Stanford Business School Admissions Statistics

It is one of the great and storied university rivalries anywhere in the world: Cal vs. Stanford. The fierce competition between one of the world’s great public universities and one of the world’s most elite private institutions extends from athletics to academics, including to these two highly ranked business schools. Separated by some 31 miles and the San Francisco Bay, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and Stanford’s Graduate School of Business have much in common. Their proximity to Silicon Valley puts both insitutions at the forefront of entrepreneurship, venture capital, and technology.

But there is one essential difference between these two great institutions of learning. As an elite private, Stanford has resources that would be impossible for a public university to claim. Those resources are put to good effect in hiring the best available faculty and support staff in admissions, programming, career services, and alumni affairs. Along with Harvard and Dartmouth, Stanford is offering a premium MBA experience. What do we mean by that? There are few, if any distractions, from the flagship two-year, full-time MBA program. At Berkeley’s Haas School, in contrast, there’s an undergraduate population of 700 students, a part-time MBA program of 750 students, and an executive MBA program with 70 students. So Berkeley’s more limited resources–its roughly 80 full-time faculty members in particular–are stretched across a larger number of programs that can detract from its ability to offer the absolute best full-time MBA program. Stanford has a staff of about 100 full-time faculty members, including three Nobel Prize laureates in Michael Spence, Myron Scholes, and William Sharpe (Berkeley has one active Nobel winner: Oliver Williamson). Aside from this basic difference, the Haas School is unquestionably one of the best business schools in the world.

In what other ways do these two stellar schools differ from each other? Let’s start with how both schools fare in the major business school rankings.

Rankings:

In the rankings, Stanford has historically performed much better than Berkeley. The only major ranking in which Berkeley bests its Northern California rival is from The Economist which places the Haas School third, its highest showing in any ranking, and Stanford seventh. Of the five major rankings, we consider The Economist the least credible due to its odd methodology so we wouldn’t put much weight behind that result. The biggest rankings gap between these two schools occurs in The Financial Times ranking which rates Stanford fourth and Berkeley 28th. The P&Q rank–which factors into consideration all the major rankings weighted by their individual authority–puts Stanford at number two and Berkeley ninth. That makes Haas the highest rated public business school in the country. More interestingly, perhaps, is that Berkeley has consistently beaten UCLA’s Anderson School, which is now ranked 16th by us. Some 20 years ago, UCLA more often than not came out on top. These are the up-to-date rankings from each ranking organization.