Archive : Business School Rankings

The Financial Times has just released its new global MBA rankings for 2012. For the first time in the history of the FT rankings, Stanford grabs the top spot, pushing London Business School and Wharton (Which were tied for #1 in 2011) down to #2. Stanford becomes only the fourth school to sit atop the FT rankings, joining LBS, Wharton, and Harvard for that distinction.

Without further ado, here are the Financial Times’ top ten global MBA programs for 2012:

Earlier this week U.S. News & Word Report released its annual business school rankings for 2012. As we write every year, it’s easy for applicants to get too caught up in the rankings and obsess over details such as a school “plunging” from 8th to 11th in the rankings. Ignoring the rankings as you research business schools would be silly, but using them as any more than a useful starting point can only lead to trouble.

Still, it’s human nature: When someone ranks something — anything — we can’t help but take notice and pick apart the rankings at least a little. Without further ado, here’s a look at the top 20 U.S. programs as defined by U.S. News. Each school’s previous rankings follows in parentheses:

Today at 5:15pm EST, Bloomberg Businessweek will host a live chat to announce its 2011 undergraduate business school rankings.  Will Notre Dame hold onto the top spot in the rankings? Could UVA or MIT make the leap to the #1 position?

Even if you’re not considering a BBA, there are some interesting stats and trends to follow in the undergraduate rankings.  The salary and job placement statistics year-to-year can provide insight into the health of the typical MBA feeder industries (consulting, banking, brand management), and the rankings of the MBA feeder programs can demonstrate some insight into your competition for MBA programs down the road.  Washington University (St. Louis) – Olin was the top-ranked MBA feeder program in 2010, with Cornell, Berkeley, MIT, and Virginia following.  (Do note, however, that these are statistics just for business programs and not for undergraduate institutions as a whole, and that MBA feeder universities like Princeton and Harvard do not even have undergraduate b-schools).

This just in! Bloomberg BusinessWeek has just unveiled its new business school rankings for 2010. In a live chat, BusinessWeek editors Louis Lavelle and Geoff Gloeckler counted down the rankings of the top 30 MBA programs in the United States.

U.S. News and BusinessWeek vie for the title of most closely watched business schools rankings. While it’s debatable as to whether the BusinessWeek MBA ranking system or the U.S. News ranking system is more valid, the fact that BW’s rankings only come out every two years always makes this announcement a little extra exciting. To its credit, BusinessWeek does a good job of building up the drama with its online chat format for announcing their business school rankings.

Without further ado, here are the top 30 U.S. business schools:

Recently The Economist released the 2010 edition of its global business school rankings. As the editors of The Economist noted in their introduction to this year’s rankings, “Usually, schools move up or down just a few places year on year. This time around, however, swings have been wilder.”

Score one more point for Educational Testing Service (ETS) in its effort to take market share from the GMAT as the preferred test for business school admissions. On his Morse Code Blog, U.S. News Director of Data Research Robert Morse announced that this fall’s U.S. News survey will ask admissions offices detailed questions on GRE test scores and the number and the percentage Class of 2012 students who submitted them.

Last week U.S. News & Word Report released its annual business school rankings for 2011. As we wrote about the law school rankings the other day, it’s easy to get too caught up in the rankings and let the tail wag the proverbial dog in choosing which schools to apply to or attend. (Heck, we have one client right now who’s not sure he wants to attend Cornell — on a full ride! — because it “plunged” from 17 to 18 in the rankings this year! We pointed him to this post.)

People respond to incentives. Such is the main takeaway from the bestselling book Freakonomics (and its soon-to-premiere documentary and follow-up book SuperFreakonomics), and a major competitive advantage worth embracing as you plan your MBA applications. Admissions committees are people, too, and they respond to incentives. To become a better MBA applicant, you should better understand the incentive structure for MBA admissions committees, and give them what they want.

The Financial Times has just released its 2010 business school rankings, with London Business School remaining in the #1 spot. This comes after LBS and Wharton actually shared the #1 position in last year’s rankings.

