Duke law: 8th (+2)
Duke Fuqua: 13th (+1)
Duke Med: 8th
While rankings should only be a part of one’s decision factor, the improved Duke rankings shows the various Dean’s commitment to improving the quality of the respective schools. Great accomplishment for the Blue Devil family today!
http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-graduate-schools
That’s all good news. It’s interesting, however, that Bloomberg/BusinessWeek (generally considered a more-authoritative MBA program assessment than UNN&WR) current rates Duke/Fuqua as the world’s top full-time MBA program.
US News Rankings are pretty stagnant for top universities. it is not hard to notice that for the past few years, rise/fall in rankings for top universities has occurred mainly through the adding or removing of colleges to/from a tied n-th rank. I would wager that someone who last checked US News ranking five years back can predict the schools in the top 20 today with very high accuracy.
@TopTier “…however, that Bloomberg/BusinessWeek (generally considered a more-authoritative MBA program assessment than UNN&WR)”
You think they’re the authority? A lot of people consider USNWR the gold standard for undergraduate and graduate rankings and take it more seriously than BWeek.
But again, it’s good to see that a different methodology is used for Bweek than USNWR. It gives applicants different angles to judge business schools from. The rankings only matter to the extent that the factors they use to rank schools matter to applicants.
@eurdition: I would agree re US News (at least in terms of broad use/acceptance, if not precision) for UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS. However, this evaluation is for POSTGRADUATE/PROFESSIONALS SCHOOLS, not for Barchelor’s-level education.
@Jwest22: Anecdotally, I can tell you that most MBAs with whom I have discussed rankings (and they graduated from a wide variety of universities) almost-universally believe Bloomberg/BusinessWeek’s every two year ranking is THE most important assessment, although I suspect U S News’ is more well known outside the managerial community. What I especially favor in B/BW’s methodology is its customer-focus; it puts great weight on the appraisals of those who hire significant numbers of principally first-tier MBAs, rather than the more-traditional academics-rating-other academics approach. Yelp’s success is based on (for example) customers rating plumbers and restaurants, not self-anointment within the practitioner community.
You’re kidding, right?
I’m not trying to “badmouth” Fuqua as I do think it is one of the top 12 best business schools, but I don’t think it is fair and justified to say it is superior to 9 other business schools at the moment. At best, Fuqua is #10. It isn’t even worthy of a 9th place, quite honestly speaking.
@abadon (re post #5): Apparently, you missed a vital point in post #4. Bloomberg/BusinessWeek, not I, ranked Fuqua as #1. I’ll wager a smart person like you can ascertain how to send a letter to their editor expressing your disagreemennt.
Incidentally, I’m curious, just how much do you know about first-tier MBA programs and exactly what is the basis for your expertise?
@ababon
As Bill Boulding pointed on the Duke magazine, a smart person would look at a school’s ranking over a long time horizon and judge the quality rather than just looking at it’s current rankings.
And you’re obviously either trying to bad-mouth Fuqua or you just can’t comprehend the English language since TopTier never insinuated that he thinks Fuqua is the #1 business school.
@erudition Either “Erudite” or “Eruditio” was going to be my username when I first created this account but settled for my current username for other reasons 
TopTier, Nobody pays respect to BW’s MBA ranking. That’s what I was trying to say when you asserted that it is “generally considered a more-authoritative MBA program assessment than UNN&WR.”
If BW is more authoritative than USNews’ Ranking and Fuqua is the number 1 MBA program in the nation, how come Fuqua losses in the cross admit battles against Ross, and please do take note that Ross is NOT even considered in the same breadth and caliber as Booth and Kellogg, let alone Wharton, who even lag behind Harvard and Stanford. I have yet to meet an elite MBA aspirant who would rather attend Fuqua than Harvard or Stanford GSB.
Scorecard: Fuqua — 19% Ross — 44%
The largest sample size BW used to make its comparisons was 128 respondents who were admitted to both the University of Michigan’s Ross School and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. Despite Duke’s private status and its recent No. 1 ranking, Ross crushed Fuqua in the dual admit battle. Some 44% of the prospective students picked Ross, while 19% chose Fuqua. The remaining 37% went to other MBA programs not mentioned. It’s worth noting that Ross has been among the most aggressive public institutions with scholarship money in recent years.
“I’m not surprised that Ross would win a yield showdown situation, as the school has always impressed me with its ability to really spot ‘Ross students’ through the admissions process and target their admit letters to those candidates,” adds Hoff of Amerasia Consulting. “Whenever a school is a good partner in this game of match making, I feel like they usually come out well in the yield process. Michigan also has a massive alumni network that Ross students can tap into when looking for jobs, which is no small thing. I’ve always felt that Ross is the most underrated business school in the country, year in and year out, but given these numbers, maybe the word is getting out.”*
http://poetsandquants.com/2015/01/28/revealed-where-mba-dual-admits-go/4/
@ababon No one cares about cross admit battles (albeit statistical errors) between Ross and Fuqua.;
Duke as an overall University is still much more prestigious and much more desirable than the University of Michigan.
