The most popular MBAs in the world

How do you measure the popularity of an MBA degree?

You can answer that question in a variety of ways. Certainly, a school that receives more applicants per available classroom seat than any other would qualify. 

Stanford’s MBA programme attracts 14.5 applicants per seat, more than any other well-known MBA programme in the world. At roughly 8.9 candidates per seat, University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business (12.9).

Another way to get an answer is by measuring yield, the percentage of admitted applicants who actually enrol in the MBA programme. Harvard sits atop this metric, taking 85.5 per cent of its admitted applicants last year, better than Stanford’s 80.3 per cent or Wharton’s 62.0 per cent, though Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Business unexpectedly beat all of them with 86.8 per cent due to its strong appeals to Mormons.

In this analysis, we’ve chosen a different method. We’ve decided to find the most popular MBA programmes by the number of times schools came up in candidate profiles submitted by applicants to our highly popular . That’s where we calculate the odds of an applicant’s chances of getting admitted to the schools they target. 

The one obvious disadvantage of this approach is that candidates tend to want their odds assessed at the most selective programmes, even when they might well be better off at other excellent business schools. That’s why we’ve included in our table below the data on both yield and applicants per available seat. In many cases, you’ll find that the programmes lower down on this list have better comparable stats than some of the schools in the middle or near the top. That’s why our table also includes popularity as measured by applicants per class seat and yield.

The most popular MBA programmes in the world

Mind you, this is not a ranking of the best programmes. Nor is it a ranking of the schools with the highest starting salaries or the best employment rates. It’s merely an indication of the MBA programmes that are most in demand by some of Poets&Quants’ readers over the past eight years.

There’s no surprise which school tops the list. Harvard Business School offers a rigorous and transformative MBA programme known for its case method of teaching, exceptional faculty, a strong alumni network, and an emphasis on leadership development, innovation and global perspectives.

But the surprises might well end there. The Wharton School at the Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. That is an unexpected result. After all, Stanford received 6,152 applicants last year for its 424 available seats, an applicant-to-seat ratio far better than Wharton, which enrolled a much larger class of 894 students from only a slightly larger applicant pool of 6,319.