While the U.S. News 2010 Business School Rankings won’t come out until later this week, online communities have been buzzing with the possibility that U.S. News accidentally leaked its rankings in a short online video. U.S. News released a short video giving an overview of grad school trends, and in the video you can see the magazines business school rankings. While the image was small, it only took hours for eagle-eyed MBA applicants to analyze the image and determine what the new rankings are.

(UPDATE: U.S. news released the official rankings on April 23, and the rankings below do indeed appear to be correct.)

The Financial Times has just released its 2009 business school rankings, with Wharton and London Business School sharing the top spot.

There were a couple of notable milestones in this year’s FT rankings. LBS reached the #1 slot for the first time, breaking Wharton and Harvard Business School’s joint stranglehold on the #1 slot. Also notable was that for the first time an Asian business school cracked the top ten — Shanghai-based China European International Business School (CEIBS) came in at #8. Joining CEIBS in the top twenty were two other schools from Asia: The Indian School of Business ranked at #15, and the Hong Kong UST Business School was ranked #16.

This just in! In an online chat, BusinessWeek has just revealed its 2008 business school rankings. Without further ado, here are the top 25 U.S. MBA programs for 2008:

1. Chicago (Booth)
2. Harvard Business School
3. Northwestern (Kellogg)
4. Penn (Wharton)
5. Michigan (Ross)
6. Stanford
7. Columbia
8. Duke (Fuqua)
9. MIT (Sloan)
10. UC Berkeley (Haas)
11. Cornell (Johnson)
12. Dartmouth (Tuck)
13. NYU (Stern)
14. UCLA (Anderson)
15. Indiana (Kelley)
16. Virginia (Darden)
17. UNC (Kenan-Flagler)
18. Southern Methodist (Cox)
19. Carnegie Mellon (Tepper)
20. Notre Dame(Mendoza)
21. UT Austin (McCombs)
22. BYU (Marriott)
23. Emory (Goizueta)
24. Yale
25. USC (Marshall)

Brian recently posted up a nice article comparing the NCAA Tournament Season to the MBA application season, with some very sound advice. I, however, am going to take the onset of March Madness in another direction.

Financial Times released its newest business school rankings the other day. While Wharton remains at the top, this year did have some big changes (such as Dartmouth & Yale dropping 6 places each, and MIT jumping 7 places). The Indian School of Business and Hong Kong UST Business School are newcomers to this year’s Top 20, and we bid a farewell this year to UCLA: Anderson, Northwestern University: Kellogg, and University of Michigan: Ross.

The Economist Business School rankings for 2007 have been released. The Economist rankings are determined by a combination of four factors: recent alumni, increase in salary/networking potential, new career opportunities, and personal development/educational opportunities. What’s really cool though is that they have an interactive list on their site (link below), which allows you to sort the schools by various categories and/or regions.

The Wall Street Journal released their business school rankings last night. The WSJ rankings are always interesting, because they are solely the result of recruiters’ opinions. Nevertheless, people like to see how schools rank, so here you go! I’ve listed only the top North American “National” schools, as these are the schools you are likely to see in the other rankings.

US News just released its business school rankings for next year, with little change from last year. Within the Top 20, there was some movement (most notably UCLA’s drop from 10 to 16), but there’s nothing absolutely unexpected in the list. It should be noted that because of the data used to compute these rankings, drastic changes aren’t extremely common. This does, however, attest to the consistency of school’s on the list.

Financial Times has released their 2007 Global MBA Rankings; based primarily on alumni successes, intellectual capital held by the program, and the international focus of the program. It’s interesting to see the different criteria used to judge international programs versus US business schools.

Traditionally, business school rankings hold a lot of clout, and schools push to be at the top of these lists. But for applicants, it can be hard to figure out truly what the differences are between the #1 and #2 schools. However, a new Princeton Review survey aims to help with this, by ranking schools in various categories. So while Harvard sits atop the “toughest to get into” list, it only hits #10 on the “best overall academic experience” list.