About the data

1. MBA Lab's own curation. School names, locations, and the MBA format lists (full-time, online, executive, part-time) are hand-curated. Formats are listed only where we found them documented; a school missing a format here may still offer it - always confirm with the school. This is the field we trust least on this site: a spot-check of 25 schools against their current program pages found several missing a format they actually offer, and none listing one they don't. We'd rather under-list than guess wrong, but "confirm with the school" matters most for formats specifically.

2. College Scorecard (U.S. Department of Education, College Scorecard, June 2026 release). A public-domain dataset built from federal reporting. It supplies enrollment, accreditor of record, official links, campus setting, Carnegie classification, and all earnings and debt figures. Each school page links its own Scorecard profile.

3. AACSB's accredited-schools directory (accessed July 2026). Where a school shows an "AACSB accredited" badge, it appears on AACSB's own list, and the badge links to that school's AACSB listing.

The precise scope matters more here than anywhere else on the site:

• Median earnings (1 year / 4 years out) - the median annual earnings of graduates of master's-level programs in Business Administration, Management and Operations (federal program category CIP 52.02) who received federal financial aid, measured among those working and not enrolled in further study. Cohorts are pooled across graduating years by the Department of Education.
• Median federal graduate debt - the median federal loan debt (Stafford and Grad PLUS) of those graduates at the point of entering repayment. Private loans, employer sponsorship, and savings are not counted.
• The cohort sizes shown beside each figure - how many graduates the median actually describes. A median of 300 people and a median of 25 deserve different confidence, so we show the count wherever the source publishes one.

Two limitations apply everywhere. First, CIP 52.02 at some institutions includes business master's degrees other than the MBA, and at a few, the flagship MBA is coded under a different category - so these figures describe a school's business master's programs, not "the MBA" specifically. Second, only federally-aided graduates are counted; schools whose students rarely take federal loans are measured on a small, unrepresentative slice. That's why no page on this site labels these numbers "MBA salary."

When a school shows no figure, the Department withheld it - usually because the cohort was too small to publish without identifying individuals. We treat missing as missing: those schools are excluded from every average, range, and ranking on this site, never counted as zero.

• State and city figures are the median of the reported per-school medians, with the reporting count always shown alongside.
• Aggregates and rankings are withheld entirely below three reporting schools - "1st of 2" is noise dressed as a ranking.
• The "vs. directory median" comparison on school pages is against the median across every reporting school in MBA Lab's directory.
• The 1-year and 4-year earnings figures are two different cohorts measured at different times, not one group tracked over a career - which is why we label the change between them "reported change," never "expected growth."

• Undergraduate / graduate enrollment - institution-wide federal reporting. Neither is MBA cohort size, which is usually far smaller; ask admissions for the program-level number.
• City - the city of the business school, which is not always the university's main seat. Harvard is the clearest case: Harvard Business School is in Boston (Allston) while Harvard University is in Cambridge, so this directory lists Harvard under Boston - the city you'd actually study in. A handful of other schools differ from their federal city of record for the same reason.
• Campus setting - the federal locale classification (large/midsize/small city or suburb, town, rural), simplified for readability. Note this describes the institution's federal locale code, which is tied to its main campus rather than the business school.
• Carnegie class - the Carnegie Basic Classification, 2021 edition, as carried in the Scorecard release. "R1"/"R2" are its research-activity tiers for doctoral universities.
• Institutional accreditation - the accreditor of record in federal data. This is the institution's regional accreditor, a separate thing from AACSB's business-school accreditation.
• AACSB accreditation - shown only when we matched the school on AACSB's list with high confidence. AACSB was founded in 1916 and is the longest-established of the three business-school accreditors recognized in the United States; the other two are ACBSP (1988) and IACBE (1997). Accreditation applies to the business school as a whole, not to any individual program, so treat it as a quality floor rather than a ranking. We never display "not accredited": absence from the badge can mean the school holds ACBSP or IACBE accreditation (which we don't track), or simply that AACSB lists it under a name we could not confidently match.

Every directory page shows a "last data update" date derived from when its underlying data file actually changed - we never re-stamp unchanged pages. Source vintages are stated where the data appears: June 2026 release for Scorecard figures, July 2026 for the AACSB list.

If a figure looks wrong, start with the source links on the school's page - they exist so every number here can be checked against the original. Where our copy and a source disagree, the source is right and we want to fix it.