<p>that Northwestern moved up to 4th. He will party all day and night and probably get fired.</p>
<p>UChicago always gets screwed in the US News rankings. Most of the other rankings have it around the top 5 or so.</p>
<p>My school (Anderson) went from 12 to 11. Yay!</p>
<p>I can't believe that they ranked Haas ahead of Chicago and CBS.</p>
<p>USC fell from 18 in 2005 to 26 this year. Ouch.</p>
<p>Columbia got super screwed</p>
<p>I wish i could say the rankings mattered but they dont. At all. Its all about recruiting and networking. Business has a human element unlike the sciences. Its all about personality. It also depends whether the alumni base is very loyal to the school in which case schools like Umich etc do very well in. The loyalty also helps the small liberal arts schools Williams, Amherst etc.</p>
<p>Chicago, Columbia and Michigan were ranked lower than deserved. Chicago belongs in the top 5 and Columbia and Michigan would be ranked between #6 and #8. But at the end of the day, is there such a big difference between #5 and #8 or between #9 or #10 and #6-#8? In short, any of the top 15 or so programs are awesome, so whether a program is ranked #5 or #10 doesn't really make a big difference.</p>
<p>Rankings are, overall, useful to identify problems that schools have so that they can improve. While rankings are flawed indicators of problems, they are better than nothing. Let's face it. Without rankings, most business schools would not bother to ever improve on anything. </p>
<p>Speaking specifically about Michigan and Chicago, the fact is, they suffer in relation to most of the other elite B-schools when it comes to selectivity. The fact is, it is easier to get into Michigan or Chicago than it is to get into most of the other top flight places. Hence, I think that they should be dinged for that. As was stated above by mahras2, business-school is largely about networking, which means that you want to go to a school with as high quality of a student body as possible. The better the students are, the more valuable your networking will be. </p>
<p>Hence, what Chicago and Michigan should do in the future is raise their selectivity. That could mean any number of things. For example, it could mean simply reducing the number of available seats in next year's class. It could mean a bigger marketing push to get a larger pool of applicants. It could mean a more aggressive push to get those superstars students who do get admitted to actually come (as opposed to going elsewhere). </p>
<p>The upshot is that the rankings have identified a problem, and so now the B-schools can work on the problem to get better. I think we can all agree that if rankings didn't exist to identify problems, then those problems would never get fixed.</p>
<p>Sakky, I don't think selectivity should play a role in MBA rankings...or any rankings for that matter. Quality of student body, on the other hand, is important and should play a role, albeit a small one. All top 10 or so programs have students who graduated with a mean GPA between 3.35 and 3.5 (generally from top undergraduate institutions) and mean GMAT scores between 690 and 710. There really is not difference at that level. I think reputation, program culture and environment and connections to industry are most important.</p>
<p>Well, I think that this is just a play on words. To me, selectivity and student body quality are almost one and the same - it's difficult to have a high quality student body without strong selectivity. Possible, but difficult. Simply put, the higher quality of your student body (which tracks strongly with selectivity), the better your school will tend to be. </p>
<p>And I would disagree that there is no signifcant difference between say, a 3.5 and a 3.4 at the macro level, or a 710 and a 690 on the macro level. When we're comparing two individuals with such differences, I would agree that the difference is basically nil. But when we're talking about large groups of people who have differences in their average numbers, the differences become significant. It's all about macro-levels of consistency. </p>
<p>I agree that reputation, culture and industry connections are extremely important. But these traits are also affected by the quality of the student body (or selectivity or whatever you want to call it). The better a school's average student quality, the better reputation it will tend to have, the better connections it will tend to have, and the better culture it will tend to have. Obviously the connection is not absolute, but the trend is clear. After all, consider reputation. If a school is truly highly reputable, then the best students will inevitably want to go there, and will decline other schools to attend. Then when a school becomes known for producing the highest average quality graduates, the reputation of the school will be enhanced, creating a virtuous cycle. But you can't get that started if you continue to admit students who really aren't that good.</p>
<p>Sakky, I disagree with your assessment. A 3.4 and a 3.5 are identical...at the micro or macro level...so is a 690 and a 710. I agree there is a difference between a 3.3 and a 3.6 or between a 670 and a 720, but a 3.4 and a 3.5 are identical. As are a 690 and a 710. </p>
<p>As far as reputation and selectivity, they are unrelated. Dartmouth, Cal, UCLA and Yale are more selective than Chicago and Michigan, but they are not as reputable, at least, not according to the the polls.</p>
<p>I still maintain that Chicago, Columbia and Michigan were ranked a little lower (2-4 spots) than deserved.</p>
<p>And I have to maintain that I have to disagree. You may remember your statistics - the % of variation decreases with the number of samples. If we just have 2 samples (i.e. 2 individuals), one with a 3.4, and one with a 3.5, we may just be looking at random statistical noise. If we have 2 large groups of people, one with an average GPA of 3.4, and another with an average GPA of 3.5, then that is far less likely to be attributable to noise. It's like if I played one roulette table for one hour and won 51% of the time, that may just be due to randomness, and I can conclude nothing. But if I played over and over for an entire year at that same table, and won 51% of the time, I have strong reason to believe that the table is rigged in my favor. </p>
