Business school goliaths like the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and Harvard Business School may consistently dominate the U.S. News rankings, but other schools have quietly built programs that are in demand among applicants. One indicator of a school's popularity among students is its yield—the percentage of applicants accepted by a business school who ultimately decide to enroll in the program.
Harvard, according to an analysis of yield among full-time business programs, is the nation's most popular. In 2010, the business school, which ranked second in the 2012 Best Business Schools rankings, accepted 1,071 students and enrolled 903, putting the school's yield at 84.3 percent. Four of the 10 top-ranked business schools were among the list of most popular business programs, including Stanford, Harvard, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia Business School.
What may be more interesting, though, is that half of the top 10 most popular are schools whose rankings fall outside of the top 25 Best Business Schools. Programs that accepted less than 100 students for enrollment and schools that were designated by U.S. News as Unranked were not considered for this report.
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Of the 98 business schools that were considered for this list, the average yield was 50.8 percent. The top 10 most popular business programs all possessed a yield of more than 66 percent, with an average yield of 74.4 percent. The Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University, the nation's most popular university for undergraduates, placed fifth among the top 10 most popular business schools with a yield of 75.4 percent.
Although Stanford finished second to Harvard by nearly five percentage points, the California institution holds the distinction of having the lowest acceptance rate among the top 10 most popular b-schools, accepting only 6.8 percent of students that apply. On the other side of the spectrum, the University of Kansas School of Business accepted 81.9 percent of all students that applied for enrollment—the highest acceptance rate among the top 10 most popular business programs.
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Below is a table of the 10 most popular business schools in America, based on full-time yield data provided to U.S. News.
| Business School | Students Accepted | Enrollment | Yield | U.S. News B-School Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Harvard Business School | 1,071 | 903 | 84.3% | 2 |
| Stanford University Graduate School of Business | 488 | 389 | 79.7% | 1 |
| Louisiana State University--Baton Rouge Ourso College of Business | 100 | 76 | 76.0% | 89 |
| University of Wisconsin--Madison School of Business | 156 | 118 | 75.6% | 28 |
| Brigham Young University Marriott School of Management | 211 | 159 | 75.4% | 32 |
| Columbia Business School | 1,023 | 739 | 72.2% | 9 |
| University of Kansas School of Business | 104 | 75 | 72.1% | 105 |
| University of Pennsylvania Wharton School | 1,145 | 817 | 71.4% | 3 |
| University of Michigan Ross School of Business | 691 | 488 | 70.6% | 14 |
| University of Kentucky Gatton College of Business and Economics | 105 | 70 | 66.7% | 102 |
Don't see your school in the top 10? Access the U.S. News Business School Compass to find acceptance statistics, salary data, and much more.
U.S. News surveyed more than 430 accredited master's programs for our 2010 survey of business schools. 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 comes 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.
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