Indian Application Disadvantage at Wharton’s MBA Program

Recently I discovered an Indian application disadvantage at Wharton’s MBA program while reviewing their admissions data. I have been busy over the past few months at business school and haven’t been able to post. I am attending NYU Stern school of business and loving it. I have a little bit of free time over Thanksgiving break so I decided to make a little progress towards building my MBA admission calculator. I started by analyzing Wharton’s admission data because I have far more data available for Wharton compared to other schools. This makes it easier to find statistical significance in the model. For example, there are 1,093 Wharton applicants verses 498 NYU applicants. I built a beta version of a model to predict admissions into Wharton, but plan to spend a lot more time working on it before I release it on this website.

The Indian Application Disadvantage at Wharton

In building the logistic regression, I found that the only three variables had statistic significance, including GPA, GMAT and whether the applicant was from India. I was shocked to find a significant Indian application disadvantage, the acceptance rate for Indians was 3.4% compared to 18.2% for Americans and 13.8% for non-Indian Internationals.

Indian Application Disadvantage Wharton MBA GMAT

Despite similar GMAT scores, Indian applicants had significantly lower acceptance rate at Wharton.

The difference between American and non-Indian acceptance rates was not statistically significant. However, the Indian acceptance rate difference was significant, with a confidence interval of 0% to 8%. This means we can be about 95% sure that the Indian acceptance rate is equal to or lower than 8%. For this analysis I excluded all entries that were missing both GMAT and GPA. If I had included these applicants who didn’t share their scores, then the Indian acceptance rate would have dropped to 2.8%.

I don’t know why the acceptance rate for Indian applicants is lower despite similar GPAs and GMAT scores. It could be due to trouble writing application essays or some other explanation, but I think this matter needs to be looked at closer.

9 thoughts on “Indian Application Disadvantage at Wharton’s MBA Program

    1. admin Post author

      I get my data from gmatclub.com. Just search for the “Calling all Applicants for Wharton 2016” or whichever school and year you are interested in. They only have 3 years worth of good data so far.

      Reply
  1. john doe

    you also have to remember that the Indian population at gmatclub.com is much greater so that isn’t the most accurate representation…

    Reply
    1. admin Post author

      I only have a small sample size to work with from gmatclub so nothing is guaranteed, but by doing a T test for significance I found that with an alpha of 5%, this effect is significant. I created the confidence interval of 0% to 8% to account for the fact that I only have around 6% of applicants in my sample. Even with the best case scenario for India, an 8% acceptance rate, it is still significantly lower than the rate for applicants from the US and other foreign countries.

      Reply
  2. KINJAL

    Ok, Can you tell me what are the prospects of Indian Applicant in the range of 700+. I can see the average GMAT is 728 for indian applicant. If you have groups for instance 700-720, 730-750 and 750+, is there any correlation?

    Reply
  3. Pingback: Wharton Acceptance Rate Analysis for Indian Applicants

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