<p>And look, I said that reputation and selectivity were linked. I never said they were linked absolutely. In other words, the R-squared value is a positive number, but it is not equal to 1. You know and I know that if we were to plot reputation and selectivity of all B-schools, on a graph, we would see a positive correlation between the 2. </p>
<p>I agree with you that certain programs are not ranked where they probably should. But again, on the whole, USNews seems to be a more reliable ranking than BW and certainly more reliable than FT. For example, BW ranks Chicago as #2. I don't even think that diehard Chicago fanatics really believe that. BW ranks Cornell #7 - better than Columbia and MIT. I think that even diehard Cornell fans would find that hard to defend. BW ranks Harvard #5. I don't think too many people seriously believe that. </p>
<p>Or take FT. FT ranks Kellogg either #11 overall, or #9 in the US, and ranks MIT #13 overall and #10 in the US, and Michigan #16 overall or #12 in the US. FT would have you believe that Yale is better than Kellogg, MIT, and Michigan. I don't think too many people would agree with that. To be fair, at least this year's FT rankings are less strange than last year's FT rankings, which ranked Michigan #30 overall, which is one of the strangest things I have ever seen (almost as strange as the WSJ rankings). But this year's FT rankings are still strange. </p>
<p>Hence, I maintain that while all rankings have flaws, USNews does tend to map closest to what the consensus seems to be, and tends to be a more stable ranking as well (i.e. you don't get the wild swings like Stanford being #11 in one BW ranking and #4 in the next BW ranking, or Michigan swinging from #30 to #16 as it does in FT). Hey, if somebody wants to prove me wrong by actually doing the statistical analysis and find the 'relative error' of USNews, BW, and FT, as well as their time-variances, knock yourself out.</p>
<p>I agree that BW is not the absolute ranking. I definitely think the FT and the WSJ are the weakest ones. You and I disagree on the USNWR and BW, but they aren't that far apart anyway. The USNWR and BW are definitely the best two ratings. They each have their little inconsistencies. BW with Chicago, Wharton, Harvard and Cornell, USNWR with Cal, Columbia, Chicago and Michigan. I found the compiled historical rankings to be very accurate.</p>
<p>But we disagree on what determines quality. To me, grades and GMAT measure neither intelligence nor potential...not at the individual level nor as a collective. There are simply too many other variables, such as professional success and track record, personality traits, major etc... Like I said, there is an abvious difference between a 3.3 and a 3.6 or between a 670 and a 720. But minimal differences do not, in my opinion, make a difference.</p>
<p>Can anyone give us detailed rankings for the top 10 at least? Does anyone have an account or something? I remember that somebody posted something last year...</p>
<p>Here's the top 25 MBA programs according to the latest USNWR.</p>
<p>TOTAL SCORE (OUT OF 100): 100-96</p>
<h1>1 Harvard University $112,000 (Starting Salary)</h1>
<h1>2 Stanford University $110,000</h1>
<h1>2 University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) $105,000</h1>
<p>TOTAL SCORE (OUT OF 100): 95-91</p>
<h1>4 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan) $104,000</h1>
<h1>4 Northwestern University (Kellogg) $104,000</h1>
<p>TOTAL SCORE (OUT OF 100): 90-86</p>
<h1>6 Dartmouth College (Tuck) $106,000</h1>
<h1>6 University of California-Berkeley (Haas) $96,000</h1>
<h1>8 University of Chicago $101,000</h1>
<h1>9 Columbia University $102,000</h1>
<h1>10 University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (Ross) $100,000</h1>
<p>TOTAL SCORE (OUT OF 100): 85-81</p>
<h1>11 Duke University (Fuqua) $95,000</h1>
<h1>11 University of California-Los Angeles (Anderson) $96,000</h1>
<h1>13 New York University (Stern) $102,000</h1>
<p>TOTAL SCORE (OUT OF 100): 80-76</p>
<h1>14 University of Virginia (Darden) $95,000</h1>
<h1>15 Cornell University (Johnson) $99,000</h1>
<h1>15 Yale University $93,000</h1>
<h1>17 Carnegie Mellon University (Tepper) $91,000</h1>
<p>TOTAL SCORE (OUT OF 100): 75-71</p>
<h1>18 Emory University (Goizueta) $87,000</h1>
<h1>18 University of Texas-Austin (McCombs) $84,000</h1>
<h1>18 University of Washington $78,000</h1>
<p>TOTAL SCORE (OUT OF 100): 70-66</p>
<h1>21 Ohio State University-Columbus (Fisher) $80,000</h1>
<h1>21 University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (Kenan Flagler) $90,000</h1>
<h1>23 Purdue University-West Lafayette (Krannert) $84,000</h1>
<h1>23 University of Minnesota-Twin Cities (Carlson) $86,000</h1>
<h1>23 University of Rochester (Simon) $86,000</h1>
<p>They have the third highest income...</p>
<p>Besides that, Tuck owns Wall Street and especially Goldman Sachs...</p>
<p>Tuck owns GS? You better tell that to the boys at Wharton and HBS, because they don't seem to know. </p>
<p>Hey, where did Hank Paulson, CEO of GS, go for B-school? Hmmm, it seems that he went to HBS. Granted, he did go to Dartmouth for undergrad. But that was undergrad - it has nothing to do with Tuck.</p>
<p>Since when does one man decide an entire industry? I agree that HBS and Wharton are better schools than Tuck, but Paulson doesn't decide which one is better.</p>
<p>Anyways, US News is on something if they list Tuck's salary at $106,000. It is $91,000.</p>
<p>When did I say that one man decides an entire industry? I was specifically questioning the assertion put forth that Tuck 'especially owns' GS (his words, not mine). If if was truly that Tuck 'especially owns' GS (again, his words, not mine), that doesn't jive with the fact that Paulson is an HBS grad. </p>
<p>USNews lists total compensation numbers, not salary figures. That is why the discrepency exists.</p>