449 Business Schools with Swim Teams, Ranked
Updated July 2026 · 2025-26 season data
By Kevin Tu · Swim parent and founder, On The Board
Yes, and business coursework usually bends around a travel schedule. The pressure point is fall internship recruiting, which lands in the heart of the season. The 449 swim schools here with business programs, the most of any major on the site, are ranked by graduate earnings and selectivity.
Most "best business schools" rankings tell you which programs produce the highest-paid graduates. This one tells you which programs a swimmer can actually finish. Business coursework bends around a travel schedule. The recruiting calendar does not. Finance and consulting firms open junior-year internships in August, run interviews through November, and fill offers before the spring championship season.
The ranking below shows the top 25 programs ordered by academic outcomes and selectivity. Three swimmers who chose this path are further down the page.
Washington University in St. Louis, a Division III program, ranks #3 for business, ahead of every Ivy except Penn.
449 schools · Rankings use College Scorecard field-of-study outcomes, school selectivity, and swim program data from the 2025-26 season.
Start your swimmer’s list from this Business ranking.
You’re looking at 449 business schools with swim teams. Save the ones worth a look, or add your swimmer’s times to see which belong on the list.
A school can rank high here and still be wrong for your swimmer. It may be too fast, too selective, too expensive, or missing the right academic path. On The Board helps narrow this list around the swimmer, not just the major.
All 449 Business schools with swim teams
| Rank | School | Division | Earnings | Accept |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Penn Private · $29K net price · 10,700 students |
D1 | $122,725 | 5% |
| 2 | Rice Private · $13K net price · 4,800 students |
D1 | $89,530 | 8% |
| 3 | Wash U Private · $22K net price · 7,900 students |
D3 | $91,744 | 12% |
| 4 | Notre Dame Private · $27K net price · 8,800 students |
D1 | $86,375 | 11% |
| 5 | Northwestern Private · $29K net price · 9,200 students |
D1 | $76,995 | 8% |
| 6 | NYU Private · $37K net price · 28,700 students |
D3 | $82,507 | 9% |
| 7 | Georgetown Private · $41K net price · 7,600 students |
D1 | $85,538 | 13% |
| 8 | California Public · $13K net price · 33,100 students |
D1 | $81,456 | 11% |
| 9 | Brown Private · $25K net price · 7,200 students |
D1 | $73,769 | 5% |
| 10 | Carnegie Mellon Private · $32K net price · 7,300 students |
D3 | $80,196 | 12% |
| 11 | Michigan Public · $13K net price · 34,200 students |
D1 | $83,177 | 16% |
| 12 | Emory Private · $23K net price · 7,300 students |
D3 | $77,283 | 11% |
| 13 | USC Private · $33K net price · 20,400 students |
D1 | $71,643 | 10% |
| 14 | Cornell Private · $29K net price · 16,000 students |
D1 | $69,338 | 9% |
| 15 | Northeastern Private · $31K net price · 17,300 students |
D1 | $65,517 | 5% |
| 16 | Boston College Private · $42K net price · 10,100 students |
D1 | $75,518 | 16% |
| 17 | North Carolina Public · $12K net price · 20,800 students |
D1 | $73,823 | 15% |
| 18 | Villanova Private · $44K net price · 6,900 students |
D1 | $90,856 | 27% |
| 19 | Washington & Lee Private · $24K net price · 1,900 students |
D3 | $66,449 | 14% |
| 20 | Boston University Private · $24K net price · 18,200 students |
D1 | $60,597 | 11% |
| 21 | Texas Public · $20K net price · 42,900 students |
D1 | $75,652 | 27% |
| 22 | Georgia Tech Public · $12K net price · 18,800 students |
D1 | $61,714 | 14% |
| 23 | Lehigh Private · $37K net price · 5,900 students |
D1 | $74,142 | 26% |
| 24 | Tulane Private · $40K net price · 7,800 students |
D1 | $64,281 | 14% |
| 25 | Richmond Private · $31K net price · 3,000 students |
D1 | $66,355 | 22% |
Most families keep all this in a spreadsheet.
