Kellogg MBA Class Of 2025: Near-Records For GMAT & International, Women's Enrollment

Kellogg’s MBA Class of 2025 in comprised of 48% women. Kellogg photo

We see it time and time again: A low GPA is not an insurmountable hurdle to admission to an elite MBA program. That fact was reinforced again today (September 21) with the release of Northwestern Kellogg School of Management’s MBA Class of 2025 profile.

Kellogg’s new class bears all the hallmarks of its avowed commitment to diversity: 42% of the domestic population are U.S. students of color, 13% are in the first generation in their families to pursue an advanced degree, and 9% are part of the LGBTQ+ community. Forty-eight percent are women, once again putting Kellogg among the global leaders in the MBA enrollment of women.

But undergraduate GPA is where applicants can really find hope in their quest to join an elite M7 program. Once again this year, an applicant (possibly more than one) earned admission to the Kellogg School with a sub-3.0 GPA — this year that low was 2.8, up from 2.6 last year and 2.4 in the 2021 intake.

NORTHWESTERN KELLOGG BY THE NUMBERS 2020-2023

Northwestern Kellogg	Class of 2025	Class of 2024	Class of 2023	Class of 2022
Class Size	529	503	508	559
Women	48%	48%	49%	40%
Internationals	39%	38%	36%	26%
Underrepresented Minorities	19%	23%	23%	NA
LGBTQ+	9%	8.2%	NA	NA
First-Generation Students	13%	NA	NA	NA
Countries	NA	NA	NA	48
Mean GPA	3.70	3.70	3.70	3.60
GPA Range	2.8-4.0	2.6-4.0	2.4-4.0	2.5-4.0
Mean GMAT	731	729	727	727
GMAT Range	620-780	620-780	630-780	640-770
Median GRE Verbal	163	162	162	163
Median GRE Quant	163	163	165	163

AFTER CAMPAIGN, SCHOOL-RECORD 19% OF CLASS HAILS FROM TECH

Second only to the pandemic-inflated intake of 2020, this year’s MBA class is among the largest in Kellogg history at 529 students, up 26 seats from last year. And a near-record number of those seats are taken by international students, who comprise 39% of the class, up 1 percentage point from last year and just shy of the 40% from 2015.

Another near-record: Graduate Management Admission Test average, which Kellogg reports as 732, almost certainly good enough to keep Kellogg in the company of schools with the highest average scores and second in school history only to the MBA Classes of 2019 and 2020, both of which notched 732. This year’s class GMAT range is 620-780, which at the lower end is among the lowest reported by the school — and, like GPA, another source of solace for the bright student who perhaps doesn’t test well.

One class record did fall in 2023: the number of students who hail from the tech industry. That’s 19%, up from 17% last year, a direct result of Kellogg’s efforts in late 2022 and early 2023 to court workers in the tech industry who had been laid off en masse during the industry’s historic downsizing.

“Kellogg continues to emphasize building a diverse community across many dimensions — including a broad spectrum of lived experiences, demographics, perspectives from around the world and career focus — to ensure a breadth of viewpoints and strengths in each class. Emily Haydon, assistant dean of admissions and financial aid, writes in a blog. She points to individual students, among them one who “contributed to corporate efforts to assist millions of Floridians during Hurricane Ian in September 2022”; another who led a national campaign with one of India’s public policy think tanks “to ensure the well-being of 29 million senior citizens during Covid-19”; and one who “performed an emergency procedure on a patient with a brain aneurysm rupture and supported post-operation care using novel techniques.”

“This year’s class reflects the empathetic, collaborative spirit so core to Kellogg,” Haydon continues. “These traits are identified in our admissions process and nurtured throughout the student journey.”

Source: Northwestern Kellogg

NEW STUDENTS HAIL MOSTLY FROM CONSULTING INDUSTRY

Like most B-schools in recent years, Kellogg reports its adherence to two methods of reporting race and ethnicity in its MBA class profiles, using both Federal Reporting Guidelines as advised by the Graduate Management Admission Council, and Multi-Dimensional Reporting, “which allows students to select multiple categories of race and ethnicity if they identify with those categories.” This means if a student identifies as both Black and Asian, he or she is counted in both the “Black” and “Asian” categories under Multi-Dimensional Reporting, as opposed to being classified as “multi-racial” under Federal Guidelines Reporting. In Multi-Dimensional Reporting, Kellogg’s minority cohort is 19%, a few points down from last year, while according to the federal standard it is 42%. In the former measure, the class is 7% Black and 24% Asian; in the latter, 6% Black and 20% Asian. In both measures, the class is comprised of 10% Hispanic/Latinx students.

The new Kellogg MBA class has the same average length of work experience as its immediate predecessor: 62 months. Aside from its huge cohort of techies, new students hail mostly from consulting (26%, up from 24%) and financial services (19%, same as last year). Those with experience in the government/education/nonprofit, consumer products, and healthcare/biopharmaceuticals sectors all comprise between 3% an 5% of the new class.

Business majors comprise 50% of the Kellogg Class of 2025, up from 45%, while STEM majors are 38%, same as last year. Those with humanities majors are 25%, up from 24%.