What’s a Top School MBA Cost?

Think that an MBA at a top school is totally out of the question? Not necessarily. It might surprise you to know that most top universities provide their students a significant amount of grants, scholarships and fellowships that can make the high tuition cost start to look doable.

The website Poets and Quants has done the research and put together a table showing the approximate cost of a two-year MBA program at 20 of the tops business schools in the US. What makes this table unique however, is that they’ve also included the percentage of students receiving some kind of financial aid as well as the average amount of aid. That can make a huge difference.

For example, a Harvard MBA will cost you around $159K. That’s totally out of the question, right? Well, it was surprising to me to find out that 63% of students get some sort of financial aid averaging $113K. All of a sudden, Harvard isn’t totally out of the question.

But before you send off your application, there’s one caveat you need to be aware of. The term “financial aid” can mean a lot of different things with each school putting their own spin on the term. Some schools have significant endowments and can provide paid fellowships or stipends to students that don’t have to be paid back (as long as you continue to meet the scholastic requirements). Other schools simply package various types of student loans that need to be paid back with interest. Make sure you fully investigate this so that you can make an apples-to-apples type of comparison.

According to Poets and Quants, the average cost to complete an MBA at the following top 20 schools are as follows:

School	Total MBA Cost	Two-Year Tuition	Percent Getting Aid	Amount of aid/loans
1. Columbia	$168,307	$106,416	55%	$115,716
2. Pennsylvania (Wharton)	$168,000	$108,018	76%	NA
3. Stanford	$166,812	$106,236	75%	$115,954
4. Chicago (Booth)	$165,190	$101,800	NA	NA
5. Dartmouth (Tuck)	$162,750	$101,400	80%	$90,150
6. MIT (Sloan)	$160,378	$100,706	71%	$130,418
7. Harvard	$158,800	$97,200	63%	$113,038
8. New York (Stern)	$157,622	$94,572	NA	$114,628
9. Northwestern (Kellogg)	$156,990	$102,990	66%	$111,782
10. Yale School of Mgt.	$151,982	$99,800	70%	$87,182
11. Carnegie Mellon	$149,400	$105,000	81%	$88,240
12. UCLA (Anderson)	$147,278	$97,854	80%	$85,744
13. Berkeley (Haas)	$144,746	$95,274	68%	$67,052
14. Cornell (Johnson)	$142,404	$98,544	70%	$87,182
15. Virginia (Darden)	$142,000	$99,000	80%	$110,160
16. Michigan (Ross)	$141,210	$107,600	72%	$107,228
17. Duke (Fuqua)	$137,744	$95,920	81%	NA
18. UNC (Kenan-Flagler)	$136,860	$93,176	73%	$87,924
19. Emory (Goizueta)	$130,280	$84,800	85%	$90,534
20. Texas-Austin (McCombs)	$127,144	$90,256	75%	$97,740