The M7.

It’s the informal super elite group of seven private business schools generally considered to have the world’s best MBA programs. If you’re in business, you know their names: Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Kellogg, Booth, Columbia, and MIT Sloan.

You can quibble forever over whether the Magnificent 7 really should be the Terrific 10, with Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, UC-Berkeley’s Haas School, and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business thrown in for good measure.

But years ago, the deans of these top seven schools decided to form their informal network to share information and to meet twice a year, and through the years, the group has been limited by the self-anointed seven instiutions. It’s not only the deans who get together. The M7 modality cascades down to meetings among vice deans, admission directors, career management directors, even PR and marketing types.

SECRET MEETINGS TO TRADE GOSSIP, INFORMATION AND BEST PRACTICES

At the private sessions, for which the schools rotate hosting duties, business school officials trade gossip, best practices, and whatever topical issues end up on the agenda. In the aftermath of Lehman Brothers bankruptcy and the onset of the Great Recession, for example, the deans discussed how their schools were responding to the collapsing job market. There’s a good bit of jealousy about these tete a tetes, especially from the deans of schools just outside the Magic 7, who privately gripe about how elitist the whole exercise is.

From an applicant’s point of view, the M7 is something else entirely: It’s the Holy Grail of the MBA Kingdom. Every year, there’s a sizable number of applicants who will only apply to the M7 schools or a subset of them, even though there are many other business schools that are just as or nearly as good. Indeed, for some candidates, a case can easily be made why the Tuck School or the Darden School at the University of Virginia might well be preferable to an M7 institution. After all, the cutoff at seven was arbitrary to begin with and was made at a very different time.

Still, the fascination with this mysterious group and these schools can turn into an obsession for any highly striving MBA candidate. Which is why we’ve put together this comparative look at the M7 players, comparing and contrasting them by everything from GMATs and GPAs to starting salaries and job offer rates.

SURPRISES, EVEN AMONG THE SUPER ELITE

Even among these elite schools, there are surprises. For the first time ever, the average GMAT score for Wharton’s incoming class in the fall of 2014 beat the Harvard Business School. Wharton said its mean GMAT–often considered something of a proxy for the quality of a class–rose to a new record 728, up from 725 in 2013, which represented a more sizable hike from a score of 718 in the previous four years. The new record is just two points higher than Harvard’s reported 726 average so the difference isn’t all that much. But it does send a signal that Wharton is aggressively playing the GMAT game in admissions, having increased its average score by a full ten points in the past two years.

An MBA degree from an M7 school is pretty much a sure thing. No one is going to question your decision to go to any of these schools, and very few of the graduates from these institutions regret their choice to attend. But none of this comes cheap.

The highest estimated cost of the MBA degree among these elite schools is at Stanford where the price tag, including living expenses, is now more than $200,000. Of course, that’s the price before any scholarship grants–and it turns out that if you need financial help Stanford is among the more generous business schools in the world. The average annual grant to an MBA student at Stanford is $35,830 and 52% of the students receive fellowship support from the school.

That’s an important part of the financial puzzle to keep in mind when you apply to these schools. Don’t let the sky high tuition scare you off. Stanford, Harvard, and Chicago Booth are awarding large sums of money to students that make essentially make the return on investment of their MBA degrees outrageously good. In effect, every school has a two-tier pricing structure for the MBA: the full sticker price and the discounted price. Stanford and Harvard claim to only give out money based on need, but all the other schools are using the cash to lure the best qualified applicants to their programs.

Once you’re in one of these MBA programs, you can see what kind of teaching methods you’re likely to encounter. There’s no surprise that Harvard is on the extreme end when it comes to case study teaching. The school estimates that 80% of all the learning at HBS is via the case method. It’s also no surprise that the team with the most team project work–25% is Kellogg, known around the world for its highly collaborative culture. Among the M7 schools, MIT Sloan claims that it piles on the most experiential learning, with 22% of the teaching delivered that way.

The largest core classes are at Harvard which puts as many as 94 students in a classroom. The smallest core courses are at Stanford and Chicago Booth which claim that they sign up no more than 50 students per class. Interestingly, every school estimates that the typical class size for electives is exactly 43 students.

Source: P&Q analysis

Source: P&Q analysis

Source: Business schools reporting to Bloomberg Businessweek

The payoff of an M7 education is indisputable. There are few educational degrees, with the exception of a degree in computer science, that payoff as quickly as an MBA from one of these top schools and–more importantly–builds on its value over the course of a career. The first-year compensation package for M7 grads tends to be above $150,000, once you include a sign-on bonus, other year-end compensation, and possible stock options and perks that schools don’t even bother to tally.

Where M7 grads actually end up varies by school, but all of these institutions have world-class companies and organizations regularly recruiting their MBAs.

Source: Business school employment reports & Payscale

Notes: 20-year income estimates are by Payscale and reflect historical income up to 2013 and not future income; 2014 median total is comp reflects all three key pay components together, though not all graduates receive all three

Source: 2014 school employment reports

Notes: * Indicates that the school includes sponsored students in its numbers. If Columbia subtracted out the sponsored students in consulting, for example, the percentage going into that industry would fall to 26% from 34%. Some categories are not always exactly the same across the schools.

Source: P&Q analysis