Wharton leads peers in female enrollment

Building on two consecutive years of an unparalleled 40-percent female enrollment, Wharton’s incoming MBA class of 2013 is expected to have a similarly high rate of female students.

“We’re currently still solidifying the incoming class,” said Ankur Kumar, Wharton’s deputy director of MBA Admissions. “[But] it looks like we’re going to be trending [toward] another banner year” for female enrollment.

Kumar credits this high rate to the variety of “women-focused marketing events” the Admissions Office offers, including a day-long event which allows prospective women to interact with females already in the program.

“We don’t have things like targets or prescriptives,” she said. Wharton is “building awareness and talking to this population about the specifics of their situations.”

Peer business schools — including the Stanford Graduate School of Business and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University — have also seen a rise in female enrollment, but none of them have reached the coveted 40 percent mark.

“We changed the game about two years ago. Our peers haven’t joined us just yet,” Kumar said. She added she is “glad to see our peers using [Wharton’s] momentum.”

Harvard Business School hosts a special admissions outreach event for women where prospective female applicants can ask questions about the MBA program and its application process.

The Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago hosts an annual Women’s Week with its Chicago Women in Business Alumnae Network. Prospective MBA students can use these informal receptions to learn about Booth “from a woman’s perspective,” according to its website.

“We’ve seen that, over the last five years, the number of women in the top business schools has been increasing,” said Elissa Sangster, executive director of the Forte Foundation, a consortium of corporations and business schools that works to increase the number of women pursuing MBAs.

“A number of schools, probably a dozen, are above 35 percent [female enrollment],” she said. “Wharton is definitely leading the pack.”

A report published by the Graduate Management Admission Council found that more than 100,000 women took the Graduate Management Admission Test, the standardized examination used for business school admissions. This number represents a 3.3-percent annual growth rate over the past decade and contributes to the lowest-ever male-to-female ratio of GMAT exams taken.

“Our organization is excited to see the trend [of increased female enrollment], and it’s backed up by the fact that more female students are taking the GMAT,” Sangster said. “This bodes well for the future.”

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