Top 5 MBA Feeder Universities and Pre-MBA Employers

Are you seeking admission to a highly competitive MBA program? Are you interested to learn how your pre-MBA background compares to other successful applicants?

You can always check class profiles to get a sense of common pre-MBA work histories and education, but these profiles won’t tell you much more than general stats on demographics and some select data points like average GPA and GMAT score. If you wanted to know, for example, the top feeder undergraduate programs and pre-MBA employers for a certain business school, you’d have to look elsewhere.

And until now, you wouldn’t have found what you were looking for. But thanks to our extensive database of MBA profiles, Menlo Coaching has answers to your most pressing questions on MBA admissions data, including (ranked) lists of feeder universities and pre-MBA employers for top US business schools. Below we offer this information in easy-to-navigate tables, followed by analysis and general commentary on trends and major conclusions.

Our feeder data aggregates undergraduate institutions and pre-MBA employers for the years 2018-2020, in order to provide a larger sampling size and highlight the most significant feeders for top US business schools. You can read more on our methodology for data collection here.

Because the number of placements by university and pre-MBA employer begins to form a long tail at the lower end of the feeder lists (where 30+ companies or colleges have the same number of placements into an MBA program), we created cutoff points for each school based on the number of unique data points available. Where possible, we aimed to offer a complete top 10 listing for each feeder category; in some cases, we offer only the top 5 feeders, and for a small number of programs, only the top 3 feeders.

MBA Feeder Colleges and Universities, Ranked

• US MBA programs tend to admit applicants who attended the same parent university for their undergraduate degree. For example, 5.7% of Harvard Business School’s classes of 2018, 2019, and 2020 attended Harvard University. 3.1% from NYU Stern attended New York University. And 6.4% from UT McCombs attended The University of Texas at Austin. The list goes on, meaning that parent universities are often the #1 undergraduate feeder into an MBA program.
  
• For a number of MBA programs, The United States Military Academy at West Point ranks as a top feeder undergraduate institution (and West Point ranks #11 overall). Other service academies are also represented, reflecting the fact that many AdComs look favorably on military experience.  
  
• It most likely won’t come as a surprise, but it bears mentioning that all eight Ivy League universities can be found across the feeder lists for individual programs, and all eight make their way into the top 20 overall ranking. Admission into the competitive Ivy League as a college student could certainly have an impact when applying to business school.

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MBA Feeder Companies, Ranked

• If you would have guessed that the list of top pre-MBA employers would be populated by big name companies like McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and Google, you wouldn’t be far off—but the details might surprise you.
  • For example, Deloitte tops the list ahead of MBB, while McKinsey ranks #3 behind Boston Consulting Group (BCG). 
  • And while Goldman Sachs ranks #11, the US Army and the US Navy come out ahead, at #4 and #11 respectively. As we noted in regard to the list of undergraduate feeders, military experience provides a significant boost to your chances of admission to a top MBA program.
    
• For MBA programs that maintain strong regional reputations, top pre-MBA feeder companies follow regional lines as well. For example, Boeing and Microsoft are the #1 and #2 pre-MBA employers for UW Foster, which places many students into the Seattle-area tech industry after the MBA.
  • Similarly, the Ford Motor Company ranks #3 on the list of Michigan Ross pre-MBA feeders, while General Motors ranks #5.

Amidst the noise of MBA rankings, trust in our reliable MBA admission consulting expertise to help you discern the best path for your academic and professional aspirations.