Most Popular Business SchoolsThe 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.
As Harvard Business School and Stanford Graduate School of Business constantly battle for the top spot in the U.S. News Best Business Schools rankings, often, they’re also both very popular among those offered admission to the programs. One way to measure the popularity of a school is to calculate its yield – the percentage of full-time applicants accepted to the institution who decide to enroll there.
[Get Matched With Top Online Colleges and Universities Now]
For the fall 2010 entering class, Harvard was the most popular according to yield, and Stanford was second most popular. Once again, Harvard tops the list of most popular business schools among the fall 2011 entering class, but a different California institution is nipping at its heels this year. While Harvard’s yield is 89.3%, the yield of Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business and Management is 89.1%. Graziadio, which didn’t break into the top 10 most popular business schools list last year, displaced Stanford, which claims the No. 3 spot with a yield of 85.2%.
Of the 132 ranked business schools that submitted acceptance and enrollment data to U.S. News in a fall 2011 survey, the average yield of full-time applicants was 55.4%. The average yield among the top 10 most popular business schools was 20 percentage points higher – 75.6%.
Graziadio isn’t the only newcomer to this year’s list of top 10 most popular business schools. Other institutions that weren’t on last year’s list include Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, University of Alabama’s Manderson Graduate School of Business, and University of Utah’s Eccles School of Business.
Schools designated by U.S. News as Unranked were excluded from this list. U.S. News did not calculate a numerical ranking for Unranked programs because the program did not meet certain criteria that U.S. News requires to be numerically ranked. In the table below, U.S. News did not include schools that accepted fewer than 100 applicants.
Below are the 10 schools with the highest yield among accepted students for fall 2011:
| Business school(name) (state) | Studentsaccepted | Enrollment | Yield | U.S. Newsb-school rank |
| Harvard University (MA) | 1013 | 905 | 89.3% | 1 |
| Pepperdine University (Graziadio) (CA) | 128 | 114 | 89.1% | 81 |
| Stanford University (CA) | 466 | 397 | 85.2% | 1 |
| University of Alabama (Manderson) | 125 | 93 | 74.4% | 78 |
| University of Wisconsin—Madison | 154 | 111 | 72.1% | 25 |
| Brigham Young University (Marriott) (UT) | 210 | 150 | 71.4% | 34 |
| Columbia University (NY) | 1062 | 751 | 70.7% | 8 |
| University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) | 1209 | 853 | 70.6% | 3 |
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan) | 599 | 403 | 67.3% | 4 |
| University of Utah (Eccles) | 107 | 71 | 66.4% | 84 |
Don’t see your school in the top 10? Access the U.S. News Business School Compass to find data on acceptance rates and much more.
[Get a Free Financial Aid Guide and FASFA Form Now]
U.S. News surveyed more than 400 schools for our 2011 survey of business programs. Schools self-reported a myriad of data regarding their academic programs and the makeup of their student body, among other areas, making U.S. News’s 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’s rankings of Best Colleges or Best Graduate Schools.
Originally published at USNews.com on March 20, 2012