Thursday, January 3, 2008

LBS and IESE acceptance rates

First of all: Happy New Year! Before I grow old and rusty (and start forgetting), I wanted to share some stats on LBS' and IESE's acceptance rates. Both schools don't publish any of these. So during an informational interview, I was told by an IESE admissions officer that the acceptance rate of the class of 2009 was 17%, which is remarkably low and hard to believe. But it could be true, considering the small class size of IESE (210 students) and the competitiveness among Spanish and South American applicants for the bilingual track. As a comparison, both Harvard and Berkeley had acceptance rates of around 14% for the class of 2009. Now for London Business School, they received 2100 applications last year and the class size was 310. Assuming LBS has a yield rate of 65% , we can assume that LBS gave out offers to around 480 applicants which would translate into an acceptance rate of about 22%. That ain't too bad for a top MBA program!


Update: According to Veritasprep LBS has an acceptance rate of 20%. No source is given, they probably did the same simple math as I did...

Update: Check the comments to this post for more info on IESE's acceptance rate... According to BusinessWeek's 2010 Ranking LBS has an acceptance rate of 18% and IESE has an acceptance rate of 21%. No source is given.

Update: Check my post regarding LBS class of 2010 stats... The number of applications increased to roughly 2500, so using the math from above you get an acceptance rate of 19.7% (using a class size of 320).

2 comments:

EveTV said...

Hey!

As far as I know you are +/- right about the acceptance rate at IESE.
Last year (enrolment for MBA 2009) IESE had the biggest number of candidates - around 6 to 7 candidates for 1 place. Which translates to anything between 16,7 to 14% acceptance rate...
It's not easy to get there... but feasible. I'm an IESE 2009 student :)

Cheers,
Ewa

Thomas said...

Hey Ewa, the figures you give would actually mean that IESE has a 100% yield, meaning all people who get an offer accept it and attend, which is probably not the case. Assuming IESE has a 50% yield (half of the people who get an offer also attend - the other half attend other b-schools), then you can assume an acceptance rate of 28%-33% based on your figures, which sounds more reasonable to me. Thanks for the info though!