List of United States graduate business school rankings

[
thumb|right|Columbia Business School is ranked #1 in "The Financial Times" "ranking of rankings" for United States business schools.] List of United States business school rankings is a tabular listing of all business schools and their affiliated universities located in the United States that are included in one or more of the major public rankings of full-time Masters of Business Administration programs. This is not a comprehensive list of business schools in the United States. These rankings are a subset of college and university rankings. Business schools are university-level institutions generally affiliated with a university or college that produces students who attain business administration degrees. Most of the schools listed in the rankings below are accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. Some of the publications shown here have related rankings for undergraduate, part-time and executive curricula. There is currently some controversy among faculty and administrators in American Institutions of Higher Education regarding the request by the surveyors to have college presidents give their subjective opinion of other colleges because some of the methodologies are deemed misleading and a disservice. This has resulted in a movement surrounding the President's letter. [cite web|url=http://www.educationconservancy.org/presidents_letter.html|title=President's Letter|publisher=The Education Conservancy]

Marketing significance

Business school rankings are important to the various business schools because they are an important marketing tool used to recruit top students, and lure recruiters from the top companies. Business schools attempt to achieve higher rankings in order that they may obtain the top students who will over the course of their careers most likely benefit the school by achieving high ranking positions, attaining great influence, and accumulating great wealth. Such students often are able to help other students attain better (higher paying, more respected and more influential) jobs. Students use the rankings to choose their school, and creators of the rankings produce them to aid in this decision. [cite web|url=http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/usnews/edu/grad/rankings/about/faq_meth_brief.php#one|title=Frequently Asked Questions–Rankings|accessdate=2007-12-18|publisher=U.S.News & World Report. L.P.]

Rankings have such importance that business school deans cite improving rankings under significant accomplishments and are said to hire and fire over such successes. A typical quote explaining a rise in rankings can be found by looking at summaries such as "Recruiters believe Georgetown's new dean and career-services director have made speedy progress in producing more polished, marketable graduates." If a dean chooses the wrong strategy it is likely to show up in the results as well: "Recruiters criticized some of the Regional schools for lowering their standards and admitting less-qualified students when their applications plummeted a couple of years ago."

Ranking techniques

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caption1 = Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania - "The Financial Times"


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caption2 = The Stanford Graduate School of Business - "U.S. News & World Report"
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caption1 = Harvard Business School - "U.S. News & World Report"

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caption2 = University of Chicago Graduate School of Business - "BusinessWeek" and "The Economist"
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caption1 = BYU Marriott School of Management (regional)

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caption2 = Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College (national) and #1 by "Forbes"


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caption3 = MIT Sloan School of Management (international) The rankings are based on a variety of factors such as standardized test scores of students, salary of recent graduates, survey results of graduates and/or recruiters, number of top companies recruiting at the school and a variety of attributes.cite web|url=http://www.careerjournal.com/reports/bschool06/20060920-alsop-mblede.html|title=The Top Business Schools: Something Old, Something New|accessdate=2007-12-18|publisher=Dow Jones & Company, Inc.|date=2006-09-20|work=The Wall Street Journal Online |author=Alsop, Ronald] The ratings vary significantly by method used to determine the success of each program. The "Forbes" and "Financial Times" results are based on long-term graduate career progress concerns. The "BusinessWeek" and "Economist" polls evaluate short-term experiences of the students with their program. The "Wall Street Journal" and "U.S. News & World Report" consider the recent experiences of recruiters with the program.cite web|url=http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/3ed8a91e-ad5a-11db-8709-0000779e2340,dwp_uuid=991cbd66-9258-11da-977b-0000779e2340.html|title=How the rankings compare: A matter of judgment|accessdate=2007-12-25|date=2007-01-29|publisher=The Financial Times Ltd|author=Bradshaw, Della and Wai Kwen Chan]

