‘Because It’s Harvard’: HBS Is Still The Most Desired MBA

Harvard Business School may not top every MBA ranking — but when it comes to aspiration, it’s still in a league of its own.

For the third consecutive year, Harvard emerged as the most desired MBA program in Bloomberg Businessweek’s Best B-Schools 2025-26 survey, with 22% of students and alumni naming it the school they would attend if costs and admissions weren’t a factor. That figure topped Stanford GSB’s 15%, and no other school surpassed even 5%.

The finding reinforces what Poets&Quants has consistently reported: that despite shifting rankings, rising costs, and an increasingly uncertain job market, HBS retains a unique gravitational pull — particularly for international students and prestige-driven applicants. As one admissions consultant recently put it, “For many people, it simply comes down to this: Because it’s Harvard.”

HARVARD’S BRAND STILL DOMINATES — EVEN BEYOND THE RANKINGS

Harvard’s 22% share of the aspirational vote in 2025’s Bloomberg survey matches last year’s total and trails only slightly behind the 23% it garnered in 2023. Stanford has consistently ranked second, but still trails by a sizable margin. The rest of the field is fragmented. Wharton, MIT Sloan, Columbia, and Chicago Booth are all clustered below 5%, while international schools like INSEAD and London Business School hover around 2-3%.

The dominance is even more striking given that Harvard ranked only No. 4 in Bloomberg’s overall U.S. MBA ranking this year. (Stanford took the top spot, followed by Booth and Darden.) Yet in the hearts and minds of prospective MBAs, Harvard is clearly still the most powerful brand in business education. According to a P&Q analysis, along with Stanford, HBS has by far the highest yield — that is, the percentage of admits who choose to enroll — of any elite B-school on the planet.

HBS’s brand power is built on more than just prestige. Its case-method pedagogy, expansive alumni network, and historical legacy as the prototype of the modern business school all contribute to its aura.

INTERNATIONAL STUDENTS STILL CHOOSE HARVARD IN DROVES

Perhaps the most revealing data point from Bloomberg’s 2025-26 survey is Harvard’s pull among non-U.S. respondents. Among the international students and graduates surveyed, 31% named Harvard as their dream school — well ahead of Stanford’s 18% and comfortably ahead of the remaining U.S. business schools combined, which were chosen by 51% of respondents.

Only 25% of international candidates said they would prefer a non-U.S. school, and among those, INSEAD and London Business School each garnered a little over 3% of the vote.

The preference for Harvard is especially strong among Indian candidates, with 175 respondents from India naming HBS their dream school — more than any other country. The school’s appeal extends across South America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, as well. However, another 318 respondents across South Asia selected other U.S. B-schools.

COSTS RISE WHILE OUTCOMES FALL

These findings reflect trends identified in Poets&Quants’ February 2025 analysis of global MBA pipelines, which showed Indian students far outnumbering Chinese students in many top-tier U.S. programs, especially at Harvard, Wharton, and Duke Fuqua.

But prestige comes at a price — and not just figuratively. Poets&Quants estimates the two-year cost of a Harvard MBA at $ 245,390, just outside the ten most expensive MBAs in the U.S., up 4.6% from last year’s estimate.

Meanwhile, job placement has taken a notable hit. Only 77% of 2024 HBS graduates who sought jobs were employed within three months of graduation — a steep decline from 86% in 2021, and among the lowest rates among M7 schools.

POLITICAL SCRUTINY FUELS APPLICANT ANXIETY

This dip mirrors a broader cooling in the MBA job market, especially in tech and consulting, as P&Q has chronicled in its years-long coverage of post-Covid hiring slowdowns. Compounding the economic pressure is mounting political scrutiny. This year, the Trump administration has openly threatened to cut federal funding to Harvard over its diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and its alleged mishandling of campus antisemitism. 

President Trump also floated visa restrictions that would have blocked international students from remaining in the U.S. after graduation — a move Harvard’s legal team said could upend the two-year MBA pipeline.

International applicants have taken notice. “There has been an increase in trepidation and scrutiny among international applicants,” Oren Margolis, founder of Pinetree & Palm, a boutique admissions consultancy based in Los Angeles, tells Bloomberg. “Some ask, ‘Will I even be able to get to campus?’”

Yet Harvard’s draw remains magnetic. Its general management curriculum, taught through the case method, continues to differentiate it from rivals with more specialized or quant-heavy approaches; and its alumni base — now over 90,000 strong — offers networking opportunities few schools can match. Its global brand remains synonymous with leadership and influence across sectors, from finance and consulting to government and entrepreneurship.

All of which explains why international students still contemplate a Harvard degree despite mounting challenges. As Margolis adds, many of his clients still seek to apply to HBS simply “Because it’s Harvard.”

As Rupal Gadhia, managing director of MBA marketing and admissions at HBS, tells Bloomberg, “We remain highly attractive to international students, who continue to represent roughly a third of the student body.”

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