With students in Wharton’s MBA Class of 2020 now settled in on campus, Wharton Deputy Vice Dean Maryellen Reilly took to the school’s MBA Admissions Blog to welcome the new class and share details about its composition. Though application volume was down, average GMAT score returned to the school’s record high of 732, matching the Class of 2017.
“This class is an impressive collection of leaders from all walks of life, backgrounds, nationalities, industry experiences, and ambitions,” Reilly wrote. “These newest members of the Wharton community bring with them a wide-range of perspectives to enrich their shared experiences both in and outside of the classroom.”
Application volume was off by 6.7 percent year over year, dropping from 6,692 to 6,245. But here Wharton is in good company. We’ve been hard-pressed to find a leading U.S. school reporting that applications were up measurably year over year. The vast majority has shared that numbers were down or at best flat.
Perhaps one of the biggest shifts between last year’s class and this year’s was an uptick in humanities undergrads, from 41 to 45 percent of the class. Students from STEM backgrounds make up another 29 percent of the class, trailed by those who studied business, at just 26 percent.
One-third (33 percent) of the incoming class is international, up from 32 percent last year. Although students this year hail from 80 different countries, compared to just 65 one year ago. U.S. students of color make up another third of this year’s class, unchanged from last year.
There are 862 students in the Class of 2020, one shy of the class before, and the percentage of female students slipped one point, to 43 percent.
In terms of prior work experience, former consultants outnumber all others by a considerable margin, making up 27 percent of the class, up from 26 percent last year. The next-largest group, at 13 percent, comes from private equity/venture capital, followed by 10 percent from tech.
To view the complete Wharton MBA Class of 2020 profile, click here.
