Wharton Takes Over Top Spot on New U.S. News MBA Ranking
Harvard loses its crown, Wharton ranks first, and Purdue stumbles in new U.S. News & World Report “Best Business Schools” ranking.
The annual U.S. News & World Report Best Business Schools ranking, largely regarded as the most prominent MBA ranking system in the United States, debuted its newest annual listing, with The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School taking the top mantle.
The Philadelphia metro business school ascends past Harvard Business School and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business—both tying for first last year. Both schools took a minor tumble to the third overall spot, sitting in a three-way tie with the MIT Sloan School of Management. Stanford’s Graduate School of Business lept into the second overall spot, which comes just a few months after the Silicon Valley school maintained its status as the best in the world according to the Financial Times.
U.S. News & World Report Top 10 Business Schools
| School | This Year's Ranking | Last Year's Ranking |
|---|---|---|
| Wharton (University of Pennsylvania) | 1 | 3 |
| Stanford Graduate School of Business | 2 | 4 |
| Harvard Business School | 3 (tie) | 1 (tie) |
| Booth (University of Chicago) | 3 (tie) | 1 (tie) |
| Sloan (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) | 3 (tie) | 5 |
| Columbia Business School | 6 (tie) | 9 |
| Kellogg (Northwestern University) | 6 (tie) | 6 |
| Haas (UC Berkeley) | 6 (tie) | 7 (tie) |
| Yale School of Management | 9 | 11 (tie) |
| Fuqua (Duke University) | 10 | 11 (tie) |
Within the top 50 business schools, this year’s ranking largely resembles last year’s. In fact, only three business schools—the University of Pittsburgh Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business, the Iowa State University Ivy College of Business, and the The Manderson Graduate School of Business at the University of Alabama—moved into the top 50 since last year. The three business schools to fall out of the top 50 were Rutgers Business School, the Haslam College of Business at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business. All three moved down the ranking by at least 10 spots each.
U.S. News Ranking Rising Business Schools
No school saw a better year-end turnaround than the aforementioned Iowa State University Ivy College of Business. The Midwest business school moves from the 79th spot last year to 47th this year; a 32-spot increase. On the news of the new ranking, Dean David Spalding says in a press release, “This significant rise in the ranking is a direct result of the quality work our faculty do every day in the classroom. At a time when some universities are dropping their full-time MBA programs, the Ivy MBA continues to excel. Our internationally known faculty provide a top-notch MBA experience that helps our MBA graduates advance their careers to the next level.”
Iowa State University’s Ivy College of Business earns the biggest ranking bump from U.S. News this year, moving up 32 spots from last year.
Ten schools in the top 100 saw double-digit rankings jumps, with Iowa State accruing the greatest increase. The University of Kentucky Gatton College of Business and Economics, the Oklahoma State University Spears School of Business, and the Babson College F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business all saw a rise of at least 20 spots this year as well.
Purdue, Case Western Stumble
On the opposite end of this year’s ranking is Purdue University’s Krannert School of Management, falling a total of 21 spots from 53rd last year to 74th this year. The University of Kansas School of Business and the Saunders College of Business at RIT join Krannert as this year’s three biggest falling schools, each dropping at least 20 spots respectively. Like most of the annual U.S. News rankings, the placement fluctuation is much more apparent the further and further down the list you go, with schools in the top 50 largely remaining stable.
U.S. News 2020 Ranking Methodology
To formulate its ranking, U.S. News & World Report analyzed “475 MBA programs accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business International.” A total of 367 schools responded to its surveys, but only 131 schools made the final ranking “because they provided enough of the required data on their full-time MBA program that were needed to calculate the full-time MBA rankings, based on a weighted average of the indicators.” Those indicators, with the weighted values, are as follows:
Quality Assessment (0.40)
• Peer assessment score (0.25)
• Recruiter assessment score (0.15)
Placement Success (0.35)
• Mean starting salary and bonus (0.14)
• Employment rates for full-time MBA program graduates
Student Selectivity (0.25)
• Mean GMAT and GRE scores (0.1625)
• Mean undergraduate GPA (0.075)
• Acceptance rate (0.0125)
Did The Methodology Changes Affect This Year’s U.S. News Ranking?