The "U.S. News & World Report" uses a combination of the objective and subjective as well. The magazine seeks "expert opinion about program quality and statistical indicators that measure the quality of a school's faculty, research, and students." However, it ranks a broad spectrum of professional school programs such as business schools, law schools, and medical schools as well as a variety of programs specific academic disciplines such as the social sciences or humanities.cite web|url=http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/usnews/edu/grad/rankings/about/08method_brief.php|title=How We Do the Numbers|author=Morse, Robert J. and Samuel Flanigan|accessdate=2007-12-07|publisher=U.S.News & World Report. L.P.] The business opinion data incorporates responses from deans, program directors, and senior faculty about the academic quality of their programs as well as the opinions of professionals who actually do the hiring of the new MBA graduates from the schools. The statistical data combines measures of the qualities of the incoming students and as well as the faculty with measures of post graduate success as related to their degrees. There were 382 programs that responded out of 402 solicited, and the formula used a strict combination of quality assessment (40%), placement success (35%), and student selectivity (25%). [cite web|url=http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/usnews/edu/grad/rankings/about/08biz_meth_brief.php|title=Business Methodology|accessdate=2007-12-18|publisher=U.S.News & World Report. L.P.]

The "BusinessWeek" rankings, which are based on three sources of data (a student survey, a survey of corporate recruiters, and an intellectual capital rating), are published in mid-October of even numbered years.cite web|url=http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/apr2006/bs20060420_4380.htm#MBA1|title=MBA Rankings: Updated October 2006|accessdate=2007-12-18|publisher=The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc.|work=BusinessWeek.com] The 2006 student survey of 45 online questions of students' ratings of their programs was distributed to 16,595 students three weeks before graduation; there were 9,290 responses. The recruiter survey determines how many MBAs a recruiter's company hired in the previous two years and which schools it actively recruits from. 223 respondents participated out of 426 solicited. The intellectual capital is determined based on a formula incorporating academic publications in journals, books written, and faculty size.

The "Forbes magazine" methodology was to calculate a five year return on investment for 2002 graduates. "Forbes" surveyed 18,500 alumni of 102 MBA programs and used their pre-enrollment and post-graduate business school salary information as a basis for comparing post-MBA compensation with the cost of attending the programs. [cite web|url=http://www.forbes.com/2007/08/16/business-school-methodology-biz-07mba_cz_kb_0816bschoolmeth.html|title=Best Business Schools: Methodology|accessdate=2007-12-18|publisher=Forbes.com LLC|date=2007-08-16]

"Wall Street Journal"/Harris Interactive poll was the result of an online survey of 4,125 recruiters between December 132005 and March 162006, based on their experiences at schools where they had recently recruited. The survey was not based on academic quality although the survey was built upon 21 attributes including faculty and curriculum. However, the poll was based on attributes that would lend toward professional success such as interpersonal and communication skills, teamwork orientation, personal ethics and integrity, analytical and problem-solving abilities, and work ethic. The "Wall Street Journal" (WSJ) publishes three lists: a "national" ranking of U.S. business schools that are heavily recruited by national and multinational companies, an "international" ranking of European, North American, and Central American schools visited by recruiters for companies seeking employees for jobs outside the United States, and a "regional" ranking of schools not included on the national list that draw many of their recruiters from within their U.S. geographic region.

The Economist Intelligence Unit, the business information arm of the Economist Group, gathered results from two internet questionnaires, one of business schools and one of their students and recent graduates, and used them to rate business schools located all over the world. Information provided by the schools made up 80% of the ranking, with student and alumni responses accounting for only 20%. Factors in the evaluation included faculty:student ratio, GMAT scores of incoming students, student body diversity, foreign languages offered, percentage of graduates finding jobs within three months after graduation, percentage of graduates finding jobs through the school's career service, graduates' salaries and the comparison of pre-enrollment and post-graduation salaries, and student/alumni evaluations of the program, facilities, services, and alumni network. Results were tabulated using a smoothing method incorporating the three previous years' results. The organization used strict data provision thresholds, with the result that some highly regarded schools were omitted from the list of 100 ranked schools. [cite web|url=http://mba.eiu.com/site_info.asp?info_name=wmba_rank_method|title=Rankings methodology|accessdate=2007-12-19|publisher=The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited]

