The odds of getting into a top-ranked business schools are tough
if not cruel. Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, the most selective U.S.
business school, rejected 92.9% of its applicants last year. Harvard Business
School turned down 88.5%. UC-Berkeley’s Haas School said no to 86.2%, while New
York University’s Stern School turned away 84.3%.
Those rather daunting
probabilities begs an obvious question: Where do the odds fall in favor of the
candidate?
Of course, all of this
is relative. Acceptance rates for any school are based on the applicant pool
its MBA program attracts. A lot of self-selection goes on here: If you think
you stand a decent chance of getting in, you’ll apply, If you don’t think
you’ll have a prayer, you’re likely to apply elsewhere.
Generally 80% of the applicant pool is good
enough to get into a school
Still, admissions
officials have said that as a general rule, 80% of a school’s applicant pool is
fully qualified to be accepted into its MBA program and do well. So you can
assume that about 20% of the pool at the best schools is essentially
non-competitive for the school to which they’ve applied. The candidate is
tossing a Hail Mary pass in the hopes that he or she gets through the screen of
a stretch school.
If you were playing
the odds of getting into the best possible MBA program, how would you do it? If
you’re within the mid-80% of the GMAT and GPA ranges for the school and the
acceptance rate is more than 30%, you have at least a 50-50 or better chance of
receiving an invite.
Obviously, this is a
simple way to look at MBA admissions. Work experience, the quality of your
essays, recommendations and interview all play a role as well. But GMAT and GPA
numbers loom large in the equation, enough so to create a list of the schools
with the odds definitely fall in your favor.
So here’s our list of
the very best “50-50 schools,” their actual acceptance rates, and the GMAT and
GPA scores of the latest entering class.
Source: US News & World Report
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