Last September, calls for changes in the MBA ranking methodology seemed to be answered by several large publications, including U.S. News. The company’s Chief Data Strategist, Robert Morse, noted, “There is an active and ongoing debate about how to best measure quality in education, and we pay close attention to that debate. Over time, our ranking model has put more emphasis on outcomes measures … As part of this evolving process, we’ve wanted to measure whether schools were successful at serving all of their students, regardless of economic status.”
The overarching issue seemed to lie within a framework that continually rewarded students and business schools that actively enrolled more and more students from affluent families. In response, U.S. News decreased its ranking value of acceptance rates, which previously rewarded schools that were more selective. Now, as seen above, the weighted value of acceptance rates is less than 1 percent.
However, the changes in the formula did not seem to bare much tenable change in the outcomes. The top 50 schools were largely unchanged, with only minor variances. Several schools, such as Iowa State and Oklahoma State were handsomely rewarded in the new ranking, moving up at least 20 spots each. However, schools rising and falling by 10, 20, even 30 spots in a given year isn’t a new occurrence. In fact, last year, nine schools in the top 100 rose at least 10 rankings from the previous year.
Stay tuned to MetroMBA for more information and analysis of this year’s MBA rankings.
Stanford GSB Tops Remodeled Bloomberg Businessweek Ranking
The Stanford Graduate School of Business is no stranger to a top spot, but this is their first time claiming top honors on the Bloomberg Businessweek Best B-School list for U.S. programs.
Berkeley Welcomes Record Number of MBAs in for Class of 2020
Last week, UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business unveiled stats for the incoming students that comprise its full-time MBA Class of 2020.
With 291 full-time MBA students (along with 276 evening and weekend students), the Berkeley Class of 2020 is larger than any before.
The new class one of the most academically accomplished in school history. Average GPA for this year’s first-year class is 3.66, off just .05 from last year’s. But an increase in average GMAT offset the tiny backslide in GPA. At 726, it moved up one point higher than last year’s incoming class.
In terms of professional experience, Haas students come from various backgrounds. About a quarter of the students come from the consulting industry, and another 20 percent come from banking/financial services backgrounds. The industries drawing the third-, fourth-, and fifth-most Haas grads are high tech (10 percent), nonprofit (9 percent), and healthcare/pharmaceutical/bio (7 percent). In addition, 5 percent of the incoming class has military experience.
The percentage of women in Haas’s incoming class is also up over the previous year, something we’ve also seen this year at Northwestern’s Kellogg School, Duke’s Fuqua School, and USC Marshall, among others.
About 43 percent of the incoming Berkeley Class of full-time MBAs are women—a 3 percent increase. International students from 30 countries make up around 34 percent of the class, down from 39 percent last year. Here, too, Haas is not alone. Many U.S. schools have shared, in both in published class profiles and informal conversations, that international application volume was down, or at best, flat year over year.
Former Haas Dean Richard Lyons stepped down in June after 11 years with the school, a role in which he raised more money than any prior dean and oversaw the construction of Connie & Kevin Chou Hall. The addition of the new building helped make it possible to expand the Haas class, an effort Lyons championed. He and other supporters viewed it as a way to help ensure that Haas has enough graduates to command attention from the world’s top recruiters without compromising the intimacy and culture.
“Part of the reputation of the school is a function of its scale, and there are times where you are just not at the right reputational scale. You’re too small,” he explained in a 2017 interview with Clear Admit.
“It’s a super intimate experience—there’s no question about that—but target companies want to go to a place where there are enough people graduating that they can send a team of recruiters, for example. If you are too small you are below the threshold.”
Ann Harrison, a renowned economist and member of the faculty at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, will serve as Haas’s next dean. Harrison begins her term on January 1, 2019. Professor Laura Tyson, the current interim dean since Lyons left, returns to her prior faculty positions next year.
