These Are the Students Good Enough to Turn Down Harvard Business School

Who in their right mind would get accepted to Harvard Business School and turn it down? Turns out the answer is: someone who also got into Stanford.

It’s a nice problem to have: You’ve been admitted to two or more MBA programs and can only choose one. As you weigh a host of factors, you might be curious about the decisions of recent students who faced the same set of school choices as you. Using data from students who answered a survey for Bloomberg Businessweek’s 2014 MBA rankings (about half of all 2014 graduates at ranked schools), we’ve identified MBAs admitted to specific pairs of top programs and tried to make sense of where they ended up. What we can't glean from this: insight into financial aid packages, location preferences, or any other factors that might drive an applicant's choice. Still, few things are a purer indicator of which school is truly most desirable than where the most sought-after MBAs—the ones with their pick of highly selective schools—chose to go.