This past year, we published hundreds of stories ranging from features on some of the country’s most interesting and unique business students and professors, what it’s like to intern and work at some of the world’s most elite companies, and the newest and most important trends happening in business education. It was our largest traffic year in the history of the four-and-a-half-year-old site and it wasn’t even close. But when it comes down to what is the most popular among readers, rankings and career-related articles stand above the rest. This year was no different.
Below you will find our most read articles of 2018. Take a look below at what drew the most eyes this year at Poets&Quants for Undergrads.
And the winner for hardest business school to get into goes to … Cornell’s Dyson School, which accepted fewer than 3% of applicants in 2018. Cornell photo
10. Acceptance Rates At The Top B-Schools
For the past three years, we’ve ranked the top undergraduate business schools in the U.S. As part of that ranking, we ask schools to report data that you won’t be able to find anywhere else, including the actual acceptance rates to get into an undergraduate business program. We crunch the data to provide accurate assessments of the odds of getting into either a direct admit program as a freshman or a two-year program that you have to transfer into after getting accepted into the university. Last year, our article on this subject was our tenth most read article. And it makes sense why. Parents, high school students, and guidance counselors alike want to know how tough or easy it is to get into the country’s top business schools.
And there is definitely a spread among the best programs. The most selective school — Cornell University’s Dyson School — reported an acceptance rate of 2.9%–even lower than the overall acceptances rates at Harvard University (4.59% last year) or Yale University (6.3% in 2018). At the other end was Kansas State University, which has an acceptance rate of 93.37%. See the link above for the coverage and list of acceptance rates at all 82 ranked.
The UC-Berkeley Haas School of Business. Courtesy photo
9. Target Schools For MBB Consulting Firms
This year, we took the time to mine the plethora of data available at Wall Street Oasis. Part of that project was looking at data from a survey of more than 1,500 users of that site currently employed at the world’s top 100 consulting firms. The result? A look at which universities are currently sending the highest percentage of students to McKinsey, Bain and BCG. At the top of the list is the University of California-Berkeley. UC-Berkeley is followed by many top undergraduate schools, including New York University, the University of Texas-Austin, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale.
Among other things, the list shows that the chances of landing a job at a top consulting firm don’t necessarily increase by attending an Ivy League school. Besides UC-Berkeley and UT-Austin, the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia are also in the top ten of schools whose graduates are successful in landing top consulting jobs right out of school.
