MIT Sloan MBA Class Of 2025: Sloan Staves Off Serious Application Slide

Sloan Fellows: An Elite Mid-Career Degree At Three World Class B-Schools

MIT Sloan School of Management has released its MBA Class of 2025 profile. File photo

The pandemic boom in MBA applications is over, and the top business schools in the United States and globally have seen a return to normalcy, of sorts, in the volume of applications they receive to join their programs. The declines from all-time highs in apps began in the 2021-2022 cycle and continued at many top B-schools in 2022-2023 — but the second year of downturns has been milder, particularly at some of the vaunted M7 schools, suggesting a better cycle and better times ahead.

Now another of those M7s, MIT Sloan School of Management, has joined those reporting a more moderate year of MBA application decline — which does not, to be sure, suggest any decline in the quality of the students who have joined the storied Boston program.

The Sloan School enrolled a class of 409 in its MBA Class of 2025, one year after welcoming 408, suggesting its class size has stabilized after ballooning to nearly 500 in the coronavirus intake of 2020. This year’s class of Sloanies retains its proportion of women (46%), a school record set last year and among the most of any top U.S. school, while maintaining near-highs in international students (40%), median GMAT score (729), and median class grade point average (3.61). Altogether, it’s the kind of high-quality class one expects at a school ranked consistently in the top 10, including fourth in the 2023 U.S. News ranking and sixth in Poets&Quants‘ 2023 list of U.S. B-schools and 11th in the latest Financial Times list of global schools.

MIT SLOAN MBA CLASSES 2020-2025: BY THE NUMBERS

Stats	Class of 2025	Class of 2024	Class of 2023	Class of 2022	Class of 2021	Class of 2020
Applications	5317	5349	7112	6350	5260	5560
Enrolled	409	408	450	484	416	409
International	40%	40%	43%	33%	42%	38%
Countries Represented	60	63	64	51	54	49
Women	46%	46%	44%	38%	41%	42%
URM	28%	32%	23%	NA	NA	NA
Average Work Experience	5 years	5 years	5 years	5 years	5 years	4.9 years
Median Class GPA	3.61	3.62	3.59	3.54	3.58	3.48
Median Class GMAT	729	730	730	725	730	730
Mid-80% GMAT Range	700-760	690-760	690-760	690-760	700-760	700-760
Median Class GRE	327	325	325	NA	NA	NA
Mid-80% GRE Quant Range	157-168	158-169	158-169	156-168	156-168	158-169
Mid-80% GRE Verbal Range	155-167	157-168	157-168	154-168	156-168	154-169
% GRE	34%	32%	24%	NA	24%	NA

MILD SECOND-YEAR APP DECLINES OCCUR AT STANFORD, HARVARD, WHARTON

MBA applications to the Sloan School were down only about half a percent last cycle, one year after declining by nearly 25%. The latter decline of more than 1,700 apps was steepest among all top-25 B-schools that cycle — alarming even though it was obviously a correction from two years of pandemic: Sloan was one of many schools that made submission of Graduate Management Admission Test or Graduate Record Exam scores optional in 2021, inviting far more applicants to take a chance on getting into what for most is a reach school.

Sloan was not alone. Several of the GSB’s peers suffered declines two years ago and as P&Q’s coverage has detailed, many have reported a second year of slumps as the market corrects from a pandemic-fueled boom in applications. Stanford, too, had among the biggest drop-offs in MBA applications between 2020-2021 and 2021-2022, when it lost more than 16% of app volume in a single cycle. But Stanford dodged a second year of decline in 2022-2023, with 6,190 apps to its MBA program after 6,152 last year — a modest gain, but a gain nonetheless. At the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, apps were down slightly this year, to 4,184 from 4,352 for the Class of 2024, a decline of nearly 4% and the lowest app total for Booth since 2016. In two years, apps to Booth’s full-time MBA have dropped about 17%.

At the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School, apps were down this fall for a second straight year, dropping 2%, or 125 apps, from the previous cycle. Wharton’s 2022-2023 application total of 6,194 is down 15.6% or 1,144 apps in two years, a precipitous decline from a school record of 7,338 for the class that enrolled in fall 2021. And at Harvard Business School, MBA applications in 2022-2023 were down by 115 or 1.4%, a year after dropping more than 15%, falling from 8,264 last year to 8,149. But the long-term trend at HBS is definitely down: MBA apps at MIT’s neighbor and rival are down more than 21% since the school received a record 10,351 for entry to the Class of 2019.

Application numbers in 2022-2023 as revealed school by school this fall have been … well, all over the place. Apps to UCLA Anderson School of Management fell 11.8% and are down almost 30% in two years; they dropped at Duke Fuqua School of Business by 7%; and they’re down about 5% at Yale School of Management. Virginia Darden School of Business reported a 4% decline. Some schools, however, saw gains: See below for links to more of Poets&Quants’ coverage of the MBA Class of 2025.

