Monthly Archives: March 2015

MBA Waitlist Acceptance Rate Rank

A more up-to-date analysis of MBA waitlist acceptance rate has been completed which include admissions data for the class of 2019.

At this point in the year many applicants have been placed on the waitlist for the school of their dreams. It is a frustrating experience that I personally have experienced. This articles shows the MBA waitlist acceptance rates for the top US MBA programs. The data for this analysis comes from GMATClub. These acceptance rates are meant to give a rough idea of the waitlist acceptance rate and should be taken with a grain of salt. The sample sizes vary by school; Olin, Emory and Stanford have the lowest sample sizes.

MBA Waitlist Acceptance Rate by School Rank

US News RankSchoolWaitlist Acceptance Rate
1Stanford9%
2Harvard2%
3Wharton6%
4Booth15%
5Sloan8%
6Kellogg6%
7Haas4%
8Columbia6%
9Tuck10%
10Darden16%
11NYU3%
11Ross11%
13Duke4%
13Yale3%
15Anderson18%
16Cornell11%
17McCombs8%
18Kenan-Flagler46%
19Olin30%
20Tepper13%
21Emory4%

MBA waitlist acceptance rates ranges widely from 46% to 2% depending on the school. It tends to vary quite a bit from year to year, so these acceptance rates should only be used as a guide. For example Dartmouth’s average waitlist acceptance rate is 10%, however for the class of 2016 it was only 2%. The top ten schools on average have a slightly lower waitlist acceptance rate coming in at 8% while the next ten schools average a noticeably higher acceptance rate of 14%.

MBA Waitlist Acceptance Rate Rank

Acceptance RankSchoolWaitlist Acceptance Rate
1Kenan-Flagler46%
2Olin30%
3Anderson18%
4Darden16%
5Booth15%
6Tepper13%
7Ross11%
8Cornell11%
9Tuck10%
10Stanford9%
11Sloan8%
12McCombs8%
13Kellogg6%
14Wharton6%
15Columbia6%
16Emory4%
17Duke4%
18Haas4%
19Yale3%
20NYU3%
21Harvard2%

The schools with the highest MBA waitlist acceptance rates are Kenan-Flagler, Olin, and Anderson. At the other end are Harvard, NYU and Yale with the lowest waitlist acceptance rates. Although NYU has the highest interview acceptance rate, it rarely accepts anyone off the waitlist.

Darden MBA Acceptance Rate Analysis

Darden, UVA’s business school, is the business school ranked 11th in the US. Darden is a prestigious school and only 25% of applicants are accepted. I built a predictive model to see which factors are most and least important for Darden admission, the results may surprise you.

Darden MBA Acceptance Rate by GMAT

Darden MBA Acceptance Rate by GMAT UVA MBA Admissions Business School

It is not shocking that increasing your GMAT will raise your Darden admission chance. The average GMAT score for accepted students at UVA’s business school is 706. If you were to increase your GMAT by 100 points from 650 to 750 when applying to Darden, you would raise your acceptance rate by an impressive 62%. Even at a GMAT score of 650, chance of acceptance is still over 20%.

Darden MBA Acceptance Rate by GPA

Darden MBA Acceptance Rate by GPA UVA MBA Admissions Business SchoolShockingly, GPA has little to no impact on your chance of admission to Darden. The average GPA of accepted students is 3.52. When I ran a regression model on factors that predict the chance of acceptance at Darden, GPA was one of the first variable eliminated. The graph above confirms my conclusion, a person with a 4.0 GPA has only a slightly higher chance of admission than a person with a 3.0. If you have a low GPA and a high GMAT, then Darden is a great school for you.

Darden MBA Acceptance Rate by Round

Darden MBA Acceptance Rate by Round UVA MBA Admissions Business School
Recently I performed an analysis of MBA acceptance rates by application round. The Darden MBA acceptance rate was noticeably lower during round 3. When building the Darden predictive model I confirmed that the low round 3 acceptance rate was in fact statistically significant. Although round 3 applicants still have a fairly reasonable 19% acceptance rate, it is still significantly lower than the round 1 and 2 Darden admission rates. If you are on the fence about applying round 3 to Darden, you might as well wait for next year.

Other Darden MBA Acceptance Rate Factors

Similar to Wharton, Darden MBA applicants from India have roughly a 75% lower chance of admission. Computer science majors also have a similarly low chance of being accepted, coming in at 11%.