BUSINESSWEEK 2019 MBA PROGRAM RANKINGS RELEASED TODAY 11/4/19

Graduate School Business School - MBA
1

Businessweek released its annual ranking on MBA programs today 11/4/19.

Lists top 94 programs.

Dartmouth-Tuck jumped from #19 last year to #2 this year. Dartmouth-Tuck experienced a severe decline in applications last cycle resulting in an admit rate of 34.5%. Hard to understand this dramatic move.

  1. Stanford-GSB

  2. Dartmouth-Tuck

  3. Harvard

  4. Chicago-Booth

  5. Virginia-Darden

  6. UPenn-Wharton

  7. MIT-Sloan

  8. UCal-Berkeley (Haas)

  9. Columbia

  10. Northwestern-Kellogg

  11. Cornell-Johnson

  12. UCLA-Anderson

  13. NYU-Stern

  14. Yale SOM

  15. Carnegie Mellon Univ.-Tepper

  16. Univ. of Washington-Foster

  17. Michigan-Ross

  18. Univ. of North Carolina-Keenan-Flagler

  19. Georgetown-McDonough

  20. Duke-Fuqua

  21. Texas-Austin

  22. USC-Marshall

  23. Emory-Goizueta

  24. Georgia Tech

  25. Indiana-Kelley

2

Bloomberg Businessweek 2019 MBA Program rankings continued:

  1. Maryland

  2. BYU-Marriott

  3. Notre Dame-Mendoza

  4. Univ. of Rochester-Simon

  5. Vanderbilt-Owen

  6. Rice-Jones

  7. Univ. of Florida-Hough

  8. Penn State-Smeal

  9. College of Wm. & Mary

  10. Minnesota-Carlson

  11. Univ. of Texas at Dallas-Jindal

  12. Wisconsin

  13. WashUStL-Olin

  14. Michigan State-Broad

  15. TCU

  16. Ohio State-Fisher

  17. SMU-Cox

  18. UC-Davis

  19. Univ. of Georgia-Terry

  20. Howard University

  21. UC-Irvine

  22. North Carolina State

  23. ASU-Carey

  24. Boston College-Carroll

  25. Boston University-Questrom

Businessweek uses employment & pay data along with surveys to students, alumni & recruiters when compiling the ratings & rankings. Focuses on compensation, networking, learning & entrepreneurship.

3

The most elite MBA programs are referred to as the M-7 group (Harvard, Stanford, Penn-Wharton, Northwestern-Kellogg, Chicago-Booth, MIT-Sloan & Columbia).

UCal-Berkeley is an outstanding program as well–as are Michigan-Ross, Virginia-Darden, NYU-Stern (especially for finance), and a few others.

Unless determined to switch industries, the most important factor, arguably, when considering MBA programs is cost of attendance (COA).

Tuition, fees, books, room& board exceeds $200,000 at about a dozen elite MBA programs (about $230,000 at the priciest school = Stanford). Add in opportunity cost of lost earnings for almost two full years and the COA can exceed $450,000 for an elite, fulltime MBA program.

In my opinion, the soaring cost of earning a brand name MBA should encourage those eyeing a career in the business world to major in business at the undergraduate level which minimizes or eliminates the need for earning an MBA in favor of a one year specialty masters degree.

Nevertheless, recently minted MBAs from elite programs are averaging well over $150,000 in first year salary & signing bonus (usually about $25,000).

4

The MBA programs in the Top 10 look fine, just the order seems a bit odd.

However, Businessweek was the original MBA guide, so they should know better than to allow data to move a program 17 spots in either direction from one survey to the next, especially #19 to #2. It would be more realistic if it was 17 spots starting from #650.

How can Tuck’s score rise from 44.3 in Learning to 92.3 in Learning in one short year?

What did Tuck do, fire the entire faculty and start all over a year ago?

This is precisely why I disregard the Forbes undergrad best colleges survey. While the idea to drop student inputs and score only outputs from the university sounded great in theory, Forbes’ wild swings even at the very top every year make it a meaningless survey to follow Enter college at #1 and graduate from the same college at #20. Reality cannot move that fast. USNWR does a much better job at not allowing individual inputs to skew the entire survey from year to year.