Many applicants may wonder if their undergraduate major impacts their chance of getting into business school. Admissions data suggests that your college major can significantly impact your probability of getting into business school. The general trend seems to be that majors that are more dominated by women have a higher acceptance rate while industries that dominated by men had lower acceptance rates. This could be because my data does not have gender as a variable, so I could not account for it. Many people believe that women’s acceptance rate is higher than it is for men with similar credentials, but I have not found any data that proves it. Another explanation is that the female dominated majors are generally underrepresented in business school application pools, so when schools aim to diversify the class, the acceptance rates are higher for those majors.

Given that there so many different college majors, there is not enough data to analyze major by school, so instead I analyzed the major acceptance rate by school tier. I grouped the top 10, 11 – 16 and 17 – 25.

As you can see, the tier has a strong effect on the acceptance rate. GMAT and GPA also correlate strongly with ranking. Below you can see what majors have a higher acceptance rate than we would expect and which have lower acceptance rates, given the GMAT and GPA.

Top 10 MBA Acceptance Rate by Major

In the top 10, education majors have the highest acceptance rate for top 10 MBA programs despite having substantially lower GMAT of 711 compared to the average of 728. Law majors have lower GMAT and GPA, but nearly 50% higher acceptance rate than average. Liberal arts and humanities majors have a noticeably higher acceptance rate despite lower GMAT and similar GPA. Other Majors with high acceptance rates also have higher than average GMAT, which could explain the acceptance rate.

In the top 10, operations majors have substantially higher GMAT and GPA, but only a 16% acceptance rate compared to the average of 20% acceptance rate. Engineering students have similar to average scores, but only 15% acceptance rates. Computer science, marketing and health/medical majors have very low acceptance rates, that may be at least partially explained by low scores.

Ranked 11 – 16 MBA Acceptance Rate by Major

In the middle tier of rank 11 to 16, communication majors have an absurdly high acceptance rate with similar GMAT and noticeably higher GPA. Liberal arts majors had very high acceptance rates despite the lower than average GMAT. Political science majors had a high acceptance rate of 40% even though their GMAT and GPA are well below average.

Operations majors have a lower acceptance rate, but it is explained by a fairly low GMAT. Arts majors have a low acceptance rate despite having higher GMAT and GPA than average. Engineering majors have the highest average GMAT for middle tier schools, but one of the lowest acceptance rates. Health/medical majors have a low acceptance rate, but it is explained by very low GMAT of 688. Marketing, computer science and law majors had some of the lowest acceptance rates, but they also had lower than average stats.

Ranked 17 – 25 MBA Acceptance Rate by Major

For rank 17 to 26 schools, communication majors had an extremely high acceptance rate even though they had an average GMAT and an only slightly higher GPA. Economics, political science, liberal arts, marketing, business, law and operations majors all had very high acceptance rates yet lower than average stats.

Health/medical and education majors’ acceptance rates are lower than average, but explained by very low GMAT score. Engineering and arts majors have above average stats, but lower acceptance rates.