This article has been edited and republished with permissions from Clear Admit.
The Best Business Schools for Landing Top Consulting Jobs
Clear Admit recently explored which business schools help prepare MBAs the most for a career in consulting, which you can read below.
With starting salaries in the $140,000 to $150,000 range and a customary $25,000 signing bonus on top of that, it’s no wonder so many business school students target the prestige consulting firms known as the “MBB”—McKinsey & Company, Boston Consulting Group (BCG), and Bain & Company—as their post-MBA landing pads. That $170,000+ annual compensation package can quickly cut any MBA loan debt you may have taken on down to size.
Indeed, management consulting has been one of the most coveted career paths for fresh MBA grads for ages. And though the technology industry has in recent years been stealing some grads from the consulting industry’s traditional slice of the pie, the most recent MBA employment reports reveal that consulting is already making a comeback against tech at certain schools.
The opportunity to work with a range of clients comprised of many of the world’s most celebrated businesses across industries—tech included—is part of the appeal of consulting. In many ways, a top consulting gig allows MBA grads to continue their management education while getting paid for it—and further honing their skills and expertise by helping solve a wide variety of business challenges. And, not for nothing, breaking into the MBB is a highly competitive pursuit—one that almost assures that your colleagues will be smart, driven people you’ll get a lot out of working with.
Finally, where the top consulting firms are choosing to find their talent reflects on the quality of the education those schools’ students are getting. In many ways, the hiring practices of the MBB can serve as a gold star standard of sorts for MBA programs.
Elite Firms Hire Grads from Elite Business Schools
The crème de la crème of leading business school talent has headed toward the top consulting firms for decades—and performed well there—creating a virtuous circle of sorts in which the firms’ appetite for such talent only grows. And while this piece focuses on MBB, we should note that a host of other consulting firms—Deloitte, A.T. Kearney, Accenture, Strategy&, and Oliver Wyman among others—are also highly prized post-MBA destinations.
If you are looking to see which business schools send the greatest percentage of their graduates into consulting overall, don’t miss our September 2017 analysis of leading consulting industry feeder schools. Which schools top the list? And what stands out about how these schools successfully train students for careers in consulting?
Looking at Class of 2016 graduates, the University of Virginia’s Darden School led the pack, with 38 percent of its graduates heading into consulting. Columbia Business School was next, sending 35 percent, followed closely by Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, which sent 33 percent.
The 2017 employment reports, which have been released since our analysis last fall, show some shifts year over year. Darden tied with Emory’s Goizueta School of Business in terms of the percentage of Class of 2017 grads who headed into consulting, with each school sending 34 percent. Close on their heels were Columbia, Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, and Dartmouth’s Tuck School. All four sent 33 percent of their most recent graduating class off to consulting firms.
2 Non-U.S. Schools Lead All Others in Consulting-Bound ’17 MBA Grads
But year after year, one thing remains the same. INSEAD, with campuses in France, Singapore, and Abu Dhabi, beats all leading U.S. business schools when it comes to consulting. INSEAD’s 2016 MBA employment report, detailing employment outcomes for December 2015 and July 2016 INSEAD grads, shows that 46 percent went into consulting. And the most recent figures reveal that almost a full half—49 percent—of the 1,029 students who completed the INSEAD MBA program in December 2016 and July 2017 chose to either enter or return to the consulting field.
We should note here that INSEAD is distinct from many other schools in that it includes sponsored students who are returning to their pre-MBA employers among its hiring stats. This is in contrast to many U.S. schools, where the reported number and percentage of students hired by sector and employer corresponds to those students actively seeking employment, excluding sponsored students. Of the 49 percent of INSEAD 2017 grads headed into consulting, 33 percent were new hires and the remaining 16 percent were returnees.
London Business School (LBS) was the runner-up for the Class of 2017, sending 41 percent of grads into consulting. This was a 6 percentage-point gain over the school’s previous class of MBA graduates. Like INSEAD, LBS’s reported sector designation and top employer information includes sponsored students, only its employment report does not disclose what percentage of the class those returning students represent.
