(Bloomberg Business) — Some top-ranked business schools are raising tuition by between 2 percent and 10 percent this fall, bumping up the cost of classes for the 2015-16 academic year to nearly $66,000 at the high end. Throw in room and board, fees, and textbooks, and it will cost as much as $99,000 to attend B-school next year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg Business.
Half of the MBA programs ranked in Bloomberg Businessweek’s top 20 have announced updated tuition numbers so far this year. Of that group, the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business has biggest tuition hike, with tuition up by 9.9 percent next year for out-of-state residents, bringing the cost of classes to $52,380 from $47,655. (The most expensive school we surveyed is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, which will charge its next class of students $65,750 in tuition, a 3.1 percent bump from last year.) Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management reported the smallest bump. It will charge MBAs $59,500 for classes next year, up 2.2 percent from $58,192 this year.
The tuition hikes are consistent with a broad rise in education costs. Undergraduate tuition has outpaced inflation for almost every year in the past four decades.
The rising price tag for business school hasn’t stemmed the flow of applications. In the 2013-14 admissions cycle, the latest year for which data are available, 62 percent of full- time, two-year MBA programs reported receiving more applications, according to the Graduate Management Admissions Council.
In 2012-13, 52 percent did. B-schools, especially the most prestigious, have benefitted from a growing number of applications from foreign students, allowing even the priciest among them to sustain large class sizes and high rates of selectivity. (At the Stanford Graduate School of Business, 7,355 applicants fought to win one of just 410 spots in 2014.)
A growing share of U.S. MBA programs are receiving more applications.
