Military MBA

With funding now available from the New GI Bill, military veterans are weighing their options for getting an MBA degree and committed to find the right school for their education needs. Veterans say military friendly school lists provide no meaningful data that can be used to make an informed decision about enrolling in an MBA school. Magazine rankings are subjective and geared toward traditional, not military, MBA students.

Military MBA wants to help military veterans and their families, using the New GI Bill, to evaluate schools and get a quality MBA degree at the right price. What follows is our complete analysis of the Best Value in MBA Schools.


Explanation of the Chart
The chart above plots total tuition paid by schools and the VA versus the MBA school ranking by US News & World Report. We chose these measures because they offered the best available means to evaluate educational quality and cost to students: in other words, the most bang for the buck. Go here for the methodology of our analysis.

After plotting amounts of tuition waived for veterans against rankings of MBA schools, the data points fell into three clusters. The three groups of schools are listed, and explained, in greater detail below.

	University/MBA Schools	Total Tuition	% Tuition Paid	Balance Owed	US News Rank
	Dartmouth College Tuck School of Business	47835	80.4	9389	8
	Duke University Fuqua School of Business	45850	76.3	10850	12
	University of Michigan School of Business	42989	70.5	12661	13
	Carnegie Mellon Tepper School of Business	49200	65.9	16800	15
	Washington Univ St. Louis Olin Business School	42525	76	10209	22
	Universtiy of North Carolina                        School of Business	23456	59.7	9456	20
	Northwestern University Kellogg School of Mgmt.	49074	40.8	29074	3
	University of Pennsylvania Wharton	50430	39.7	30430	3
	University of Chicago Booth School	49020	40.8	29020	5
	UCLA Anderson Graduate School	35673	48.2	18473	14
	Harvard Business School	46150	21.7	36150	1
	Cornell University School of Management	47150	35.7	30302	17
	University of Virginia Darden School	43500	27.6	31500	15
	Columbia University Business School	49728	10.1	44728	9
	Georgetown University McDonough School	41952	11.9	36952	19
	Vanderbilt University Owen Graduate School	41792	47.9	21792	33
	University of Notre Dame School of Business	38860	41.2	22,860	33
	Southern Methodist University Cox	37692	50.7	18588	47
	Michigan State University Business School	21690	36.2	13840	40
	Rice University Jones School of Mgmt.	40000	12.5	34990	38
	Wake Forest University                            Babcock School of Mgmt.	36750	32.7	24750	51

IMPORTANT TO NOTE
Our analysis of best value led to a Top 20 list of MBA schools. It is not a ranking, but a defined group of the 20 MBA schools that provide the best value for military veterans. All twenty of these MBA schools should be commended for their many commitments to work with military veterans and their families. Veterans can get an excellent education at any of these schools.


High MBA School Ranking, Large Tuition Waiver
Each MBA school in this category rated high academically and also committed to reduce tuition for veterans, at some of the highest percentages, to lower their overall tuition rates.


High MBA School Ranking, Smaller Tuition Waiver
MBA schools in this group were given high marks for the quality of their MBA programs, but committed less funding relative to other schools to help veterans offset high costs of tuition. The challenge next year for this group of MBA schools will be to step up their financial commitments to veterans, which the VA will subsequently match, to make their programs even more valuable. Even so, four out of nine MBA schools in this category reduced their tuition 40%-50% for veterans and their families.


Lower MBA School Ranking, Smaller Tuition Waiver
Even though some of these schools may not rate as high academically, there are many outstanding MBA programs in this cluster. It is encouraging that two out of five MBA schools in Group III finished in the top half of all MBA schools providing the most tuition aid to veterans this year.

METHODOLOGY
In order to perform this analysis we sorted through data supplied to the Dept. of Veterans Affairs (VA) from 7,000 participating institutions of higher learning. Out of this nationwide group we located approximately 50 MBA schools committed to tuition waivers, which are then matched 100% by VA as part of the Yellow Ribbon Program. Of these 50 institutions, we found that there were 20 MBA Schools that offered tuition waivers and were ranked in the top 55 by US News & World Report. We then divided the total tuition by the total of the amount waived by the universities plus the VA matching funds to arrive at the total percentage tuition covered. The resultant percentages of tuition waived were plotted on the vertical axis.