Bloomberg Businessweek Releases MBA Rankings

Harvard Business School has held onto its first-place spot in Bloomberg Businessweek’s ranking of MBA programs in the United States. Meanwhile, Wharton and Sloan are ascendant, taking over second and third place respectively.

Here are Bloomberg’s top ten:

– Harvard Business School
– The Wharton School
– Sloan School of Management
– Booth School of Business
– Stanford Graduate School of Business
– Fuqua School of Business
– Tuck School of Business
– Kellogg School of Management
– Columbia Business School
– Jones Graduate School of Business

Both HBS and Booth are unchanged in their rankings from last year, but there was some shuffling around of the schools immediately above and below them. In particular, Stanford and Fuqua dropped three places each, making room for Wharton and Sloan to each rise by four.

Bloomberg’s rankings are designed to gauge how business schools prepare students for the job market. With this emphasis in mind, the most important factor is an employer survey that asks recruiters from companies that hire MBA graduates how they regard students from different programs.

The employer survey determines 35 percent of a school’s overall score. Next most important, worth 30 percent, is a survey of alums’ salary increases, job satisfaction and MBA program experiences. This year, the alums surveyed were from the classes of 2008 to 2010.

An additional 15 percent of a given program’s rank comes from a survey of recent grads, 10 percent from how the program’s graduates rank in salary (relative to their region of the country), and 10 percent from the program’s job placement rate.

 

For example, HBS was propelled to its first-place finish by high rankings in the employer survey (number 1 out of 85 schools), in salary (2), and in the alum survey (3). More modest rankings of 18 on the student survey and 35 in job placement weren’t enough to tarnish these stellar numbers.

Meanwhile, Wharton stood out by performing reasonably strong on all five measures, even though it didn’t have first-place credentials on any one factor. Its highest score was for salary rank (3) and its lowest was on the student survey (17).

Fifth-place Stanford, on the other hand, had a larger gap between its highest and lowest scores. Although the school came in first in both salary rank and alumni survey rank, it was weighed down by a job placement rank of 62 and an employer survey rank of 20.

Taken together with other rankings, then, the Bloomberg ranking can tell you how different MBA programs prepare students for the job market – and what areas in particular those schools excel in.

Of course, one you know what the best B-schools are, the next logical question is: how do you get admitted to them? That’s where we come in. We can tell you how your profile stacks up at different schools and help you create a winning strategy – get started by asking us for a free assessment!