2024 Ranking: Acceptance Rates At The Best Undergraduate Business Schools

What was the hardest undergraduate business school to get into in the 2023-2024 academic year?

The answer isn’t much of a surprise. It also happens to be the business school that topped our 2024 ranking of the best undergrad b-schools in the U.S.: University of Pennsylvania’s The Wharton School.

The Wharton School reported an acceptance rate of 4.5% for fall 2023, making it the most selective school in our ranking. Out of 10,810 applications, Wharton admitted 665 first-time students and 531 of those ultimately enrolled.

In fact, it was harder to get into Wharton this fall than in any of the last five admission cycles. Since the fall of 2019, Wharton’s admission rates have gone from 6.7% to 7.6%, 6.03%, 6.3%, and 4.5% respectively.

WHY ADMISSION RATES MATTER

Besides signaling to prospective students their chances at getting into a particular business school, admission rates can also indicate the quality of classmates admitted students can expect. That’s why the metric accounts for 30% of a school’s Admission Standards category in our ranking methodology. (Admission Standards, in turn, accounts for a third of the overall score). (See our full ranking methodology here.)

Wharton students are certainly part of an elite class of high achievers. Entering students posted an average SAT score of 1528, the second highest average in our ranking. Further, 95.16% of its 2021 alumni reported being in the top 10% academically of their graduating high school classes and 37.7% reported being National Merit Scholarship finalists or semifinalists.

The second most selective school in the Fall 2023 cycle was the most selective in Fall 2022: Cornell University’s Dyson School of Applied Economics & Management. Its 4.79% acceptance rate rose slightly from 4.17% the previous cycle. The business school, based in Ithaca, New York, has ranked No. 6 overall for the last two years of our ranking.

MOST AND LEAST SELECTIVE BUSINESS SCHOOLS RANKED BY P&Q

Of the 91 ranked schools, three admitted 6% or fewer of applying students (compared to two schools in the previous cycle) and 11 schools admitted fewer than 10% of applicants (compared to eight schools the year before.)

Over the top 10 business schools in our 2024 ranking, acceptance rate averaged 9.16% – down just slightly from the 9.26% the top 10 schools averaged in last year’s ranking. Across all 91 business schools ranked this year, the average acceptance rate was 47.86%. That’s down from the 49.15% average of the 93 schools ranked in 2023 and the 51.35% of schools ranked in 2022.

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