Doesn’t make any sense that a school with a 75% acceptance rate has a top 10 business school.
Suit yourself, but IU is an excellent school with many top students. Of course, it is a state school so it has a wider range of students. Indiana has a less hierarchical state system than some others. The campus is one of the most beautiful out there, the alumni network is huge, people are friendly, etc. But I think your implication is correct that most students who go there are more interested in learning than rankings. The business school is likely more selective than the university as a whole. Not sure why you draw your conclusion.
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Maybe GCs in Indiana are giving advice to students with lower stats that they shouldn’t apply. Indiana has a number of top programs - their public policy program often is ranked either first or second in the US News and World Report rankings.
@WISdad23 I apologize for my wording, it was incorrect and offensive. However, my question still stands because Kelley is ranked top 10 and has an average sat scores in the 1400s. Indiana University as a whole comes no where near in this in terms of selectivity and ranking. This is the only school I can think of which this much of a gap between the parent University and the undergraduate business school.
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IU has a much lower retention and graduation rate compared to say Michigan or UIUC. This lowers their overall ranking. Many of the less qualified students who are admitted drop out for academic reasons.
IU’s music school BTW is considered one of the top university based music schools in the country.
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We ( mostly my wife) is struggling with this as well. My son was admitted top 30 schools but is leaning toward Kelley, a good UG business school but still part of IU Bloomington ranked @ 86 by USNWR. I agree this is highly unusual despite any other highly ranked programs. It is not disparaging; it is merely factual & peculiar. Merely for comparison sake, IUB ranking is tied with SUNY Binghamton, much more selective overall but its School of Management, is ranked 133
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@NJFather Yeah but I don’t think it really matters. At the end of the day, Kelley is ranked high because it places many students in high paying jobs. The rankings are there because of the performance of the school. I think I’m going to pull the trigger on kelley
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I think a big part of the answer to this question is money. Kelley has lots of alumni making lots of money, so it can afford to have nice facilities and top staff.
Another reason why IU isn’t ranked terribly high is the lack of STEM prominence. IU just recently started a small-scale engineering program, and it hasn’t had much time to grow. IU also doesn’t have top programs in many other STEM fields as far as I know. The lack of great STEM programs is irrelevant to a Kelley student, but it shows up in the rankings.
Kelley’s rankings and salary numbers speak for themselves: https://kelley.iu.edu/UCSO/Statistics/salaryStats/page40582.html
I think it would be very misguided to not attend Kelley based on IU’s entire university ranking.
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@iubaccounting That is due to the mission split in IN. Purdue is the STEM school and IU is the humanities and social sciences school.
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I agree with the OP. Kelley’s graduation rate is 98% and the overall school is 60% but I heard that IU does a good job of preparing the students and the biz school is actually quite rigorous
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@TomSrOfBoston I know - I have lived in Indiana my whole life. I’m just saying that IU’s lack of STEM prestige lowers the overall school ranking
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@Drizzy248 , I think Kelley is a great choice. Albeit not at the UG-level, post-MBA ( from another school), I tackled a specialty masters through Kelley based on its reputation. My only slight hesitation with my son going there is he is if he decides to study something else, he will regret not having chosen a different school with other highly-ranked options. Up until September of last year, he was planning to study engineering. Business was a last minute pivot just before applications were due.
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You will find this issue with lots of flagship/state universities in low to mid population states. Some area are fantastic but other area not so much. They just have to admit so many kids (a chunk who aren’t very well prepared) so they can get tuition money, then they really don’t provide a lot of support, and then the lower end of the admits end up quitting.
@NJFather that’s great to hear. I’m still considering Bentley University though instead of Kelley. Do you know anything about Bentley?
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@Drizzy248 My son got accepted both by Bentley and Kelly. He chose Kelly for the ranking. We live in Boston area.
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I believe Bentley is regionally ranked, not nationally. Therefore, it is tough to compare the overall university systems if that is the metric you are most concerned with. There is a significant difference in reputation and rankings of the business schools however.
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I prefer him to stay in Boston area. But either school is fine.
My son will be attending Kelley as a direct admit this Fall. We grappled with the same issue. IU as a whole is solidly average to above-average, but their Kelley school and Jacobs school are outstanding and their foreign language program and a few other programs are excellent. Moreover, it has other attributes that increase its standing. To repeat what another poster said, being ranked 86 out of over 2,500 non-profit four year colleges is quite an achievement, so let’s keep things in perspective.
That said, I think it would be safe to assume that, in general, the best students at IU attend the Kelley and Jacobs schools. Those students are a subset that is in a class by itself. These students, any future employer will know, could have gained entrance to universities that were better ranked overall (as a university). Those employers will also know that those students went to IU specifically BECAUSE those schools (Kelley & Jacobs) were so highly ranked, with more stringent admission standards.