Now, let’s look at the stats:
GMAT:
732 - STanford
726 - Harvard
694 - Duke
GPA:
3.74 - Stanford
3.67 - Harvard
3.42 - Duke
ACCEPT RATE:
7.1% - Stanford
11% - Harvard
26.5%
PAY/SALARY OF GRADS:
$142,834 - Stanford
$144,750 - Harvard
$107,833 - Duke
PIER:
4.8 - Stanford
4.8 - Harvard
3.8 - Duke
RECRUITER:
4.6 - Stanford
4.6 - Harvard
3.8 - Duke
Clearly, Duke-Fuqua is NOT in the league of the best schools for MBA. It’s a good school nonetheless, but ceetainly not worthy of being number 1 nationwide.
We’re talking about MBA here, not undergrad. Even for law, I would argue that Michigan is more regarded than Duke, and plenty more people choosing Michigan Law than Duke Law. Deal with it as it is the reality now. For undergrad, Duke is more regarded than Michigan, in general. But for certain professional programs, Duke has a lot more work to do to get to the status and prestige level that it really wants.
@ababon:
You indicate that no one “respects BW’s MBA ranking” and you also provide all sorts of SCHOLASTICALLY ORIENTED statistics to support your conclusion. That’s just fine.
However, I respectfully suggest you’ve missed THE most essential point. The Bloomberg/BusinessWeek rating is primarily based on employers’ – in fact, the very employers who hire the most first-tier MBAs – opinions of the graduates from the various business schools. In the real world, that is an infinitely more-relevant and more-valid measurement of MBA programmatic efficacy than is cross-admits, or GPA, or GMAT, or – for that matter – anything else. MBA program exist only to provide top management and leadership talent – MBA entry level all the way to CEOs – to all sorts of enterprises; obviously, therefore, the “consumers’/customers’ satisfaction” with the universities’ product (MBAs of various ages and experience levels) is what REALLY counts.
To illustrate, your hypothesis reminds me of a baseball pundit who provides innumerable quantitative and subjective reasons why team X will win the World’s Series. The only trouble is, X – despite its theoretical prowess – simple does not win too many games. Conversely team Y, whose statistical measures are not quite as impressive, is the hands-down winner in the only place that counts: the scoreboard. Similarly, at least according to B/BW, Fuqua was the clear winner in the only place that really counts for MBAs: the enterprises (of all sorts) that hire and promote large numbers of them.
I sincerely recommend you read B/BW’s quite recent MBA ranking assessment: http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-11-11/best-business-schools-2014-duke-is-top-full-time-mba-harvard-slips. It will likely clarify why employers are so pleased with Fuqua graduates . . . and it will also will highlight B/BW’s customer/consumer-orientation, which seems incredibly sensible to me, whether the product is MBAs, or SUVs, HDTVs, laptops, tennis racquets, ground beef, or ANYTHING else.
^^^
According to Employer’s survey:
RECRUITER:
4.6 - Stanford
4.6 - Harvard
3.8 - Duke
As you can see that’s rather a huge discrepancy that separates between H/S and Duke-Fuqua, that’s why a lot of people questioned the BW ranking’s credibility, because in the real world, Fuqua couldn’t really compete with Harvard/Stanford/Wharton grads.
Another thing to consider here is the quality of the employers surveyed. Do you think Goldman Sachs, for instance, would rather hire someone form Fuqua than someone from H/S/W? I don’t think so.
Fuqua can claim that they can please the employers the most, but at the end of the day, H/S/W grads still dominate in the employment race, as the data would show that they are preferred by better employers/companies/firms and are receiving higher compensation rates. There’s no other better justification than those.
If we would make a survey amongst the top Duke undergrads and ask them to choose where they would rather end up getting an MBA degree after acquiring their undergrad degree, I’m pretty sure the survey results would be very biased towards H/S/W.
If you two (ababon and Jwest22 and anyone else that decides to join in) cannot disagree without personal insults, then this thread will be closed and sanctions will be involved.
@ababon - Those salary numbers don’t look right at all. I’m admittedly stealing here from @alexandre with the data below; but I’ll trust his data. Duke MBA grads would be in the same salary range as the other top schools.
Top MBA programs based on reputational ratings (average between peer and recruiter over 4.0):
^ Since the source I was looking at was incomplete, I plucked it out from this site – http://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/school/the-fuqua-school-of-business-duke-university
Granted, my figures were inaccurate, the data would still show that H/S/W’s figures are higher than that of Fuqua’s, which, again, would only tell us that there are MBA programs that are superior to Fuqua’s and BW ranking it number 1 is highly suspicious.
I ran some numbers for the Michigan forum that are relevant to this forum’s discussion. Those are derived from the US News latest rankings.
Top MBA programs based on reputational ratings (average between peer and recruiter over 4.0):
Top Law Schools based on reputational ratings (average between peer and lawyers/judges rating over 4.0)
Top Medical Schools based on reputational ratings (average between peer and residency directors rating over 4.0)