The incoming class for the full-time Master of Business Administration program at Iowa State University’s Ivy College of Business marks a milestone that a majority of MBA programs nationwide are still aspiring to reach — gender equity. 

For the first time in the program’s history, an equal number of female and male students — 14 each — are enrolled in the newest 28-member Ivy Master of Business Administration class at ISU. 

The achievement has been seven years in the making, said David Spalding, who set out to raise the level of female enrollment shortly after joining ISU as dean of the business school in 2013. 

“We have reached a goal here that some of the highest ranked MBA programs in the country have not yet been able to achieve, including Stanford and Harvard,” Spalding said. Female enrollment is at near-equity for the college’s part-time MBA program as well, at 47% female enrollment currently, he noted. 

Among the 25 most prestigious MBA programs in the country, only one so far — the University of Southern California-Marshall — reached that goal when it achieved 52% female enrollment in its 2018 class. Last year, 13 of the top 25 schools tracked by the graduate business education newsletter Poets&Quants had female enrollment of 40% or higher.  

Spalding said to his knowledge, no other MBA program of comparable size to ISU’s has achieved 50% or higher female enrollment among a full-time class. The program at the Ivy College of Business is the only full-time MBA degree program offered in Iowa.  

Having gender equity in MBA classes often translates to executive ranks of a company. However, it’s a heavy lift for business schools to reach, given that women are still in the minority of applicants for full-time, two-year MBA programs in the United States. 

Nationally, only 39% of applicants to full-time, two-year MBA programs in the U.S. are female, according to the 2019 application trends reported by the Graduate Management Admission Council. 

Everyone’s Business, an organization formed by USC students in 2017, led a push to encourage more women to enroll in the California school’s MBA program. According to that group, earning an MBA matters more for women. While only 34.4% of Fortune 500 CEOs have MBAs, a whopping 70.4% of Fortune 500 female CEOs have MBAs, the group said. 

Spalding said a key step toward the Ivy College of Business attracting more women to enroll in the full-time MBA has been a focus on recruiting more high-quality female faculty. Consequently, the business school went from having the lowest percentage of female faculty in the Big 12 universities to the highest percentage. “More women in the front of the classroom draws more women into the classroom,” he said. 

Notably, of the four research awards made by the business school last spring (based on quantity and quality of research produced over the previous two years), three went to female faculty members who had been hired within the past three years, Spalding said. 

The dean acknowledged that class enrollment for the full-time MBA program has dipped in the past couple of years — down from 34 last year and 38 the year before that. 

However, the latest application numbers year-to-date indicate 32 students have already applied for next year’s class. By comparison, just four applications were in by this time a year ago. Spalding attributes the uptick to the MBA program’s latest national ranking by U.S. News & World Report, which last October placed it in the top 100 program, at No. 47.  

“So that gives me good confidence that we’ll see a good increase in our full-time enrollment this year,” he said.