Best Business Schools?

Miami Univ in OH, Babson and Bentley, both near Boston

Definitely check out Indiana (Kelley). It’s consistently ranked as a Top 10 business school in the country, and you could get some nice merit aid with Direct Admission into the Kelley School of Business depending on your stats.

Berkeley Haas is a real gem, but you can’t apply directly. You need to apply to Cal, then apply separately to Haas as a sophomore and only a fraction get in.

rickle, while Ann Arbor is obviously located in the Midwest, it has a very global vibe. That’s because residents of Ann Arbor come from all over the place, and the student body is fairly geographically diverse as well. Of the 28,000 undergraduate students, 4,500 come from the East Coast, another 2,000 come from the West Coast and Southwest and 2,000 come from overseas. When one third of your students come from outside your own region, you are bound to have a very eclectic campus culture.

I’m sure that’s true and Michigan is awesome. Not the vibe I was referring to. I meant he likes the vibe of living on the east coast, surrounding areas, topography (mountains, ocean, forests, lakes all reasonably close to good size cities)

This is exactly the point of creating a criteria. There are great schools all over the place. That being the case, he wanted a great school on the EAST COAST. Didn’t consider Michigan or Chicago or Northwestern or IU, etc. because he would rather consider Duke, Georgetown, UNC, WIlliam & Mary, Wake Forest, BC, Harvard, etc.

He got very specific by size, suburban, great academic program in general and in his area specifically, residential and undergraduate focused, exciting D1 sports, major employment base in his major available for internships and on campus recruiting, etc. You can get very specific. The cool thing is there are so many good schools, you can generally find several options that meet your criteria. It didn’t matter that some areas in the midwest were as close (physically) to FL. They’re not as close per the criteria.

^^^That makes sense. I was trying to figure out “the vibe” where Boston and Winston-Salem are similar.

“Do you mind elaborating on this? I thought that conventional wisdom on CC is don’t even think about applying to Michigan OOS unless you are prepared to pay through the nose. Is Michigan a good bet for those with calculated need but a poor choice for “donut hole” OOS-era.”

Now I remember this comment from a discussion in the parents forum here on CC:

Pertaining to Michigan:

“Most impressive was the meeting we had with financial aid. They actively encouraged OOS applicants and said that they were now just about able to meet the full need of all OOS students who demonstrated need. What a change from other universities. Alas, UM is now one of the most competitive universities but it still was a wonderful experience.”

The OP never said he wanted East Coast. One of the other posters said that. OP is more open currently.

@swamatl You really should think through type of area…city versus college town versus suburban versus rural. You will find it definitely makes a difference. With my son, we went and visited each type of setting…walked around campus (no official tour) and then spent time in the town itself. He quickly realized that he wanted a city but could do a big, busy college town (e.g., Ann Arbor). He grew up being able to walk to things and didn’t like the idea of being trapped on a campus with nothing around it.

Also, I would say to you that you should think about where you want to end up post college. Even for the top schools recruiting tends to be somewhat regional. The investment banks and consulting firms will go to select schools regardless of geography. Beyond that it gets somewhat regional meaning it will take more effort on your part to get employment in a distant area.

Best of luck!

swamati, all the business programs you mentioned in your OP are good to great. Obviously, the University of Pennsylvania (Wharton), UC-Berkeley (Haas), NYU (Stern), Georgetown (McDonough) and USC (Marshall) are the best, but the others are definitely good too.

There are other excellent business schools on par with Haas and Stern that you may want to look at:

Carnegie Mellon University (Tepper)
Cornell University (Johnson/Dyson)
Emory University (Goizueta)
Indiana University-Bloomington (Kelley)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan)
Ohio State University (Fisher)
University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (Ross)
University of Minnesota-Twin Cities (Carlson)
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (Kenan-Flagler)
University of Notre Dame (Mendoza)
University of Texas-Austin (McCombs)
University of Virginia (McIntire)
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Washington University-St Louis (Olin)

Northwestern University does not have an undergraduate business program, but Kellogg, its top 5 MBA program, offers two excellent, one-year certificate programs that are also worth looking into.