Core #2 · Full school dossier

DePauw University

School of Business & Leadership + Management Fellows · Greencastle, Indiana
Portfolio verdict: High admission probability + strong need-aid model + one of the most distinctive experiential business programs in the portfolio.
Undergraduates
1,847 degree students (Fall 2025)
Business scale
School of Business & Leadership; Management Fellows is selective
Setting
Small residential college / small town
Admission estimate
93% planning estimate
Cost works if admitted
84% planning estimate
Early route
EA I Nov. 1
Program lens

What business actually looks like here

Program strength: Unusually strong business-and-liberal-arts pathway; School of Business & Leadership plus the Management Fellows honors program established in 1980

Major options: Students may major in any discipline while completing Management Fellows business core; School of Business & Leadership adds business-focused pathways

Program admission: Separate selective Management Fellows application after DePauw admission: résumé + essay + interview; current page lists Dec. 1 or Feb. 15 rounds

Experiential learning

Work before graduation

Model: Management Fellows integrates business fundamentals, speaker/networking series, career programming and an immersive junior-year internship

Internship / co-op: Management Fellows: full-time, paid, ~15-week, semester-long, credit-bearing internship. Tuition is paid as usual; off-campus room/board charges do not apply during the internship term. Placement is heavily supported, but the handbook says a particular internship cannot be guaranteed.

Distinctive feature: Management Fellows reports average 4 internships before graduation and 1,000+ fellows completing internships historically

Career outcomes

Where the degree tends to lead

Placement: Management Fellows site reports 100% of graduates in the past three years accepted job offers within six months; university-wide 2024 outcomes: 93% desired outcome

Compensation: Management Fellows: approx. $74K starting salary; university-wide first-destination page: $55K average starting salary

Employment geography: Published top graduate locations include Indianapolis, Chicago, New York, St. Louis, Dallas, Seattle/Redmond, Cincinnati and Washington, D.C.

Money

How this becomes financially usable

Need / institutional aid: DePauw Promise: designed to meet 100% of calculated need for eligible incoming cohorts; $75M+ institutional scholarships/grants

Merit / jackpot route: Rector and other merit awards; need package is the principal reason it ranks this high

Family rule: the relevant question is not “Is there scholarship money?” It is whether tuition + campus living can be solved for all eight semesters with only a small student contribution.
Fit

What matters specifically for him

This discovery materially strengthens DePauw: small college, but with a much more explicit national business-career pipeline than the brief card showed.

What could change the ranking: Management Fellows is not automatic with DePauw admission. The value proposition changes substantially without it, so the separate application matters.