Top 5 undergrad business schools

[behappy7]

<p>Bloomberg Businessweek has just come out with their 2011 ranking of undergrad business schools.
1. Notre Dame
2. UVa
3. Emory
4. Wharton
5. Cornell</p>

[kellybkk]

<p>Other than if one were focused on Accounting and going into an accounting firm directly after college, I wonder why bother with an undergrad business degree – if you want to go into business, clearly an MBA is the far preferable credential, and why spend useless time in MBA classes covering stuff you already did as an undergrad in undergrad b-school?</p>

[rjkofnovi]

<p>I prefer this list of the top 5 undergraduate business schools. </p>

<p>[Best</a> Undergraduate Business Programs | Rankings | US News](<a href=“http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/business-overall]Best”>http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/business-overall)</p>

<p>top five:</p>

<p>Wharton
MIT
Berkeley
Michigan
NYU</p>

[jgraider]

<p>Wow Wharton is the only one in the top 5 of both, that shows how subjective these lists are.</p>

[behappy7]

<p>Agree jgraider, college rankings are highly subjective. The US News rankings are no better [often worse!] than others</p>

[ricegal]

<p>I agree with kellybkkk.</p>

[Ray192]

<p>Undergrad business school rankings are like the special olympics. You can run and run, but at the end of the day, the best finance jobs are still taken by math/physics/engineers. </p>

<p>Ok, that’s a tad harsh, but I don’t know anybody who goes to biz school for an education. Most of them just want to get that GS interview (the others are entrepreneurs who want the networking). So really, who cares?</p>

[Alexandre]

<p>Although no ranking is without its flaws, BW’s ranking of BBA programs seems to miss the mark several times. Wharton at #4, Sloan at #9, Haas at #13 and Stern at #15 are all highly suspect.</p>

<p>Also, how did they get their SAT and Student to faculty ratio data? Schools like Haas, McIntire and Ross do not provide such numbers and are slightly more selective than the majority of their respective universities’. Where faculties are concerned, it would seem that some programs included graduate students in their calculations whereas others did not.</p>

<p>Wharton’s recruiter’s ranking is #21? LOL!</p>

[wbwa]

<p>Alexandre, I presume you meant to say “miss the mark.”</p>

<p>Villanova ahead of MIT???</p>

<p>Richmond ahead of Stern and Berkeley???</p>

<p>USC at 34???</p>

<p>Total garbage.</p>

[RML]

<p>Wharton - Sloan - Ross - Haas - Stern are the undisputed top 5 undergrad business schools in the US. The top 5 is pretty solid that any ranking that tries to dislodge one out of the top 5 makes it a bogus ranking.</p>

[barrons]

<p>There are many more (100,000s) good finance an dother business jobs out there besides those at GS and the like. And they don’t require selling your soul nor working with a bunch of amoral jerks.
You can earn a nice living without having to watch your back every second.</p>

[behappy7]

<p>Evaluating schools is highly subjective. I strongly recommend reading Malcolm Gladwell’s recent essay on this in the New Yorker. It’s debatable that the opinion of probably a single individual working at US News [which now exists pretty much just to be publish lists], is superior to that of Bloomberg Businessweek.</p>

[Alexandre]

<p>That’s the beauty of the USNWR Business rankings. It is not determined by anybody working at the magazine but rather, by the opinions of deans and senior faculty at business schools.</p>

[Alexandre]

<p>“There are many more (100,000s) good finance an dother business jobs out there besides those at GS and the like. And they don’t require selling your soul nor working with a bunch of amoral jerks.
You can earn a nice living without having to watch your back every second.”</p>

<p>Amen brother! And let is not forget work hours. Companies like Goldman Sachs, JPM, MS etc… expect their analysts to work 60-80 hours per week. Work hours at most other companies seldom exceed 50 hours in a typical week.</p>

[lesdiablesbleus]

<p>

@RML

Wharton - Sloan - Ross - Haas - Stern are the undisputed top 5 undergrad business schools in the US.

McIntire can make a very strong case to dislodge any of the schools on your list besides Wharton and possibly Sloan.</p>

[xiggi]

<p>

Evaluating schools is highly subjective. I strongly recommend reading Malcolm Gladwell’s recent essay on this in the New Yorker. It’s debatable that the opinion of probably a single individual working at US News [which now exists pretty much just to be publish lists], is superior to that of Bloomberg Businessweek.

