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.
It’s often said that the most popular clubs are the ones that are hardest to join. The same principle might also apply to business schools.
The 10 ranked MBA programs with the most applicants for fall 2015 are all selective programs that accepted a small minority of applicants. Each of these programs placed in the top 20 in the U.S. News 2017 Best Business Schools rankings. Eight of these schools rank in the top 10, and all have acceptance rates less than 25 percent.
B-schools with large applicant pools have the luxury of being choosy about which students they admit. The number of applicants at the 10 b-schools with the largest applicant pools was well above the average at the 129 ranked schools that submitted these data to U.S. News in annual survey: 917. The school with the largest applicant pool for fall 2015 was the Harvard Business School with 9,686 applicants, more than 10 times the average.
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Most people who apply to the MBA programs with the largest number of applicants are rejected. Only 15.5 percent of applicants to these programs are accepted.
The b-school with the fewest applicants in 2015 was the Muma College of Business at the University of South Florida, which had only 21 applicants and a 100 percent acceptance rate.
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Below are the 10 MBA programs with the largest applicant pools 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 full-time applicants | U.S. News b-school rank | Acceptance rate |
| Harvard University (MA) | 9,686 | 1 | 10.7% |
| Stanford University (CA) | 7,899 | 2 (tie) | 6.1% |
| University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) | 6,590 | 4 | 19.8% |
| Columbia University (NY) | 5,829 | 10 | 18% |
| Northwestern University (Kellogg) (IL) | 4,300 | 5 (tie) | 20.6% |
| University of Chicago (Booth) | 4,284 | 2 (tie) | 24.4% |
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan) | 4,254 | 5 (tie) | 14.6% |
| New York University (Stern) | 3,696 | 20 | 20% |
| University of California–Los Angeles (Anderson) | 3,533 | 15 | 19.8% |
| University of California–Berkeley (Haas) | 3,506 | 7 | 13% |
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 schools for our 2015 survey of 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 comes 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 applicant pool data above are correct as of Jan. 24, 2017.
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10 MBA Programs With the Most Applicants originally appeared on usnews.com
