2025 OMBA Ranking: Acceptance Rates At The Top Online MBA Programs

HARDEST AND EASIEST ONLINE MBA PROGRAMS TO GET INTO

As we do every year in our annual OMBA ranking, we asked schools to report their acceptance rates for all intakes during the most recent academic year. So, that would be the 2023-2024 academic year for our 2025 ranking.

Jack Welch Management Institute (ranked No. 8 overall) was the most selective online MBA program on our 2025 list with a 27% acceptance rate. That’s down 3% from the 30% admission rate the school reported for 2024’s ranking.

Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business (tied for No. 2 overall) was the second hardest program to get into with an acceptance rate of 28%, the same as last year. The No. 1 school on our 2025 ranking, University of Texas at Dallas Naveen Jindal School of Management, accepted 46% of applicants.

The tables below show the online MBA programs for our latest ranking with the lowest and highest acceptance rates. The lower the rate, the harder it is for students to get accepted into the program.

On the other end of the spectrum, Fairfield University’s Charles F. Dolan School of Business (ranked No. 23 overall) had the least selective program, accepting 100% of applicants. It was followed by Ohio University at 99.46% and SUNY Oswego at 97%.

Fourteen programs, in fact, had acceptance rates of 90% or more, while another 15 schools accepted 80% or more of applicants.

ARE ONLINE MBAs GETTING LESS SELECTIVE?

At the start of the pandemic, many schools loosened their admission standards to help mitigate looming uncertainties in the economy, job outlook, and student enrollment.

In hindsight, it wasn’t all that surprising. It was uncharted territory; nobody knew what was coming. As a result, acceptance rates rose en masse in full-time MBA programs from the 2019 and 2020 intakes as schools adapted to the changes. Acceptance rates for online programs, already considerably higher than their full-time counterparts, followed suit.

What is somewhat surprising is that, nearly five years on, admission rates have not bounced back in the top U.S. online MBA programs. According to data reported for our 2025 ranking, the average acceptance rate of ranked programs is still 6% higher than it was before the pandemic.

For our 2020 OMBA ranking, Poets&Quants asked online MBA programs to submit acceptance rates for its 2019-2020 academic year, with data covering mainly fall 2019 – a few months before the pandemic really started shutting things down. The average rate among the ranked programs that year was 70.63%. That average rose to 73% for our 2021 ranking (using intake data from fall 2020 onward.)

That means this year’s average acceptance rate is 6.24% higher than before the pandemic. In other words, online MBA programs are, on average, easier to get into – at least among schools that we rank. There are certainly caveats to the comparison. We ranked 57 schools for 2025 compared to 35 for 2020, making a direct comparison imprecise.

There are notable exceptions: Rogers State University’s acceptance rate dropped 40.7% from 2019-2020 when 93.7% of students who applied got in to 2023-2024 when 53% of applicants were accepted.

The acceptance rate at Indiana Kelley dropped 37.9% in the same time period, from 65.9% to 28%.

Twenty of the 57 schools in our 2025 ranking reported lower acceptance rates compared to five years ago, meaning it was harder for candidates to get an invitation to enroll. However, 28 schools have higher acceptance rates than before the pandemic. (Seven schools were ranked for the first time this year and data wasn’t available for the comparison.)

ADMISSION RATES DROPPED AT 30 SCHOOLS FROM LAST YEAR

If you’re looking at just the change from last year, it’s just the opposite. So, the trend might be starting to reverse.

In fact, admission rates at 30 schools from our ranking dropped this year compared to last. They fell 7% or more at 15 of those schools.

Rogers State (ranked 49th overall) had the biggest year-over-year drop at 22%. It was followed by Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business (5th) with a 14.71% drop and University of Michigan Ross School of Business (tied for 2nd) with 14%.

Fifteen schools reported higher acceptance rates for this ranking, compared to 27 schools last year and 25 schools the year before.

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga’s Rollins College of Business (No. 47 overall) had the largest year-over-year increase in admission rates, rising 40.5% – from 54.7% for last year’s ranking to 95.2% this year.

The table below shows how acceptance rates have changed at all 57 ranked schools over the last five years.