Haas Adds Deferred MBA Admissions Option for Undergraduates

University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business is the latest top MBA program to introduce a deferred enrollment option for undergraduate applicants.

The program, called Accelerated Access, is initially being offered to students at UC Berkeley. Haas says that it has plans to expand the program across the UC system, and eventually to MBA applicants from all undergraduate institutions.

Under the program, undergraduate seniors can apply to Haas’s full-time MBA program with the application fee waived. If accepted, they can then defer enrollment for two to five years in order to gain work experience.

Also currently eligible to apply are UC Berkeley graduate students who are will receive their degrees this year with no gaps in their education. The application deadlines for the program’s first iteration are April 2 and June 11 of this year.

Haas says that students applying through the Accelerated Access program will be considered for up to five $100,000 scholarships to be awarded every year. Each scholarship has a different theme, such as financial need or academic achievement.

Morgan Bernstein, Haas’s director of strategic initiatives, said the school expected the deferred admissions program to “increase the diversity of our class, compelling students from a wide variety of academic disciplines to consider an MBA.”

In the competition to attract top talent, business schools have been increasingly offering deferred enrollment routes into their MBA programs.

A few years ago, for example, University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School launched a new deferred enrollment program for Penn undergrads. That program was recently expanded to undergraduate applicants from other institutions.

Harvard Business School has a deferred admissions program known as HBS 2 + 2, and Stanford GSB has its own equivalent.

Another deferred admissions program, this time from Haas, is certainly good news for applicants because it means more options for how to apply to MBA programs.

Of course, more options also means more strategic choices that need to be made. Whether applying to business schools in the final year of college makes sense depends entirely on your strengths, overall profile, and goals as an applicant.

For our part, we’re happy to give you feedback on how your application is likely to come across to adcoms at top MBA programs – and what application strategy you can take to make your personal brand stand out.

If that sounds helpful, simply contact us and ask us for a free MBA application assessment!