Harvard MBA Class of 2020 Admits By Undergraduate School

@foobar1 JHU probably has ample representation on the Harvard Med School list, business not so much.

Sure the top of the list is mostly Ivies but I look at the list and think that you can go to a sub T20 school or an excellent state school and attend Harvard. I understand that it probably boils down to work experience being more important than undergrad school but it gives hope.

Of course there is hope, but most prefer to go with the odds & the odds favor graduates of the most elite schools who work for the most prestigious employers in consulting, finance, & business.

@Publisher Yes, first job and elite schools produce better odds. I was thinking more about the posts on CC every year like “I didn’t get into any Ivies…should I even bother going to college”. There is hope.

Harvard Business School MBA Class of 2020 admits by employer (Top 25 Employers):

McKinsey & Co.
Boston Consulting Group
Bain & Company

Goldman Sachs

US Navy
US Army

Uber
Google

Accenture
Morgan Stanley
Exxon Mobil
Deloitte

Advent International
Apple
Microsoft
Shell
The Blackstone Group

GE
KPMG
Facebook
JP Morgan Chase
NETFLIX
Tesla
BOA/Merrill Lynch
Warburg Pincus

@publisher . . . this is an interesting list.

The top five would probably remain the same as Harvard feeds its own professional grad schools the most along with YLS, etc.; Penn has Wharton; and SYP are among the elite of the elite along with H.

But to remove the yearly spikes of certain schools, you’d have to present, say, a 5-year snapshot instead of a one-year one.

Illinois with its 11 would probably be pretty high year by year, but 2020 might have been an especially good year. Texas probably dominates the consulting/IB field in the state of Texas, so they’d probably be very high on a yearly basis. But if you have 2019 and 2021, that might be good to present to at least corroborate these estimations.

After 10 to 15, there will be yearly risers and fallers within these ranges. Berkeley would probably feed HBS at their ~ 10 pretty consistently, but would send more if HBS weren’t on the other side of the continent, and the same could be for other more regional universities, especially those who attend state colleges; if not necessarily by cost, it could be for, say, family obligations – needing to be anchored closer to home.

In other words, the $172k/year median might be tough to pass up for some, but $140/year at a top grade local MBA program might be good enough. It takes a special mindset to interrupt one’s career 2-5 years in to go across the country and effectively start over, although restarting at a much higher salary.

Obviously, there are numerous factors that are at play; not only that the elite colleges feed the elite grad programs (i.e., Harvard feeds Harvard grad . . . real shocker), but, e.g., that some colleges could send more to HBS, but for good local options.

To get these scores I divided the number of HBS class of 2020 members by the undergrad school’s undergraduate enrollment then multiplied by 10000. If two schools are numerically tied on this list I took it to the next decimal point to place them in the ranking.

For the sake of consistency I used US News enrollment numbers. For state schools I assumed the enrollment numbers were for the state flagship (e.g., I used the enrollment for UNC Chapel Hill without adding in Wilmington, Charlotte, etc.) I couldn’t find enrollment #s for U. de los Andes. Of course none of this accounts for the fact that HBS is probably more attractive to graduates from some schools than others. For instance, I’d posit that graduates of West Coast schools apply to Stanford’s business school at a greater rate than HBS and the reverse is probably true of East Coast college graduates.

The recalculated ranking taking enrollment into account:

  1. Harvard- 67.8
  2. Yale- 52.0
  3. Stanford- 49.4
  4. Dartmouth College- 45.3
  5. Princeton- 45.0
  6. Williams College- 38.6
  7. UPenn-- 38.3
  8. Duke–23 6682 34.4
  9. MIT- 32.6
  10. Wellesley College- 31.6
  11. U.S. Naval Academy- 26.6
  12. Columbia- 22.6
  13. Amherst College- 21.6
  14. Notre Dame- 20.9
  15. Georgetown- 18.8
  16. Brown- 17.4
  17. Bates College- 16.4
  18. Northwestern University- 15.8
  19. USMA at West Point- 15.6
  20. WashUStL- 14.2
  21. Cornell- 11.9
  22. Vanderbilt University- 11.7
  23. Bowdoin College- 10.9
  24. Davidson College- 10.9
  25. Colgate University- 10.1
  26. Rice University- 10.0
  27. University of Chicago- 9.2
  28. Boston College- 7.5
  29. Univ. of Virginia-7 7.1
  30. Tufts University- 7.1
  31. Univ. of Cambridge (England)- 5.8
  32. Emory University–4 7086 5.64
  33. American University in Beirut- 5.4
  34. UNC-Chapel Hill- 5.2
  35. NYU- 4.9
  36. Howard University- 4.8
  37. U.de Los Andes- 4.8
  38. Northeastern (Boston)- 4.3
  39. Univ. of Texas- 3.3
  40. USC- 4.0
  41. Georgia Tech- 3.7
  42. Univ. of Michigan- 3.3
  43. Univ. of Illinois- 3.2
  44. UCal-Berkeley- 3.2
  45. Imperial College London- 2.8
  46. Peking University (China)- 2.6
  47. Queen’s University (Canada)- 2.4
  48. BYU- 2.2
  49. Univ. of Kansas- 2.0
  50. Indiana- 1.8
  51. McGill University (Canada)- 1.6
  52. Purdue- 1.5
  53. Wisconsin- 1.23
  54. Univ. of Pittsburgh- 1.56
  55. Univ. of Georgia- 1.4
    56)South Carolina- 1.12
  56. Maryland-0.9
  57. UCLA- 0.9
  58. Univ. of Arizona- 0.9
  59. Rutgers- 0.8
  60. Univ. of British Columbia- 0.8
  61. Michigan State- 0.7
  62. Univ. of Toronto- 0.6
  63. Univ. de Sao Paulo (Brazil)- 0.4
  • Indian Institute of Technology--12 NA

@Sue22: Great work, great presentation.

Interesting thought about West Coast versus East Coast applicants. Makes sense. However, I think that it also depends upon the MBA applicants’ career plans as to whether they want Stanford or Harvard.

Those interested in high tech start-ups are likely to prefer Stanford, while those targeting MBB consulting might lean toward Harvard.

Would be interesting to get hiring info, from MBB.

I agree.

I find it interesting that with a couple of notable exceptions, and these may be in part due to year to year fluctuations, this list pretty closely approximates the US news list for 2018.

Substitute Chicago for Dartmouth and Swarthmore for Bates and you’d have the top 5 for both the US News top 5 national universities and LACs for the year in which these students were admitted.

Re: Opportunities:

Note that at some big publics, how much in opportunities you get depends on what school/program you’re in. Not so much at UW-Madison, but for instance, UNC has some prestigious small cohort scholarship programs. UVa has the McIntire b-school (while UMich has Ross and Cal has Haas). UIUC has one of the top CS programs in the country.
I know for a fact that on a per capita basis, the UNC folks who are in their big names scholarship programs are more likely to win the Rhodes than almost all Ivies/equivalents.
So I reckon that the Morehead-Cain, McIntire, Ross, Haas, Texas BHP, and UIUC CS folks actually are in the Ivy/equivalents range when it comes to chances of getting in to HBS or other M7 MBA program.

^ Hmm. I have to amend what I said about UIUC. Of the first dozen HBS/UIUC undergrad profiles pulled up with the Google search of “university of illinois” + “harvard business school” + linkedin, 7 were UIUC engineering and 5 were UIUC b-school. Gies has a little over 3K undergrads. Grainger has 6K. That puts their per capita rates in the vicinity of WashU/Cornell/Vandy/the U of C/Rice.