Harvard Discounting MBA Tuition by 55.8% 02-01

Harvard Discounting MBA Tuition by 55.8%

A case study professor in action at Harvard Business School

Harvard Business School, already the world’s most generous school in helping its MBAs with their tuition bills, increased fellowship support last year another 12% to an average of  $29,843 per student, up from $26,745 a year earlier.

Only five years ago, in 2007, the average fellowship aid per student at Harvard was $17,605 a year. That’s a nearly 70% increase in student support since 2007, making it increasingly difficult for other B-schools to lure and essentially buy the best MBA talent on the market.

Put another way, Harvard discounted its annual $53,500 tuition by an average of 55.8% last year, up from 54.7% a year earlier and 44.5% five years ago. Of course, these are average numbers. So some students pay full freight; others go for free. Many get a discount off the full cost of tuition. The school says that half of its MBA candidates, roughly 900 students, receive a need-based fellowship award.

HARVARD SPENT MORE THAN $40 MILLION ON FELLOWSHIP SUPPORT LAST YEAR

All told, Harvard spent an unprecedented $40.3 million in fellowship support last year, up from $36 million in 2011.

The numbers are disclosed in Harvard Business School’s just released annual report.

Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, Harvard’s biggest domestic rival, is not far behind in discounting the sticker price of its MBA program. The school says its average fellowship grant last year to MBA candidates was $24,708, up from $23,683 in 2011. This academic year some 427 MBA students at Stanford are receiving some form of scholarship money from the $12.8 million in institutional funding the school has set aside for MBA candidates.

The pressure Harvard is placing on other prominent schools who are losing some of their best applicants to HBS due to the lure of a deeply discounted education is not likely to let up. The business school is currently in the midst of a quiet fund raising campaign that seeks to raise an unprecedented $850 million to $1 billion, a chunk of which will go to students in the form of more fellowship money.

Harvard also reported that revenue rose 7.3% to $546 million for the fiscal year ended June 30, mostly due to sales in its publishing unit and tuition from executive education courses.

Publishing revenues rose 8.6% to $165 million last year, up from $152 million in 2011, largely from the sale of some 10 million case studies, books and Harvard Business Review reprints.

Executive education revenue totaled $142 million last year, a 7.6% increase from $132 million a year earlier.

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