This Is What It Costs To Get An MBA From A Top Business School

If you want an elite MBA degree from a top business school in the United States or Europe, be prepared to pay more than $200,000 — and significantly more than that if you’re eyeing one of the M7 or M7-adjacent B-schools.

How many top-25 U.S. B-schools are now in the $200K club? Nineteen of 27 schools analyzed by Poets&Quants charge tuition and fees and estimate living expenses that, combined over two years, equal or exceed $200K. That’s up from 15 B-schools last year. Four more schools are currently on the threshold of that club, sitting at $196,000 or more. For the 2023-2024 school year alone, 21 of the 27 schools estimate an annual cost in excess of $100,000.

Tuition is the chief culprit in the rising cost of an MBA. The number of U.S. B-schools with tuition over $80,000 rose this year to seven from four, while the number with tuition over $75K grew to 13 one year after doubling to 12. The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania reports the highest tuition, at $87,370, up about 3% this year and more than 17% since 2019. Across the top 10, the average tuition growth in those five years is 8.9%; across 25 leading U.S. MBA programs, it’s even more: 9.5%.

Think Europe is a cheaper alternative? That depends. The euro has rebounded against the dollar after a mild collapse in 2022, and at a few elite European B-schools, you could end up paying more for that high-end MBA than you would in the United States.

HIGHEST ANNUAL COST FOR A U.S. MBA PROGRAM

P&Q estimates the total cost of an MBA by adding business schools’ own yearly totals for the past two years (rather than simply doubling the most recent year). In this way we calculated that last year total cost exceeded $200K at 19 B-schools out of the top 27, up from 15 schools last year, 14 in 2021, 13 in 2020, 12 in 2019, and nine in 2018.

(Why 27 schools and not 25? We include two schools, Rice Jones Graduate School of Business and Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management, that have previously been in the top 25, because we have the historical data for them and because those schools may rejoin that group in future rankings.)

Once again this year, Stanford Graduate School of Business‘ MBA earns the title of most expensive program, at $250,854, up 2.7% from last year and more than 9% since 2019. Think $250K is a lot? That’s what you pay if you’re a single student in Palo Alto — Stanford’s living expenses grow exponentially for students with families (more on that on page 3).

The rest of the top-five most expensive U.S. MBA programs: Columbia Business School ($249,518), NYU Stern School of Business ($244,778), Wharton ($243,044), and UCLA Anderson School of Management ($238,989). The highest-ranked program below $200K is at Michigan Ross School of Business, No. 11 in Poets&Quants‘ annual ranking, where two years of MBA instruction will cost $199,729. Michigan Ross’ is also the highest-ranked MBA program under $100K for one year of schooling, at $99,780; Columbia reports the highest one-year price tag: $127,058.

HIGHEST ESTIMATED TWO-YEAR COST FOR A U.S. MBA PROGRAM

*MBA1 + MBA2 (2022 + 2023)

The average two-year cost for a top-10 MBA is $236,873, up 2.4% from last year when it was $231,420. That’s up from $228,284 in 2021 and $223,750 in 2020 — a nearly 6% increase over four admission cycles. Across all 27 schools, the average cost is $215,619, up 2.3% from last year when it was $210,724 for 26 schools. In 2021, the average cost across 26 schools was $199,544.

Chicago Booth School of Business saw the biggest year-to-year increase in total cost among top-10 B-schools, up $10,305, or 4.5%, to $237,222 (see table above). The average increase at nine of the 10 schools was $6,562 and 2.8%. The reason we don’t have all 10 schools to calculate that last number is noteworthy: MIT Sloan School of Management, unique among the top 10 and one of only three schools in the top 27, actually reported a decline in total two-year cost year-to-year, from $237,993 to $229,175, a cost reduction of $8,818 (3.7%). Michigan Ross and Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management are the only other schools with year-to-year declines, but Sloan’s is the only one that is significant (see table on page 6 of this story for details).

Sloan is totally unique in another way: It is the only top B-school to report a cost reduction from 2019 to the present. The one-year cost of attendance at the Boston school is down $9,638, or 8.1%, in that time, going from $118,818 to $109,180. In that same span, 14 other schools had double-digit-percentage increases in cost.

In the top 10, the average increase in one-year cost from 2022 to 2023 was $3,877.4, or 3.3%, at nine schools; the average since 2019 is 10.2% at nine schools. The latter number is up from 9.3% between 2018 and 2022. Across the top 27, the average year-to-year increase is $4,510.1, or 4.4%, at 24 schools, up 1 full percentage point from the 2021-2022 span. And since 2019, cost has increased by 9.8% at 25 schools, up from 9.4% for the period from 2018 to 2022.

More key data points on total cost for one year of MBA study at a top B-school:

• Smallest top-10 increase over two years: UC-Berkeley Haas School of Business, $247 (0.21%) to $116,178
• Biggest top-10 increase over two years: Chicago Booth $7,098 (6.2%) to $122,160
• Smallest top-10 increase over five years: Harvard Business School $3,820 (3.4%)
• Biggest top-10 increase over five years: Northwestern Kellogg School of Management $14,822 (14%) to $120,432
• Smallest top-27 increase over two years: Berkeley Haas again, but Indiana Kelley School of Business is close behind at $1,111 (1.38%) to $81,386
• Biggest top-27 increase over two years: Vanderbilt Owen $10,754 (11.2%) to $106,909
• Smallest top-27 increase over five years: Washington Olin Business School $2,038 (2.3%) to $89,546
• Biggest top-27 increase over five years: Vanderbilt Owen $18,818 (21.4%) to $106,909

See the next page for a breakdown of tuition data at the top 27 U.S. B-schools and five leading European institutions.