P&Q’s Must Reads: Acceptance Rates & Yield At The Top 100 U.S. MBA Programs

Hello everyone  — Welcome back to Poets&Quants’ Must Reads, a quick, digestible recap of the top business school news, sponsored by CentreCourt, P&Q’s virtual admission events.

I’m your host, Kristy Bleizeffer, and I’ll be highlighting the most important P&Q stories you might have missed. So, let’s get to it. 

No. 1: Acceptance Rates & Yield At The Top 100 U.S. MBA Programs

The good news in acceptance rates from 2022 continued into 2023, with rates rising at more than half of the top 50 MBA programs in P&Q’s annual ranking.

On the other hand, yield – the percentage of admits who actually enroll – fell at a wide majority of schools including at 20 of the top 25. That gives B-schools even more incentive to be generous in their admissions.

Of the top 10 schools in the ranking, acceptance rate has risen 13.3% over the last eight years while yield has fallen 15.8%.

See the full data set at the top 100 programs in our trending tab.

No. 2: How U.S. News Ranks The Top U.S. B-Schools By MBA Specialization 

This week, we have a lot of analysis from the 2024 U.S. News ranking of the best full-time MBA programs in the U.S., starting a look at MBA specializations.

Once again in 2024, there was remarkably little turnover at the top of each specialist ranking. Only two specializations had new No. 1 schools: Information Systems, in which MIT Sloan School of Management took over the top of Information Systems while Carnegie Mellon Tepper School of Business tied with MIT at the top of Project Management.

See the full list – including seven specializations for poets and six for quants – in our rankings tab.

No. 3:  10 Biggest Surprises In The 2024-2025 U.S. News MBA Ranking 

The only thing not surprising about the new U.S. News 2024 MBA ranking is that it’s full of surprises.

You can start from the very top of the list with Stanford and Wharton nudging aside Chicago Booth, last year’s winner, for first place. Or that Columbia Business School, Duke Fuqua, and Michigan Ross failed to make the Top Ten.

Up and down the ranking, with roughly one in four schools experiencing a double-digit climb or fall, there are shocks galore.

Read about all of them in our news tab.

No. 4: Our Weekly Round Up of  News You Can Use

No matter where you are in your MBA journey, we bring several helpful stories for you this week.

First up: What To Wear To Your MBA Interview. This story, which also offers helpful tips in choosing between the GMAT and GRE, is available on our homepage. 

Next: Should I Accept One Of My Current MBA Offers, Or Try Again Next Year? This story, which you’ll find in our admissions hub, offers insider insight from North Star Admissions.

Finally: When To Start Your MBA Application. This story, available from our homepage, offers seven strategies to start now in your Round One countdown.

And, that’s it for this week’s Must Reads recap. 

I also want to alert school seekers to our events tab from our main menu. There, you’ll find all the upcoming admissions events for a range of degrees and programs including full-time and online MBAs, specialized masters, entrepreneurship and more. Registration is free.

Again, I’m Kristy Bleizeffer, and you can join me next week, right here, for a recap of what’s important in the world of business education. Thanks for listening.