</p>

<p>I believe you missed Gladwell’s main point. It is not the opinion of ONE person working at USNews that is misleading. It is the opinion of the person who fills the survey. But that does not make it a lesser problem:</p>

<p>

“But it’s far from clear how any one individual could have insight into that many institutions,” concludes Gladwell. “Sound judgments of educational quality have to be based on specific, hard-to-observe features. But reputational ratings are simply inferences from broad, readily observable features of an institution’s identity, such as its history, its prominence in the media, or the elegance of its architecture. They are prejudices.”</p>

<p>“When U.S. News asks a university president to perform the impossible task of assessing the relative merits of dozens of institutions he knows nothing about, he relies on the only source of detailed information at his disposal that assesses the relative merits of dozens of institutions he knows nothing about: U.S. News. A school like Penn State, then, can do little to improve its position. To go higher than 47th, it needs a better reputation score, and to get a better reputation score it needs to be higher than 47th. The U.S. News ratings are a self-fulfilling prophecy.”</p>

<p>

</p>

<p>You should also note that Gladwell discussed the reputational index representing 25% of the score with the rest being represented by data such as salaries or other surveys. Obviously, that hardly corresponds to the USNews ranking for best business schools at the UG level. Unless I am mistaken the UG ranking is 100% based on the reputational index aka the peer assessment.</p>

<p>

Consider the most important variable in the U.S. News methodology—accounting for 22.5% of the final score for a college: reputation. In U.S. News’ business school ranking, it’s the single most important metric as well—given a weight of 25% of the final ranking for a B-school (the next most important variable in the B-school survey is its highly flawed survey of corporate recruiters which accounts for 15% of the final ranking).

</p>

<p>Is there anything that has not been said many times in the past?</p>

[xiggi]

<p>

Amen brother! And let is not forget work hours. Companies like Goldman Sachs, JPM, MS etc… expect their analysts to work 60-80 hours per week. Work hours at most other companies seldom exceed 50 hours in a typical week.

</p>

<p>You forget the K-12 teachers. Aren’t they claiming to be working 60-70 hours a week, slaving through night and weekends of paper grading? At least that what comes out of Madison, WI!</p>

[DunninLA]

<p>

@Ray192

Undergrad business school rankings are like the special olympics. You can run and run, but at the end of the day, the best finance jobs are still taken by math/physics/engineers. </p>

<p>Ok, that’s a tad harsh, but I don’t know anybody who goes to biz school for an education. Most of them just want to get that GS interview (the others are entrepreneurs who want the networking).

Agreed, except for Wharton which is a substitute for the MBA degree for most employers. How Wharton is not ranked #1 for undergrad biz says more about the ranking’s credibility than it does Wharton.</p>

[barrons]

<p>But at least the teachers know their work does some good. Makes that time easier to enjoy/tolerate. I don’t think most teachers work that much but I also know some that do. I also know many buy supplies out of their own pockets and act as surrogate parents to kids whose parents are lacking. If there is one thing you can say most teachers easily earn their money–which is not all that much in most districts.</p>

<p>Most good B schools publish very detailed placement reports. They will tell you everything you need to know to compare one to another. If a school does not have that report on-line I’d ask for it and if they don’t have one move on.</p>

[xiggi]

<p>

Agreed, except for Wharton which is a substitute for the MBA degree for most employers. How Wharton is not ranked #1 for undergrad biz says more about the ranking’s credibility than it does Wharton.

</p>

<p>The world of business education is a murky one. It does not take long for someone to realize that the schools with the most acclaimed MBA programs (read Harvard, Stanford, et al) do not even offer a “standard” business degree. It speaks volumes about the overall value and perception of the general UG business degree, especialy when lacking a clear and competitive specialty. </p>

<p>Wharton does offer a UG degree but it also used to separate itself from other programs by presenting itself as the best … liberal arts program in business. Now it uses a slightly different description that reads “The first collegiate business school, we combine business and liberal arts studies on an Ivy League campus.” And they mean it:</p>

<p>

It’s Thursday morning in Huntsman Hall, and students in T-shirts and jeans are filing into Nicholas Souleles’ Finance 101 class. It’s the kind of class that, at another school, might take place in a cavernous 500-seat auditorium, with students doodling in their notebooks or texting each other from the back row. But this is the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. Here, the class is made up of just 25 sophomores, most of whom Souleles knows by name. And to a person they’re so attentive that not a single one has even peered out the window during the entire 90-minute session, despite the beautiful spring weather outside and the driest of topics inside: exchange rates. In fact, the students are transfixed by Souleles, who paces around the room aiming his rapid-fire questions at one victim, then another, brandishing a cheap metal pointer like a conductor’s baton to draw their attention to the screen at the front of the room. </p>

<p>Souleles, who always dresses in a dark suit and tie, is one of the most popular professors on campus, and it’s easy to see why. Unlike professors at some other universities, who let teaching assistants do much of the heavy lifting, Souleles never does. Between classes, he takes students out for lunch to get to know them better. The textbook makes only a brief appearance early in the course. For the most part, Souleles relies on his own smarts and the pedagogical value of current events to keep his students engaged. In short, he treats the 19-year-olds in his charge as if each one were the only 19-year-old in his charge.

</p>

<p>Does that sound like the typical UG business class at one of the super-sized academic factories?</p>

<p>As far as the Ivies, only Cornell offers a business degree (BS/Applied Economics and Management) in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS). The program got a recent boost (in 2010) via a $25 million gift from the family of John Dyson to establish the new Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management.</p>