Harvard Business School will be seeing more women in the classroom this fall. The top university has announced that 39 percent of its incoming M.B.A. students are women.

While that breakdown still may seem low, it is the largest number of women ever accepted into the program.

Deidre Leopold, managing director of Harvard M.B.A. Admissions, told Forbes that women can use the degree toward goals other than becoming the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.

"Women are using it not only for finance but also to work in nonprofits or open their own business," Leopold said.

Wharton, the business school at the University of Pennsylvania, also has accepted a large number of women to its competitive M.B.A. program this year -- the class of 2011 is 40 percent female. But Penn's medical and law schools are ahead of the game with almost half of the classes' students being women.

Both schools say their admissions processes are based on merit rather than gender.