Advice to New Stanford Grad Students or Those Considering Pursuing Grad Education at Stanford
Stanford University is one of more than 800 institutions with graduate schools surveyed by U.S. News on an annual basis. Stanford University confers degrees through various schools, such as: the Graduate School of Business, the Law School, the School of Medicine, the School of Engineering, and the Graduate School of Education.
Stanford MBA Acceptance Rate
No other MBA program in the world is as competitive as Stanford when it comes to admission, with an acceptance rate that generally lands around 6% or 7%.
Stanford received 7,367 applications for its MBA class of 2023. While the university did not share how many of these applications it accepted, it did note that 426 students ended up enrolling in the program.
Recent data show that Stanford’s acceptance rate differs drastically from other top MBA programs in the country, being much more selective.
In the 2019-20 admission cycle, Stanford accepted 7.2% of its applications, Poets&Quants noted. During the same cycle, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, which received a similar number of applicants as Stanford (a little over 7,000), accepted 25% of candidates.
Other schools that Poets&Quants named the best in the country include Harvard Business School, which accepted 12% of the roughly 9,300 applications it received, and Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, which received over 5,800 applications and said yes to 20%.
According to former admissions officers, people who are not only intelligent and talented but also diverse and seem like they’ll make a significant impact on the world are exactly what Stanford’s Graduate School of Business (GSB) wants in its students. These candidates are risk-takers as well as passionate leaders.
Stanford MBA Requirements
Prospective students do not need to have a specific undergraduate degree in order to enroll in Stanford’s MBA program, but its students tend to have done well in whatever they studied. The class of 2023, for instance, had an annual undergraduate GPA of 3.78. Of that same group, 19% already earned an advanced degree.
Stanford also gets people interested in the MBA experience right from the start of the application process.
Prospective students take a quick quiz at the website MyStanford.MBA, at which they then will get a dashboard customized to them. Here, candidates can track the progress of their application; learn more about events; and get personalized recommendations about classes, clubs, and other campus activities.
Applicants must include their educational history, professional experience, and details about their interests and any awards they received. Students must also submit either GMAT or GRE scores and two letters of reference.
One letter must come from either the applicant’s direct supervisor or an appropriate alternative at their current place of employment, and the second needs to be from another supervisor.
Prospective students also get to share a bit of themselves in two personal essays of about 1,050 total words.
Stanford also considers other factors when it looks at applications, including leadership skills, their intellectual prowess, and other personal traits. The university may also invite applicants to interview with either an MBA admissions officer or alumnus.
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