Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is so renowned for the brilliant STEM minds it consistently produces that it can be easy to overlook that it’s also home to the MIT Sloan School of Management, of the world’s premier business institutions.
Across disciplines, MIT seeks out only the highest caliber students. Nowhere is this more evident than in the MIT Sloan MBA Class of 2020 profile recently published by the school.
Sloan received 5,560 applications this year, off slightly from the 5,798 applications that came in for the Class of 2019. But despite fewer applicants, class size actually grew slightly year over year. The incoming Class of 2020 includes 409 students, five more than the class before.
Beyond applicant volume and enrollment figures, the latest class profile also reveals some interesting shifts in terms of class composition and diversity. International students increased from 33 percent of the Class of 2019 to 38 percent of the Class of 2020, even amid overall industry-wide declines in international applicant volume. Sloan’s international students in the Class of 2020 come from 49 different countries, adding even greater diversity to the student body. The number of underrepresented students as a percentage of U.S. students also increased, from 18 percent in the previous year to 22 percent in the current class. The number of women in this years’s entering class at Sloan held steady with the previous class at 42 percent.
Sloan students arrive with a diverse set of academic experiences. The largest percentage of students (31 percent) come from engineering. Economics undergraduate majors make up the second-largest group, at 21 percent. Rounding out the top five are those who studied business and commerce (20 percent), humanities and social science (14 percent), and math and science (7 percent).
In addition to their wide-ranging academic backgrounds, Sloan students arrive on campus with considerable professional experience—five years in the work force on average.
The largest percentage of students come from consulting—21 percent of incoming students. This is a change from the Class of 2019, in which more students came from financial services than any other industry. For this more recent entering class, those with financial services experience make up the second-largest percentage, 19 percent. The next three most significant feeder industries are technology, media, and telecom (18 percent); government and public sector (14 percent); and industrial (8 percent).
So, we’ve given you a snapshot of what the MIT Sloan MBA Class of 2020 looks like as a whole. Now, let our Real Humans series help you move beyond the numbers to get a better sense of who some of these Sloanies are as individuals. We at Clear Admit are excited to bring you their stories.