Harvard Business School Tops Bloomberg Businessweek Ranking
For the third straight year, Harvard Business School reigned supreme in the annual Bloomberg Businessweek “Best Business Schools” ranking, topping the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and MIT Sloan School of Management. In joining HBS on the medals podium this year, those schools both saw significant gains over last year, climbing from sixth and seventh respectively.
Rounding out the top five this year is the University of Chicago Booth School of Business —holding steady year over year at fourth—and Stanford Graduate School of Business, which fell from second place in 2016 to fifth this year.
The methodology Bloomberg Businessweek uses to arrive at its annual MBA ranking involves weighting each of five principle factors. Employer surveys account for 35 percent of a school’s score. Alumni surveys account for another 30 percent. And a combination of current student surveys, salary rankings, and job placement together account for the remaining 35 percent of the final score.
High Risers
Ten out of the top 20 ranked schools in the 2017 Bloomberg Businessweek ranking advanced at least one spot over last year. Wharton and Sloan each managed to leap four spots, boosted by high praise from employers and hefty salary benefits for recent graduates. The University of Washington Foster School of Business also managed to jump from 19th to 15th overall this year, thanks largely to its top ranking as the nation’s best business school for job placement.
The Cornell S.C. Johnson Graduate School of Management and the UCLA Anderson School of Management both saw a rankings jump of three spots, with Johnson moving up to 13th and Anderson coming in at 19th.
The year’s biggest winner, however, may be the Penn State Smeal College of Business, which jumped a whopping 12 spots from last year’s 37th to come in at 25th in 2017. It wins the award for the year’s biggest overall rankings increase. The USC Marshall School of Business also saw a momentous climb this year, sidling up eight spots from 38th last year to 30th this year.
In the latter half of the rankings came another one of this year’s biggest risers, with the Terry College of Business at the University of Georgia jumping 11 spots from last year, up from 65th overall to 54th. Elsewhere, the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah, the Whitman School of Management at Syracuse University, the C.T. Bauer College of Business at the University of Houston, and the Pepperdine University Graziadio School of Business and Management all saw a jump of at least seven spots in the new ranking.
Once Mighty, Now Fallen
Stanford GSB, Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, and Jones School of Business at Rice University may all be feeling a wee bit dizzy. Last year Stanford shot up to second from seventh the year before, but this year it finds itself demoted to fifth. Duke’s Fuqua School, which last year celebrated a momentous jump from eighth to third, this year fell back down to seventh. Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, which had one of last year’s biggest gains, rocketing up nine spots to break into the top five from a mere 14th place finish the year before, this year finds itself at seventh. Similarly, Rice Business, as the Jones School likes to be called, which last year catapulted 11 spots to number eight, this year slipped to tenth. But at least all maintained their footing within the top 10.
Emory’s Goizueta Business School and the Texas A&M Mays Business School, for their part, slipped out of the top 20 altogether. Goizueta slipped just slightly, from 20th to 21st, and Mays slid from 18th to 22nd. The University of Virginia Darden School of Business also stumbled, slipping from 12th last year to 17th this year. But the Charlottesville school at least managed to remain in the top 20, thanks in part to strong scores in the student survey and salary categories.
No school, however, lost more ground than the George Washington University School of Business, which fell an eye-popping 14 spots from last year, losing its place among the top 50 business schools in the United States.
Bloomberg BW has made multiple changes to its methodology in recent years, resulting in significant volatility in terms of where schools fall on the list even when not much has changed year over year at the individual schools themselves. This has led many to question the credibility of the ranking overall. That said, Clear Admit’s Alex Brown found this year’s results easier to swallow than some in recent years. “This ranking seems more reasonable to me this year,” he says. “Each of the M7 programs are in the top 10, and the schools I would consider in the top 16 are all in the top 20.”
You can view the complete 2017 Bloomberg Businessweek rankings here.
