UC-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, which currently has the smallest student intake among the most highly selective MBA programs, will “very likely” increase next year’s entering class by 15% to 280 students. The increase will come about as a result of Haas new $60 million building that will open in the fall of 2016, said Haas Dean Rich Lyons in an interview with Poets&Quants.

Currently, Haas enrolls four cohorts of 60 students each, slightly less than the maximum size of the school’s current classrooms. When the new six-story building comes on stream, its eight tiered-lecture rooms will accommodate as many as 75 students each. In the first year, Lyons added, Haas is “very likely” to expand each cohort to 70 students.

Lyons also left open the possibility that Haas could add another cohort of students in the future. “Whether we would add a new cohort we weren’t even able to consider with our current facilities,” he said.

ONLY STANFORD & HARVARD HAVE MORE SELECTIVE MBA PROGRAMS IN THE U.S.

Haas is among the most selective MBA programs in the world, accepting only 13.2% of its 3,475 applicants last year. Only Stanford Graduate School of Business and Harvard Business School are more selective, respectively accepting just 7.1% and 11.0% of their MBA candidates last year. The average GMAT of last fall’s entering class at Haas, moreover, was 717. Only six other MBA programs at U.S. schools have higher reported GMAT scores.

Lyons said the school’s applicant pool is so deep in talent that he expects no impact at all on Haas’ overall quality numbers. “Over 80% of the applicants with GMATs of 750 or above are not getting admitted to the school because we are trying to find the most balanced candidates who bring a lot to the dynamics of a class,” he noted. “The GMAT is just one element of the application.”

Of the top Ten MBA programs in the U.S., Haas takes in the smallest class, enrolling 241 students last fall (see table below). Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business is next with 280, the level at which Haas will be once it increases enrollment by 15%. MIT Sloan enrolled a class of 406 MBA candidates, while Stanford GSB took in 410 last fall.

THE NEW HAAS BUILDING WILL ADD NEARLY 80,000 SQUARE FEET OF SPACE

Haas started construction on what will be a fourth building last December. Only yesterday did the towering construction cranes go up on the site (a live webcam of the site is here). The so-called North Academic Building will add nearly 80,000-square-foot of space and contain the eight tiered lecture rooms, four flat, flexible-use spaces for experiential learning, 28 team-based study rooms, an indoor/outdoor café, lounge areas and a 300-seat event space with sweeping views of Berkeley’s campus and the San Francisco Bay.

The new structure will provide an additional 858 classroom seats through a variety of classroom sizes and styles. By removing tiered seating, the eight larger classrooms can easily convert to flat, flexible use rooms or new classroom designs in the future. Each classroom has the infrastructure to provide video streaming and capture as well as video teleconferencing.

Alumni have played a key role in making the building possible. Ned Spieker, an undergraduate alum from 1966 and managing partner of the private real estate firm Spieker Partners, has been the school’s lead partner for developing the vision for this building. The Lisa and Douglas Goldman Fund; Robert G. O’Donnell, BS 65 and MBA 66, retired senior VP and director of Capital Research and Management Company; and the late Barclay Simpson, BS 43, who founded and chaired Simpson Manufacturing Co.; among others, have also contributed significant gifts to the campaign.

SIZE OF INCOMING FULL-TIME MBA CLASSES AT THE TOP 25 BUSINESS SCHOOLS

School Class Size University of Washington Foster School of Business 105 Washington University Olin School of Business 139 Vanderbilt University Owen School of Management 169 Emory University Goizueta School of Business 178 Indiana University Kelley School of Business 186 Carnegie Mellon University Tepper School of Business 205 UC-Berkeley Haas School of Business 241 Georgetown University McDonough School of Business 270 University of Texas-Austin McCombs School of Business 270 Dartmouth College Tuck School of Business 281 University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School 281 Cornell University Johnson Graduate School of Management 293 Yale University School of Management 323 University of Virginia Darden School of Business 324 New York University Stern School of Business 344 UCLA Anderson School of Management 354 MIT Sloan School of Management 406 Stanford Graduate School of Business 410 Duke University Fuqua School of Business 440 University of Michigan Ross School of Business 447 University of Chicago Booth School of Business 583 Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management 691 Columbia University School of Business 743 University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business 859 Harvard University Business School 935

Source: Poets&Quants analysis of business school data

DON’T MISS: ACCEPTANCE RATES AT THE TOP 50 U.S. BUSINESS SCHOOLS or AVERAGE GMAT SCORES AT THE TOP 50 U.S. BUSINESS SCHOOLS