Difference between enrollment and class size?

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rahulg83: Legendary Member; Posts: 575; Joined: Tue Nov 04, 2008 2:58 amFollowed by: 4 members; Location: India; Thanked: 18 times; GMAT Score:710

by rahulg83 » Sat Jul 28, 2012 10:21 am

Hi All,
If I need to know how many people actually get an admission to B-school, what should I read - enrollment or class size? Apologies, if my question sounds pretty silly, but I sometimes wonder by sea of difference between two parameters.

For eg, Tepper School of Business:
Graduate Enrollment for Full-Time MBA: 422 (As per Businessweek)
Class Size: 210 (As per School Brochure)

So, does Tepper accept 422 or 210 students for an academic year?

Regards,
Rahul

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Source: Beat The GMAT — Research MBA Programs | Sat Jul 28, 2012 10:21 am

essaysnark: Legendary Member; Posts: 795; Joined: Sun Sep 20, 2009 10:41 amFollowed by: 85 members; Thanked: 177 times

by essaysnark » Sun Jul 29, 2012 9:06 am

Hi Rahul! That's actually a good question - and the answer is "neither"!

Both those numbers reported by BusinessWeek are actual enrolled students. The difference is that some schools are two-year programs with undergrads and also PhD grad students on campus - that's where the "enrollment" number comes in. It's how many students are attending the bschool at any given point in time.

The class size is how many people will be graduating together. This number typically varies a bit year to year - rarely does it go up and down by more than 10 or 20 students (it depends on which school we're talking about). In the example you provided, because Tepper is a two-year program, then each year they have ~200 graduates, and at a given time there's two classes on campus so that's where the ~400 number comes in.

Make sense?

Most schools actually don't publish the number of students that they accept though sometimes they do, and you can back into that number using the yield if you're very interested. Our notes say that Tepper tends to accept around 400 or so candidates each year because their yield is in the 40s - but this is a pure coincidence, that it corresponds with that "Graduate Enrollment" number from BW. BW is reporting a hard statistic that they got from the school of actual students; our "400 or so" number is an approximation that we came up with on how many they accept.

Yes this stuff is confusing! Hope this helps you get some clarity on the stats.

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money9111: Legendary Member; Posts: 2109; Joined: Sun Apr 19, 2009 10:25 pmFollowed by: 79 members; Location: New Jersey; Thanked: 109 times; GMAT Score:640

by money9111 » Mon Aug 06, 2012 5:21 pm

yeah you can back into it using the yield but I also thought that there was a publication out there that gave the acceptance rate. if you have that and the number of applicants then there you go

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