Going to a top business school will now cost you up to $99K per year

Top-ranked business schools are raising tuition by about 4 percent this fall, bumping up the cost of classes for the 2015-16 academic year to nearly $60,000 on average. Throw in room and board, fees, and textbooks, and it will cost as much as $99,000 to attend B-school next year.

The University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business has announced the biggest tuition hike so far among schools ranked in the top 20 by Bloomberg Business. Tuition at Smith will rise by 9.9 percent next year for out of state residents, bringing the cost of classes to $52,380 from $47,655. (The most expensive school overall is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management, which will charge its next class of students $65,750 in tuition, a 3.1 percent bump from last year.) Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management reported the smallest bump. It will charge MBAs $59,500 for classes next year, up 2.2 percent from $58,192 this year.

Several elite B-schools—including Penn’s Wharton School, the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, and Harvard Business School—have yet to announce tuition rates for 2015-16. They’re expected to do so in the next few months.

The tuition hikes are consistent with a broad rise in education costs. Undergraduate tuition has outpaced inflation for nearly every year in the past four decades. At Ivy League schools who have reported tuition increases so far this year, tuition is rising by almost 4 percent in the fall. At private medical schools, first-year students who aren’t state residents will pay 2.9 percent more in the 2014-2015 school year than last year. at B-schools, it has become the norm for tuition to go up by 3 to 5 percent a year.

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The cost of a legal education is rising far faster than a business education, though: law school tuition jumped nearly 10 percent in 2014, according to the National Law Journal.

The rising price tag for business school hasn’t stemmed the flow of applications. In the 2013-14 admissions cycle, the latest year for which data are available, 62 percent of full- time, two-year MBA programs reported receiving more applications, according to the Graduate Management Admissions Council. In 2012-13, 52 percent did. B-schools, especially the most prestigious among them, have benefitted from a growing number of applications from foreign students, allowing even the priciest among them to sustain large class sizes and high rates of selectivity. (At the Stanford Graduate School of Business, 7,355 applicants fought to win one of just 410 spots in 2014.)

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