Here, you save a school and the roster times, standards, and academics come filled in.
See how the recruiting list works →Three swimmers who chose this path
Larsen Jensen built a career on exactly that kind of overlap. A three-time NCAA champion at USC and a two-time Olympic medalist, he still holds the American record in the 400-meter freestyle. He retired after the 2008 Beijing Games, was commissioned as a Navy officer, finished SEAL training at the top of his class, and served through 2014. Then he went to Stanford for his MBA and worked at Goldman Sachs, Andreessen Horowitz, and Lightspeed before co-founding Harpoon Ventures, a Silicon Valley defense and deep-tech fund now managing over $300 million. He has said the common thread through all of it is the same discipline. Show up early, stay late, put up the yardage. The vocabulary is from the pool. The application is not.
Ryan Murphy took a different route to a similar place. A twelve-time NCAA champion at Cal and a nine-time Olympic medalist, he graduated from the Haas School of Business in 2017 as the Pac-12 Scholar-Athlete of the Year, kept swimming professionally, and is now a growth equity investor at Norwest and an advisor to The House Fund, a Berkeley-focused venture capital firm. What Jensen and Murphy have in common is that both earned a business degree from a top program while competing at the highest level the sport offers, and both are now investing professionally.
Matt Fallon is doing it right now. A senior at Penn in a dual degree between Wharton and the engineering school, he made the 2024 Paris Olympic team, became the first American swimmer in Penn's history to qualify for the US national team, and last summer turned down a spot at the World Championships to take an internship at a startup called Axle. The tradeoff was not subtle. He gave up one of the two biggest meets on the international calendar for twelve weeks of real work experience at a company that might still be around when he graduates.
Swimmers who studied business
Real college swimmers named to the CSCAA Scholar All-America team — a 3.5+ GPA and a swim at nationals — who majored in business.
Weronika Gorecka
Akron · Business Administration
Scholar All-America · 5 seasons
Gavin Anderson
Colorado Mesa · Business Administration
Scholar All-America · 5 seasons
Isabella Revstedt
Indianapolis · Business Administration
Scholar All-America · 5 seasons
Leticia Vaselli
Indianapolis · Business Administration
Scholar All-America · 5 seasons
Nina Azirovic
Wingate University · International Business Management
Scholar All-America · 5 seasons
Aidan Stoffle
Auburn · Business Administration
Scholar All-America · 4 seasons
Alex Volkov
Grand Canyon · Finance
Scholar All-America · 4 seasons
Anna Peplowski
Indiana · Sport Management
Scholar All-America · 4 seasons
Named to the CSCAA Scholar All-America team, 2019–20 through 2025–26.
View the honorees ↗Rankings are a starting point. The list your family actually works from is shorter, built around your swimmer's times.
Start your swimmer's list →How the divisions compare
Division I
The Ivies lead. Penn, Rice, Notre Dame, Northwestern, NYU, Georgetown, California, Brown, and Cornell all appear in the top 15. Michigan, USC, and North Carolina give you large-program business schools with strong recruiting pipelines into finance and consulting, though they come with heavier travel and training loads than the Ivies.
Division II
Business programs at D2 schools don't cluster at the top of this academic ranking, so the decision rests on different factors. Weigh cost, location, roster fit, and the career office's regional employer network. Expect to do more of your own legwork when it comes to internship placement.
Division III
Wash U at #3 is the result to know. Carnegie Mellon at #10 and Emory at #12 round out a UAA cluster at the top, with Williams, Washington and Lee, and Skidmore also in the top 40. The UAA travels to academically serious schools together, which matters when recruiting firms plan campus visits and info sessions.
What it takes to swim at these schools
This list ranks Business programs on academics. It doesn't show how fast their rosters actually swim, and that changes a lot by division.
Frequently asked questions
Can you realistically swim D1 and study business?
