International applicants account for a large portion of applicants at many U.S. business schools, but they also receive the lion's share of rejections. Applicants from India and China lead the pack of the rejected.

By John A. Byrne, contributor

Over 50% of Duke Fuqua's full-time MBA program were international, but only 30% of the students in this fall's entering class are coming from outside the U.S.

(Poets&Quants) -- MBA applicants from India and China face significantly higher rates of rejection by many top U.S. business schools than either domestic candidates or those from Europe or Latin America, according to a new study by Poets&Quants. In some cases, the acceptance rate for U.S. citizens is four to five times higher than the rate of acceptance for Indian and Chinese applicants.

At some prominent business schools, international applicants now outnumber those from the U.S. That's the case at MIT Sloan, Duke University's Fuqua School, and Michigan's Ross School of Business. At Purdue University's Krannert School, nearly eight out of 10 in its latest MBA applicant pool were international. At Washington University's Olin School of Business, 70% of last year's 1,490 applicants to its full-time MBA program were non-U.S.

Yet at all of these prestige business schools, the percentage of international students admitted and enrolled is far lower than their portion of the overall applicant pool. At Washington's Olin School, for example, only 35% of the latest entering class is international, even though international candidates made up 70% of the school's applicant pool. Although 53% of the 3,452 applicants to Fuqua's full-time MBA program were international, only 30% of the students in this fall's entering class are not from the U.S.

The rarely seen data on the makeup of the MBA applicant pool -- as opposed to data on the students who enroll -- comes from B-schools that have supplied this information for the first time to Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Not all schools agreed to hand over this data. Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, and Columbia were among the top institutions that declined to provide this information. Yet, most business schools, including some of the most prominent, complied with the request to shed light on their applicant pools. More