A bucolic college town, a smaller MBA program, a tightly knit community, an alumni network known for really taking care of its own, access to countless outdoor adventures in the surrounding areas (not to mention picturesque views), and a curriculum with a mandatory international component. Are we describing UVA Darden ? Or maybe Dartmouth Tuck? In fact, all these descriptors apply to both of these renowned MBA programs, which consistently find themselves among the top ten in various business school rankings and often battle for the same students.
So, in this post, we wanted to drill down a bit and explore the similarities and differences between the two schools. We will start with an obvious commonality: the scenery. Dartmouth Tuck is located in Hanover, New Hampshire, a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Boston, which is the closest major city. Hanover is home to just over 10,000 residents, roughly one-half of whom are Dartmouth College students, making it a true college town. Life at Tuck revolves around campus. Warm-weather weekends are spent exploring nearby hiking trails or on the Connecticut River in canoes and kayaks from Dartmouth’s own boating club. In the winter, students hit the slopes at Dartmouth’s ski resort or even take snowshoe lessons. Given Hanover’s environment and relative isolation, Tuck not surprisingly boasts the largest outdoors club in the nation among business schools. Although the summers are undeniably beautiful, be careful not to underestimate the intensity of New Hampshire’s winters, when temperatures average 39 degrees Fahrenheit but can drop as low as 12 degrees!
By contrast, Darden’s surroundings are positively balmy. Based in Charlottesville, Virginia, Darden has its own campus within that of the broader University of Virginia. Although Darden and Tuck are equally distant from the closest major city—Darden is a little more than two hours south of Washington, DC—the city of Charlottesville is much larger and more dynamic than Hanover. Surrounded by the Blue Ridge Mountains, Charlottesville is both a city and a suburb, and UVA’s quiet, if sprawling, campus is adjacent to a bustling cosmopolitan downtown. Designed by the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, the campus is a World Heritage Site, but do not let the university’s history fool you into thinking it is outdated. On the contrary. Darden recently underwent a significant renovation, adding top-notch facilities, including a five-star hotel and meeting space that rival anything you will find on an arguably more modern campus.
Of course, a business school’s setting is only one of many defining factors worth considering as you weigh your MBA options. Another is a school’s community, and this is a point of pride for Tuck and Darden alike. Both are considered “smaller” programs; Tuck welcomes 300 students in each class, and Darden welcomes approximately 350. Their communities are therefore small enough for everyone in them to get to know one another well. However, Tuck and Darden have slightly different cultures. Tuckies tell us that they tend to create their own fun and have a fairly centralized social life, partly because nightlife in Hanover is minimal and because Tuck offers only a full-time MBA program, meaning that everyone is present all week. Darden students have a more dispersed and diversified social life. Both schools take immense pride in their culture of collaboration, belief in shared success, emphasis on ethical leadership, and investment in long-term relationships that last well beyond one’s MBA years.
What about the meat of the MBA program: the academic and professional resources that are ostensibly its raison d’être? Darden is well known for being the only U.S. business school other than Harvard to exclusively use the case method, through which students learn by evaluating real-world business situations. On the other hand, Tuck offers a mix of lecture and case-based courses. At both programs, incoming students are divided into sections of 60 to 70 people, then further broken down into Study Groups or Learning Teams of five to six students who work together to prepare for each class.
Tuck and Darden both require students to complete a core curriculum in the first year to ensure that they share a similar baseline of skills and knowledge. Then, in the second year, students are free to pursue a wide range of electives. However, Darden permits students to specialize in Theme or Career Tracks to dive deeper into their areas of interest, whereas Tuck does not offer any majors or specializations. Tuck requires all first years to participate in TuckGo, an immersive international experience, and offers partnerships with more than 30 international business schools. Darden expects that all of its students will complete a Worldwide Course. A differentiator for Tuck is the First-Year Project, a hands-on, student-proposed consulting project that runs through the spring semester and gives students a practical element with which to unify the core concepts they have been studying. Darden, by contrast, does not have a mandatory consulting project, but students can opt into a Darden Business Project. Also, a Darden student would likely argue that the case studies they work on every day are already highly practical.
With respect to students’ careers, Tuck and Darden graduates primarily enter two fields: consulting and finance. Approximately 45% of Tuck graduates go into finance and roughly 20% go into consulting, but at Darden, these figures are inverted. Of course, neither program is focused strictly on finance and consulting all the time, and especially not Darden, which offers numerous student-run domestic and international career treks that allow students to explore fields ranging from biotech to renewable energy. Darden is also investing heavily to attract aspiring entrepreneurs. Its Batten Institute now offers a start-up academy, a VC Institute, and multiple start-up competitions, as well as innovation grants.
So, how similar are Tuck and Darden? We would emphasize two critical distinctions. First is the teaching method used. Some applicants might be drawn to Darden’s strict case method pedagogy, while others might find Tuck’s varied teaching styles more appealing. The second distinction is location. Tuck’s truly rural environment could be highly attractive to some candidates, while others might prefer Darden’s blend of city and nature.
If community is your main priority, either school could be a great fit; they both have genuinely close-knit cohorts and long-lasting alumni connections. This is why many applicants apply to both programs and then have difficulty choosing between them! If you are interested in learning more, we offer “Learning about” modules for both Darden and Tuck, as well as many other MBA programs, in onTrack by mbaMission, our on-demand and highly customizable admissions course. We go deep into the reasons someone might opt to attend the different schools, the reasons someone might not attend them, their curricula, their career opportunities, and a number of school-specific special topics. These onTrack modules can also facilitate your essay writing, short-answer strategy, interview preparation, and other important application tasks.