The "Financial Times" poll was the result of over 10,000 respondents to nearly 23000 electronic questionnaires of alumni from 155 qualifying business schools. The survey began in July 2006 and all internationally accredited programs that are at least five years old and that have produced at least 30 graduates in each of the last three years were solicited. 113 of the 155 had at least 20 respondents and at least a 20 percent response rate. The questionnaire used twenty criteria in three main areas. The poll actually presents all twenty criteria to the reader. Eight criteria are based on alumni responses; eleven criteria are based on business school responses, and the final criteria is based on a research index produced by the "Financial Times". [cite web|url=http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/39626150-ad5a-11db-8709-0000779e2340,dwp_uuid=991cbd66-9258-11da-977b-0000779e2340.html|title=How to read the rankings: How the raw data are processed|accessdate=2007-12-25|date=2007-01-29|publisher=The Financial Times Ltd|author=Milton, Ursula] The survey responses are audited by KPMG. [cite web|url=http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/2ea93d06-ad5a-11db-8709-0000779e2340,dwp_uuid=991cbd66-9258-11da-977b-0000779e2340.html|title=Auditing: Aim for accuracy|accessdate=2007-12-25|date=2007-01-29|publisher=The Financial Times Ltd|author=Bradshaw, Della]

The "Financial Times" has also produced a "ranking of rankings" summarizing five of the individual rankings ("The Economist", "BusinessWeek", "Wall Street Journal", "Forbes", "Financial Times"). They produce United States, and European summary rankings based on all five and a global summary ranking using the "Wall Street Journal", "Economist" and "Financial Times". The summary is based on underlying polls in which a school placed in the top ten using an average of the ordinal placements. The summary excludes the "U.S. News & World Report" results.

Criticism

The ranking of business schools has been discussed in articles and on academic Web sites. [cite web | title = Caution and Controversy | publisher = University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | date = 2007-06-22 | url = http://www.library.uiuc.edu/edx/rankoversy.htm | format = HTML | accessdate = 2008-01-27 The article contains an extensive bibliography of critical sources.] Critics of ranking methodologies maintain that any published rankings should be viewed with caution for the following reasons:cite journal | last = Schatz | first = Martin | title = What's Wrong with MBA Ranking Surveys? | journal = Management Research News | volume = 16 | issue = 7 | pages = 15–18 | date = 1993 | url = http://officialmbaguide.org/whatswrong.php | format = HTML | doi = 10.1108/eb028322 ]
*Rankings may limit the population size to a small number of schools, ignoring many with excellent offerings.
*The ranking methods may be subject to biases and statistically flawed methodologies (especially for methods relying on subjective interviews of hiring managers).
*The same list of well-known schools appears in each ranking with some variation in ranks, so a school ranked as number 1 in one list may be number 3 in another list.
*Rankings tend to concentrate on the school itself, but some schools offer programs of different qualities (e.g. a school may use highly reputable faculty to teach a daytime program, and use adjunct faculty in its evening program).
*A high rank in a national publication tends to become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In the specific case of MBA programs, one study found that objectively ranking MBA programs by a combination of graduates' starting salaries and average student GMAT score can reasonably duplicate the top 20 list of the national publications.

Rankings

Below all schools that ranked on any of the lists below are ordered alphabetically by the name of the associated university or parent institution and presented with their numerical rankings in the respective lists. The following abbreviations are used in the column headings: USN - U.S. News & World Report, BW - Business Week, WSJ - Wall Street Journal, Ec - The Economistand FT - Financial Times.

*A N.B: All rankings are based on only United States business schools even if the full list has international schools included in the rankings.

References

ee also

* [http://bwnt.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/undergrad_bschool/ U.S. undergraduate business school rankings]