10 Most Popular Business Schools

On average, 75.6 percent of accepted applicants to these 10 b-schools choose to enroll in the programs.

March 20, 2012 RSS Feed Print

The U.S. News Short List, separate from our overall rankings, is a regular series that magnifies individual data points in hopes of providing students and parents a way to find which undergraduate or graduate programs excel or have room to grow in specific areas. Be sure to explore The Short List: College and The Short List: Grad School to find data that matters to you in your college or grad school search.

As Harvard Business School and Stanford Graduate School of Business constantly battle for the top spot in the U.S. News Best Business Schools rankings, often, they're also both very popular among those offered admission to the programs. One way to measure the popularity of a school is to calculate its yield—the percentage of full-time applicants accepted to the institution who decide to enroll there.

For the fall 2010 entering class, Harvard was the most popular according to yield, and Stanford was second most popular. Once again, Harvard tops the list of most popular business schools among the fall 2011 entering class, but a different California institution is nipping at its heels this year. While Harvard's yield is 89.3 percent, the yield of Pepperdine University's Graziadio School of Business and Management is 89.1 percent. Graziadio, which didn't break into the top 10 most popular business schools list last year, displaced Stanford, which claims the No. 3 spot with a yield of 85.2 percent.

[These M.B.A.'s have the most financial value at graduation.]

Of the 132 ranked business schools that submitted acceptance and enrollment data to U.S. News in a fall 2011 survey, the average yield of full-time applicants was 55.4 percent. The average yield among the top 10 most popular business schools was 20 percentage points higher—75.6 percent.

Graziadio isn't the only newcomer to this year's list of top 10 most popular business schools. Other institutions that weren't on last year's list include Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, University of Alabama's Manderson Graduate School of Business, and University of Utah's Eccles School of Business.

Schools designated by U.S. News as Unranked were excluded from this list. U.S. News did not calculate a numerical ranking for Unranked programs because the program did not meet certain criteria that U.S. News requires to be numerically ranked. In the table below, U.S. News did not include schools that accepted fewer than 100 applicants.

Below are the 10 schools with the highest yield among accepted students for fall 2011:

Business school (name) (state)	Students accepted	Enrollment	Yield	U.S. News b-school rank
Harvard University (MA)	1013	905	89.3%	1
Pepperdine University (Graziadio) (CA)	128	114	89.1	81
Stanford University (CA)	466	397	85.2	1
University of Alabama (Manderson)	125	93	74.4%	78
University of Wisconsin—Madison	154	111	72.1	25
Brigham Young University (Marriott) (UT)	210	150	71.4%	34
Columbia University (NY)	1062	751	70.7%	8
University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)	1209	853	70.6	3
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan)	599	403	67.3%	4
University of Utah (Eccles)	107	71	66.4%	84

Don't see your school in the top 10? Access the U.S. News Business School Compass to find data on acceptance rates and much more.

U.S. News surveyed more than 400 schools for our 2011 survey of business programs. Schools self-reported a myriad of data regarding their academic programs and the makeup of their student body, among other areas, making U.S. News's data the most accurate and detailed collection of college facts and figures of its kind. While U.S. News uses much of this survey data to rank schools for our annual Best Business Schools rankings, the data can also be useful when examined on a smaller scale. U.S. News will now produce lists of data, separate from the overall rankings, meant to provide students and parents a means to find which schools excel, or have room to grow, in specific areas that are important to them. While the data come from the schools themselves, these lists are not related to, and have no influence over, U.S. News's rankings of Best Colleges or Best Graduate Schools.

Tags:: Brigham Young University,; University of Alabama,; University of Wisconsin,; Pepperdine University,; Harvard University,; college admissions,; Stanford University,; colleges,; education graduate school,; Columbia University,; education,; students,; business school,; MIT,; businesses,; University of Utah,; University of Pennsylvania

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Carnegie Mellon is rapidly rising in the rankings. As a current student, I can attest to the quality of the program: http://youtu.be/AmuOkLZxbSY

RD of PA 10:32AM April 17, 2012

Hi!
Have you read this mba guide :
www.universitycollege-online.com/introduction-to-master-of-business-administration/

Chris of IL 5:14AM April 11, 2012

columbia university is sometimes informally considered to be harvard's business extension school in new york city-- as this is true, it is listing the same school twice. and yes-- it is possible to have a very successful business programs when you ignore the impositions of intellectual property right law, patent law, and some of the 'ethics' that exist in the ncaa to ensure that there are some kinds of differences between transnational corporations and universities.
but this as a policy is consistent with a national philosophy (marketing strategy) that seeks to both encompass the sometimes opposed ideas of free market capitalism/profit and liberal advocacy of paternalistic censorship in the media, drug markets and lifestyles, and the sometimes rigid hierarchy of corporations-- to take the 'front' position on all issues on the 'liberal fringe' is appropriate for a program that bills itself as the top authority on american business and education.
but despite the seeming ‘ideological congruence’ between taking a radical/activist position on issues that relate to domestic corporate development and an elite school’s traditional role as defender of both hierarchy and class privilege, h/c cannot rightfully retain such a position (and the accompanying authority) without resolving certain conflicts of interests, such as its role as both liberal instigator of corporate appropriations, as well as the top staffer of SEC investigators and bank officers.
h/c does a fine job of both maintaining its reputation as a purveyor of exec-level degrees, liberal education, and benefits packages that include access to the top talent (ranging from automotive to medical), but if your interested in a school that still possesses the kind of moral authority and integrity that comes from steering free of serious crime, you’ll have to look somewhere else.

jimpetrov of IL 1:24PM March 24, 2012

10 Most Popular Business Schools

On average, 75.6 percent of accepted applicants to these 10 b-schools choose to enroll in the programs.

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