Blog Archive MBA News A Closer Look at the Class of 2018

Blog Archive MBA News A Closer Look at the Class of 2018 The Class of 2018 is already hard at work inside business school classrooms. Class profiles, which schools release shortly after matriculation, reveal a diverse crowd among the latest incoming MBA students. We at mbaMission examined the class profiles of 16 top-ranked business schools to bring you a clearer picture of who, exactly, enrolled in MBA programs this fall. Three highly prestigious institutions, Harvard Business School (HBS), the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB), and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, received the most applications throughout the 2015â€"2016 application season. Nearly 10,000 individualsâ€"9,759, to be exactâ€"applied to HBS, while the Stanford GSB received 8,116 applications, and Wharton received 6,679. Perhaps unsurprisingly, HBS also has the largest incoming class, with 934 individuals. The New York University Stern School of Business, which received 3,773 applications last year, has the second-largest group of new MBA students: 872 men and women. The third-largest class among the schools we examined enrolled at Wharton, where 851 students began their MBA studies this year. Diversity is perhaps more sought after than ever in business school classrooms, as is evident in the incoming class statistics. Each of the 16 top-ranked schools we examined have an incoming class comprising more than 30% women, and nearly half (eight schools) reported female representation of 40% or greater. At Wharton and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, women represent 44% of the Class of 2018, and at HBS and the Yale School of Management (SOM), the figure is similar, at 43%. Underrepresented U.S. minorities account for more than 20% of the class at most schools, while Wharton and the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, reported the highest figures, at 32% each. Although all of the schools we examined are based within the United States, the class profiles show that the rest of the world is well representedâ€"each school reported the enrollment of students from more than 30 countries. At Wharton, incoming students hail from a whopping 71 countries, and at HBS, from 68 countries. At Columbia Business School (CBS), nearly half (48%) of students are international. Other schools with the highest percentages of international students are Yale SOM (46%), Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business (40%), and the Stanford GSB (40%). Educational and work-related statistics offered few surprises, as incoming students’ average GPAs hover around the typical 3.5â€"3.6 range, and their average GMAT scores are between 710 and 730, as in many previous years. Business was the most popular undergraduate major among new MBA students at six schools, with humanities and social sciences not far behind. At nearly every school that reported such information, the average amount of professional work experience years is five years. In addition, five schools reported the average age of their incoming students as 28. The Class of 2018 consists of a plethora of applicants, hailing from countless different backgrounds. What the Class of 2019 will look like remains to be seen. Will you be a part of it next year? Share ThisTweet B-School Charts Columbia University (Columbia Business School) Dartmouth College (Tuck) Harvard University (Harvard Business School) News Stanford University (Stanford Graduate School of Business) University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) Yale University (School of Management)