Every one to two years, various publications issue updated rankings of MBA programs. Although U.S. News and World Report and Business Week are perhaps the most well known in the U.S., the Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, and The Economist also release annual rankings, among others.
If you are considering an MBA, using these rankings to compare information on potential programs can be useful. However, it's important to recognize the limitations of rankings and put them into proper perspective. No rating system, no matter how sophisticated or complete, can capture the full measure on the worth of a program. The issuers of these reports are generally the first ones to point this out. Rankings can give you a rough idea of how different schools perform in certain categories, how selective they are, and how they change over time.
What Are You Looking At?
The issuers of rankings each use a different methodology, so be certain that you understand the criteria they're using and how this affects their rankings.
U.S. News and World Report, for example, bases their ratings on a school's reputation among professors and academics, its reputation among recruiters, and its "student selectivity ranking" (consisting of GMAT scores, GPA, and proportion of students admitted), among other things. The U.S. News and Wall Street Journal rankings do not gather any input from students, although some others do. Because of the varying methodologies, the rankings themselves frequently differ from one publication to another. So look at these rankings as a general guide that provides some insight into the various schools.
You Are the Best Judge
The b-school you attend should be based on the strengths of the individual program in which you are interested, its campus environment, teaching style (for example, case study vs. lecture), and what you see as the best overall "fit" between your needs and the particular program.
Snapshot on Schools
The following is a list of the top-20 ranked U.S. full-time MBA programs according to Business Week as a reference:
- University of Chicago
- University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)
- Northwestern University (Kellogg)
- Harvard University
- University of Michigan (Ross)
- Stanford University
- MIT (Sloan)
- UC Berkeley (Haas)
- Duke University (Fuqua)
- Columbia University
- Dartmouth (Tuck)
- UCLA (Anderson)
- Cornell University (Johnson)
- NYU (Stern)
- University of Virginia (Darden)
- Carnegie Mellon (Tepper)
- UNC - Chapel Hill (Kenan-Flagler)
- Indiana University (Kelley)
- Yale University
- Texas - Austin
