U.S. business schools are seeing a drop in applications . According to a survey of 1,087 graduate business programs at 363 business schools by the Graduate Management Admission Council , 70% of two-year full-time MBA programs in the United States saw a decline in application volume in 2018.
Harvard Business School, Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania all saw decreases in applications that year.
But earning an MBA can still pay off big for graduates. According to the nonprofit National Association of Colleges and Employers, the average starting salary for MBA graduates from the class of 2019 is $84,580 , some $25,000 more than the average for graduates with bachelor’s degrees in business.
To determine which business schools pay off the most for students, WalletHub compared nearly 100 schools across 10 key metrics including tuition, the average base salary for graduates and gender diversity. They then scored the schools, with the highest possible score being 100. The result is WalletHub’s Best MBA Programs of 2019 .
Here are the best business schools of 2019, according to WalletHub:
20. Georgetown University (McDonough) Total score: 63.40 out of 100
19. University of Wisconsin—Madison Total score: 63.48 out of 100
18. University of California—Los Angeles (Anderson) Total score: 65.07 out of 100
17. Indiana University (Kelley) Total score: 65.17 out of 100
16. Dartmouth College (Tuck) Total score: 67.51 out of 100
University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia
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15. University of Virginia (Darden) Total score: 67.89 out of 100
14. New York University (Stern) Total score: 68.49 out of 100
13. Duke University (Fuqua) Total score: 69.34 out of 100
12. University of Washington (Foster) Total score: 69.72 out of 100
11. University of Michigan—Ann Arbor (Ross) Total score: 70.78 out of 100
Students on campus of Yale University
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10. Yale University Total score: 71.16 out of 100
9. Columbia University Total score: 72.47 out of 100
8. University of Southern California (Marshall) Total score: 73.03 out of 100
7. Northwestern University (Kellogg) Total score: 73.85 out of 100
6. University of California—Berkeley (Haas) Total score: 74.28 out of 100
A man walks through Killian Court at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.
REUTERS/Brian Snyder
5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan) Total score: 75.54 out of 100
4. University of Chicago (Booth) Total score: 75.89 out of 100
3. University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) Total score: 76.58 out of 100
2. Harvard University Total score: 78.69 out of 100
1. Stanford University Total score: 83.91 out of 100
Stanford University
Beck Diefenbach | Reuters
Stanford came in first on WalletHub’s ranking. WalletHub found that Stanford Business School graduates earned the highest average base salaries and that students had some of the highest GPAs and GMAT scores.
While many Ivy League institutions like Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and Yale performed well in the ranking, many public universities also earned high marks.
UC Berkeley, the University of Washington, University of Virginia, Indiana University, UCLA, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Michigan all cracked the top 20.
