in 2022 — but more dramatic still was what happened at Texas A&M Mays Business School, which shaved its MBA cohort by more than half, to 33 seats from 74; and at Pittsburgh Katz School of Business, which went down to 39 seats from 82.

Over a three-year period from 2020 to 2022, the biggest downturn in raw numbers has occurred not at a small program but at Columbia Business School, which has dropped more than 150 seats. This is despite actually adding spots in 2022. Meanwhile Harvard Business School, which has the biggest overall MBA program at 1,015 students, has reported the biggest uptick since 2020: 283 students.

See page 5 for more enrollment data for the top 50 schools.