Sure, I think most would agree that, in the best of all possible worlds, there is an advantage to attending a top 25 or so university (pick your cut-off number). The prestige factor and the fact that a good percentage of the movers & shakers in the business world attended those schools means that graduates of those schools have somewhat of an easier time getting into certain hard to get into fields because alumni help their “own kind.” But, graduates of those schools are not shoe-ins; you still have to prove yourself. If you’re an outstanding student (or have a hook) and can afford them, they’re a great choice also because most academic departments at those schools are excellent, not just a few. That’s what makes them better, besides generally smaller class sizes and larger endowments.
(BTW, based on my and my son’s extensive college research over the past year, there seems to be a marked drop-off in academic and career advantage, generally speaking, once you get above those 25 or so top schools (meaning, the difference in advantage between a school ranked, let’s say, 35-40 and one ranked, let’s say, 80-85, is much smaller, if it exists). In that scenario one must do a difficult cost-benefit analysis. It’s hard to justify paying twice the COA in that case!)
According to Poets & Quants, which probably does the most in-depth due diligence on business schools, the Kelley School of Business is the 19th most difficult undergrad business school to get into in the nation, and it excels in other areas. When you look at their ranking of the top 50 undergrad business schools in the country, you will see Kelley is in some pretty rarefied company. It is ranked #2 by employers. It’s students have the 14th highest SAT scores among the top 50 undergrad business schools in the nation. A previous poster pointed out, I believe, that USNWR ranked Kelley 9th best undergrad business school. Poets & Quants, which specializes in researching, comparing and ranking undergrad and graduate business schools, ranked Kelley 7th best in the nation. And another poster pointed out that Businessweek ranked the Kelley School of Business 4th best in America. And, there are other accolades Kelley has earned. See a couple of references below.
http://poetsandquantsforundergrads.com/2016/12/14/average-sat-scores-top-b-schools/2/
I don’t think anyone can call these achievements shabby. Not by a country mile.
So, as guidance counselors have been advising all but the most outstanding students for decades, one should pick a college not primarily by the overall university stature, but rather by the strength of the department (school) one wants to major in.
Employers know which programs are among the best!
Kelly MBA here, and I can say that I have pondered this question myself.
IU is a big school with a strange dynamic. There are a number of truly excellent programs like music, journalism, foreign languages. and business. There are amazing niche courses offered. While I was there I met people who were studying everything from Bambara (an African language) to psychology. I used to love the fact that there was a Department of Uralic and Altaic Studies (since renamed).
I also think that serious undergraduates in traditional liberal arts majors get an amazing education at IU. I have friends who got undergraduate history and English degrees there, and who felt that it was a great liberal arts education that they didn’t need to go into much debt for. Each department has a few undergrads who are very serious and who are very well-served. While I was there, I even got to take a seminar class in political science with a professor who would later win the Nobel Prize in Economics (Elinor Ostrom). It didn’t count towards my MBA but I enrolled and they let me take it.
But Indiana is also a party school with a lot of students who are just there for the Greek life and doing the minimum to get a degree. There is a sociologist who wrote about IU in her book “Paying for the Party”. If you are on the “party track” you can get a BA in home economics, or mass communications, and other not too strenuous things. My friend who was doing home ec (lived in the grad dorm at the time) used to build sample rooms with colored paper in shoeboxes while I was drowning in rigorous case studies and bond calculations.
The whole party school thing has got to pull down the overall rankings, but I loved my time at Indiana. You can’t beat the college town, the spirit, the traditions… I just loved it.
I can’t compare it to other undergrad programs, but I did have a chance to take some MBA courses at my undergraduate institution (ranked in the 90s for MBA programs). Those credits did not transfer, and at Kelly we whipped through the information presented in those classes within a few weeks of the start of the fall semester. Kelly was much, much, more rigorous than that other MBA program.
TrudiRexar:
Your comment on the Party Culture is quite pertinent to this discussion. That atmosphere definitely attracts a certain species of college student and affects the academic climate, or lack thereof, at any school.
But, to be fair to IU, this is a widespread problem that affects many, many schools, in particular the big sports conference schools, both public and private. Less so, the LACS and non-spirit culture schools. However, even those schools have this problem. We live in New York, and are familiar with certain non-sports schools in the Northeast that deal with this. Cornell University, an Ivy League sports school, Villanova, Colgate, Hamilton, Bard college and a number of others are some we have heard about from neighbors, work colleagues and friends. Perhaps less noticeable because these schools are smaller, or much smaller than IU, but still a problem.
Colleges can, and should do much more to clamp down on this. But sports are very lucrative to colleges and they don’t want to bite the hand that feeds them!
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