10 Most Popular B-Schools

Updated 5/31/13: This article has been updated to remove the University of Wisconsin--Madison, which notified U.S. News that it incorrectly reported its acceptance data.

The U.S. News Short List, separate from our overall rankings, is a regular series that magnifies individual data points in hopes of providing students and parents a way to find which undergraduate or graduate programs excel or have room to grow in specific areas. Be sure to explore The Short List: College and The Short List: Grad School to find data that matters to you in your college or grad school search.

Public business schools are surging in popularity, converting more acceptances into enrollments than many of their more expensive private counterparts.

Four private b-schools achieved yields (the percentage of admitted students who enroll) high enough to make this year's list of most popular business schools. That's down from seven schools in 2012.

Those four school were Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School, Pepperdine University's Graziadio School of Business and Management and the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University. With the exception of BYU, each carries a price tag of more than $42,000 per year.

In contrast, Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business -- the highest ranked public b-school on the list -- reported in-state tuition of $26,968 for the 2012-2013 school year.

[Learn to lighten your b-school debt load.]

Harvard and Stanford topped the list, enrolling roughly 89 and 84 percent of accepted students in fall 2012, respectively. Fisher's yield was 71.4 percent for fall 2012, according to data reported by the schools in an annual U.S. News Survey.

Five other public business schools jumped onto the most-popular list this year, pushing out programs such as Columbia Business School and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Those schools include Oregon State University, which enrolled 81.5 percent of its accepted students for fall 2012, and the Gatton College of Business and Economics at the University of Kentucky, which had a yield of 74.1 percent. Both state schools are tens of thousands of dollars less expensive than Harvard or Stanford, even for out-of-state students.

[Discover four ways to save money in grad school.]

The following business schools had the highest yield of accepted students for fall 2012. Schools designated by U.S. News as Unranked were excluded from this list. U.S. News did not calculate a numerical ranking for Unranked programs because the program did not meet certain criteria that U.S. News requires to be numerically ranked. In the table below, U.S. News did not include schools that accepted fewer than 100 applicants.

*RNP denotes an institution that is ranked in the bottom one-fourth of all business schools. U.S. News calculates a rank for the school but has decided not to publish it.

Don't see your school in the top 10? Access the U.S. News Business School Compass to find data on acceptance rates, complete rankings and much more.

U.S. News surveyed 448 schools for our 2012 survey of business programs. Schools self-reported a myriad of data regarding their academic programs and the makeup of their student body, among other areas, making U.S. News's data the most accurate and detailed collection of college facts and figures of its kind. While U.S. News uses much of this survey data to rank schools for our annual Best Business Schools rankings, the data can also be useful when examined on a smaller scale. U.S. News will now produce lists of data, separate from the overall rankings, meant to provide students and parents a means to find which schools excel, or have room to grow, in specific areas that are important to them. While the data comes from the schools themselves, these lists are not related to, and have no influence over, U.S. News's rankings of Best Colleges or Best Graduate Schools. The enrollment data above are correct as of May 21, 2013.