M7 SCHOOLS’ MBA CLASS OF 2025: BY THE NUMBERS

MBA Class of 2025	Stanford	Harvard	Wharton	Kellogg	Booth	Sloan
Applications Received	6,190	8,149	6,194	NA	4,184	5,317
Enrolled	431	938	874	529	637	409
GMAT Average	738	740*	728	731	728	729*
GMAT Range	630-790	500-790	NA	620-780	600-780	700-760**
GRE Average	328	326*	324	326*	325	327*
% Submitting GRE	39%	34%	NA	NA	29%	34%
GPA Average	3.77	3.73	3.60	3.70	3.60	3.61*
GPA Range	NA	NA	NA	2.8-4.0	2.4-4.0	NA
Women	46%	45%	50%	48%	42%	46%
US Minority	50%	45%	37%	42%	49%	52%
URM	26%	25%	16%	19%	22%	28%
International	36%	39%	31%	39%	36%	40%
Countries	55	NA	70	NA	54	60
Average Work Experience	5 years	4.9 years	5 years	5.1 years	5 years	5 years
Average Age	NA	27	NA	NA	28	NA
LGBTQ+	NA	NA	11%	9%	12%	NA
First-Generation Students	11%	11%	11%	13%	12%	NA
Military	5%	6%	NA	3%	11%	8%

*Median

**Middle 80%

OVERTURES TO LAID-OFF TECH WORKERS PAY OFF

MIT Sloan’s MBA program not only maintained its high rate of women’ enrollment with women comprising 46% of the new class (same as last year and up 8 percentage points in four years), it also kept its international flavor intact, with 40% of the class hailing from out side the U.S., same as the Class of 2024. The new class comes from 60 countries, down from 63 last year.

Sloan’s diversity improved in terms of its U.S. minorities, as well, a category that includes Asian-American students. More than half the new class (52%) is included in this group, which is higher proportion than any other M7 (though Columbia Business School has not yet reported its 2025 class profile). Additionally, 28% of the new class are underrepresented minorities, chiefly Black and Hispanic students, down slightly from 32% last year. Thirty-three of the new class are military veterans, accounting for just over 8% of the class.

There were some major shifts in the pre-MBA industry and undergraduate major makeup of the new Sloan MBA class compared to previous years. Most new Sloanies once again came from the consulting industry (26%, up from 23% last year and 22% in 2021), but students with financial services backgrounds dropped big-time, to 17% of the class from 23%; last year was the first time since at least 2018 that finance students were just as plentiful as consultants. Students from the government/nonprofit sectors also declined, to 10% of the class from 14% last year.

Conversely, students from the tech industry grew to 23% of the class, second only to consultants and up 9 points in one year, no doubt a result of MIT’s enticements to victims of widespread tech layoffs in 2022.

Engineering continues to be king among Sloanies’ undergraduate majors, returning to 33% of the class, the same level it was for three straight intakes until it shrank to 29% last year. Business majors plummeted to 16% of the class from 23%. See below for details.

BACKGROUNDS & UNDERGRAD MAJORS FOR SLOANIES OVER THE YEARS

Background	Class of 2025	Class of 2024	Class of 2023	Class of 2022	Class of 2021	Class of 2020
INDUSTRY
Consulting	26%	23%	22%	22%	26%	21%
Technology	23%	14%	16%	15%	18%	18%
Financial Services	17%	23%	21%	17%	17%	19%
Government/Education/Nonprofit	10%	14%	12%	13%	13%	14%
Pharma/Healthcare/Biotech	7%	6%	7%	9%	9%	6%
Manufacturing	3%	3%	4%	4%	4%	8%
Energy	2%	4%	5%	5%	4%	7%
Consumer Products/Retail	2%	3%	4%	4%	4%	5%
Automotive/Transportation/Defense	2%	2%	2%	4%	NA	NA
Media/Entertainment/Sports	1%	0.5%	2%	1%	NA	NA
Other	7%	7%	NA	NA	NA	NA
UNDERGRAD MAJORS
Engineering	33%	29%	33%	33%	33%	31%
Economics	18%	17%	19%	19%	21%	21%
Business	16%	23%	18%	16%	18%	20%
Math & Science	12%	15%	9%	10%	11%	7%
Computer Science	6%	2%	3%	2%	2%	2%
Social Sciences	5%	10%	6%	8%	8%	NA
Humanities	3%	2%	4%	4%	5%	NA
Law	1%	1%	1%	1%	1%	NA
Other	6%	1%	NA	NA	NA	NA