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, The Short List: Grad School and The Short List: Online Programs to find data that matter to you in your college or grad school search.
Applying to graduate school for a master’s in business is becoming increasingly popular for both domestic and international students.
For the first time since 2009 — in the wake of the Great Recession — the majority of full-time, two-year MBA programs are reporting an uptick in applications from U.S. candidates, according to a report from the Graduate Management Admission Council, which tracks business school data and administers the Graduate Management Admission Test. In previous years, international students drove the growth in application pools, the council’s survey reports.
[See the 10 MBA programs with highest acceptance rates.]
The GMAC survey found that 59 percent of full-time, two-year business programs reported that they attracted more applications from U.S. students. With applicant pools swelling, receiving an acceptance offer at one of these ranked business schools isn’t easy. Some of these programs accept less than 20 percent of applicants.
Stanford University, for example, accepted 6.1 percent of business master’s degree applicants in 2015 — the lowest rate among the 129 ranked business schools that submitted acceptance rate data for their full-time programs to U.S. News in an annual survey. As many as 7,899 prospective business grad students applied to Stanford, but at Harvard University the number of applicants is much higher.
[Get advice on applying to business school.]
Harvard received 9,686 applications for its graduate business degree programs in 2015. Only 10.7 percent were accepted, making the school’s acceptance rate one of the lowest among ranked programs.
Among the 10 schools where the fewest applicants get in, the average acceptance rate was 13.8 percent. Of all the 129 ranked business schools, the average acceptance rate was 25.8 percent.
Below is a list of the 10 business schools with the lowest acceptance rates for fall 2015. Unranked schools, which did not meet certain criteria required by U.S. News to be numerically ranked, were not considered for this report.
| School (name) (state) | Number of applicants | Number of applicants accepted | Acceptance rate | U.S. News rank |
| Stanford University (CA) | 7,899 | 485 | 6.1% | 2 (tie) |
| Harvard University (MA) | 9,686 | 1,033 | 10.7% | 1 |
| University of California–Berkeley (Hass) | 3,506 | 455 | 13% | 7 |
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan) | 4,254 | 623 | 14.6% | 5 (tie) |
| University of Florida (Hough) | 322 | 51 | 15.8% | 37 (tie) |
| Pennsylvania State University–University Park (Smeal) | 637 | 109 | 17.1% | 41 (tie) |
| University of California–Davis | 343 | 61 | 17.8% | 45 (tie) |
| Columbia University (NY) | 5,829 | 1,048 | 18% | 10 |
| University of California–Los Angeles (Anderson) | 3,533 | 699 | 19.8% | 15 |
| University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) | 6,590 | 1,302 | 19.8% | 4 |
Don’t see your school in the top 10? Access the U.S. News Business School Compass to find admissions data, complete rankings and much more. School officials can access historical data and rankings, including of peer institutions, via U.S. News Academic Insights.
U.S. News surveyed 470 colleges and universities for our 2015 survey of graduate business programs. Schools self-reported myriad data regarding their academic programs and the makeup of their student body, among other areas, making U.S. News’ 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’ rankings of Best Colleges, Best Graduate Schools or Best Online Programs. The admissions data above are correct as of July 26, 2016.
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