Yes, but internship recruiting is the pressure point most families underestimate. Finance and consulting firms run their junior-year internship process on a fixed calendar starting in August or September. If your training schedule has you traveling for fall invitationals while your classmates are doing first-round case interviews, you are at a disadvantage that is not about intelligence or effort. Ask the business school career office whether they have worked with athletes who competed through junior-year recruiting. Ask the coaches whether they have placed swimmers into the banks and consulting firms you care about. The programs that have solved this will say so.
What is the specific scheduling conflict between business and swimming?
Ask any swimmer who has interviewed at Goldman or McKinsey, and they will tell you the same thing. The problem is not the coursework. Business classes bend around a travel schedule as long as you communicate early with your professors. The recruiting calendar does not bend. Junior-year internship applications go live the first week of fall classes for most of the big firms, and within about six weeks, you are either in the process or behind it. October is the first round. Early to mid-November is super days. By Thanksgiving, a lot of the offers are already signed. Swimmers are in midseason by October, traveling for dual meets and invitationals, and trying to prep cases on a plane. Some recruiters will flex a date. The process itself will not.
Which programs handle that conflict best and why?
Penn and Cornell have the deepest history of sending swimmers into Wall Street because the alumni networks were built for it generations ago, and Northwestern has a similar story with consulting through the Chicago pipeline. Rice is a smaller case, strong in Houston's energy sector and increasingly in tech. Wash U and Carnegie Mellon win on geography as much as anything. Both sit in cities where firms actually recruit on campus, and their career offices have worked with enough athletes to know what the schedule demands. The real question to ask on a recruiting visit is not about rankings. It is whether a career coach will run mock interviews with you at 6am because that is the only window you have before practice.
Is D3 a better fit for business students who swim?
Not necessarily, but it is worth taking seriously at these schools. Wash U, Carnegie Mellon, and Emory graduates show up at the same banks, consulting firms, and tech companies as Penn and Cornell graduates, and the career offices at all three work hard at placement. Where D3 helps a business student is in the margin around training: fewer travel weekends, a shorter championship season, and a summer after sophomore year that is genuinely available for an internship. That second summer matters more than most recruits realize. By the time you are interviewing for your junior-year internship, the firms want to see that you have already done one. A D3 schedule gives you room to build that piece of the resume without choosing between it and your racing.
What GPA and test scores do you actually need for top business programs?
Recruit status does not get you into Wharton. Penn admits business applicants at around a 5% rate with very high test scores and a consistent academic record across all four years of high school. Rice, Northwestern, and the UAA schools are in the same range. Notre Dame and Georgetown are slightly less selective but still expect a GPA above 3.7 and strong performance in math. The schools will tell you what they need. The harder part is building the academic profile two or three years before you apply.
What do swimmers who studied business say about it?
Larsen Jensen has said the discipline itself is a transferable skill. The habit of showing up before anyone else, putting in work that will not pay off for years, and doing it again the next day is how you train for distance freestyle, and it is how you build a venture fund. Ryan Murphy was more honest about the gap between earning the degree and knowing what to do with it. He graduated from Haas in 2017 and spent the next several years focused on Tokyo and Paris, letting his business career come into focus on a longer timeline. Fallon is in the middle of that same decision at Penn and chose the internship over Worlds. Different choices, same underlying instinct: they were thinking about the second career before the first one ended.
What should I ask a coach about business recruiting during a visit?
The coursework is not the risk; the recruiting calendar is. Finance and consulting firms open junior-year internships in August and fill most offers by Thanksgiving, right when you are traveling for fall meets. So ask specific questions. Ask how many swimmers on the current roster are business majors, and whether you can talk to one of them. Ask the business school's career office which swimmers have interned at the banks or firms you care about, and when. Ask the coach how the last swimmer on the roster handled recruiting during dual-meet season, because either there is a real story or there is not. A program that has placed swimmers into competitive internships will answer with names. One that has not will keep it general.
Rankings are based on field-of-study median earnings and institutional selectivity, with a bonus for nationally ranked universities. Data from College Scorecard. Learn how we rank programs →