MBA program shortlist builder

Most shortlists start as a browser with fourteen tabs open and end as a vague sense that two or three schools felt right. The problem is not the number of schools - it is that each one gets judged on whatever happened to be on the page you had open at the time: this one's tuition, that one's alumni story, another one's application deadline. Nothing is compared against anything.

This tool does two separate things and keeps them separate. First, it puts the same sourced facts about every school you pick on the same rows, so the comparison is like-for-like. Second, it gives you five criteria to record your own judgment against - the parts no dataset knows, because they are about your life rather than the school. What it deliberately does not do is mix the two together into a number.

Every criterion below has exactly three answers, and none of them is a number. That is deliberate: a 1-to-5 scale invites adding the five up, and there is no honest sum of “the money is a stretch” and “the format conflicts with my life.” They are different kinds of problem, and one of them being fine does not offset the other.

A school you have ruled out is not clutter - it is the reason the schools that stayed are still there. Six weeks later, when someone asks why you are not applying somewhere obvious, the answer is on the page next to the ones you are. So a ruled-out school keeps its row, its figures, and your criteria answers; it just sorts to the bottom.

Every figure in the comparison comes from one of two places, and nothing is derived beyond what is stated here:

• Tuition, format, program length, and accreditation come from MBA Lab’s college directory. Each program record carries the source URL it was read from and the date it was verified, both linked in the comparison.
• Median earnings and median debt come from the U.S. Department of Education’s College Scorecard, for the federal field-of-study cohort described in the note in the comparison section. Cohort sizes are shown next to each median, because a median of 300 graduates and a median of 12 deserve very different confidence.

Three rules govern how absence and estimation are shown, and they are worth stating plainly because most comparison tables break at least one of them:

• A missing figure reads Not reported. Never a zero, never a dash, never an average quietly substituted in.
• A school with no AACSB accreditation on record reads Not listed in our data, never No. Our data not listing something is a fact about our data.
• A tuition total worked out from a per-credit-hour rate is always labelled Estimated, with the rate and the credit hours it came from shown next to it. A published total carries no such label.

And one rule about what is absent by design: there is no composite score, no ranking, no star rating, and no ordering by tuition or earnings. The schools appear in the tiers you put them in, in the order you added them.