MBA rankings come and go, but Harvard Business School is recognized as the long-term #1 business school in the world.
Stanford is famous for its ties to Silicon Valley, venture capital investing, and tech startups. But the business school at Stanford University is much broader than this, teaching students an interdisciplinary, interpersonal curriculum.
Wharton is good in almost every area. Yes, finance, but also entrepreneurship, technology (don’t forget their San Francisco campus!), social impact, and more.
Kellogg School of Management is rightly famous for its team-based approach and the location in Evanston, which combines access to Chicago with a relaxed college town setting.
The Booth program is known for its academic and analytical rigor, and the fact that its flexible curriculum has only a single strictly required course, with students customizing everything else.
Columbia Business School is about access to New York City and its resources, like executives who come to campus as guest lecturers, entrepreneurs in residence, or to hire in-semester interns
MIT Sloan is strong in technology — in all senses of the word. Tech at MIT doesn’t just mean Google, Facebook and Amazon, but also physical product design for consumers and industry.
The Tuck MBA bring together a small number of students for an intense bonding experience in its Hanover, NH location, creating a fanatically loyal alumni group that donates to the school at 2-3x the average, and pulls out all of the stops to help other Tuckies.
Berkeley’s Haas School of Business is on the forefront of diversity, both through its connection to the very progressive host university, UC Berkeley, and through its own initiatives, like appointing a Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer. Its Bay Area location allows excellent placement within the tech industry.
UVA Darden, sometimes known affectionately as “the bootcamp,” puts students through a highly rigorous case method program (which makes the students very appealing to employers with a similar style, including banks and consulting firms).
Yale SOM seeks to educate “leaders for business and society,” with a special focus on training future managers about the impact of their decisions on society at large. Full time MBA students at the SOM also have access to the full resources of Yale University.
Fuqua focuses on admitting MBA students who have a high “decency quotient”, considering not just their professional achievements, but also whether they treat their colleagues, friends, classmates and others with respect.
The Ross business school is a part of the much larger University of Michigan, whose huge alumni footprint creates networking opportunities with people in almost any company or location, anywhere. “Go Blue, Go Anywhere!”
UT Austin’s McCombs School of Business is the “Harvard Business School of Texas,” and rather well respected outside the state, too. The Austin location provides great access to the city’s booming tech and VC scene.
Johnson’s host university, Cornell, has a fantastic reputation as part of the Ivy League, and getting your full time MBA at Cornell Johnson will allow you to experience Ithaca’s liberal New York state, college-town vibe to the fullest.
UCLA Anderson is the leading business school in Los Angeles, and it has excellent placement in the LA offices of McKinsey, BCG, and Bain, as well as top investment banks.
One of NYU Stern’s highlights is beyond doubt its downtown location in New York City — it even outshines Columbia in this regard. A major benefit of the NYC location for the Stern School of Business is its strong relationship with industries in the luxury retail sector.
Tepper’s host institution, Carnegie Mellon University, is one of the leading universities in the country for computer science and related fields such as automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence. If you’re interested in this space, Tepper’s full time program can provide you with the technical and analytical skills needed to succeed.
As an MBA applicant, you might be tempted to rely solely on MBA rankings when making your school selection. But that would be a mistake.
While some aspects of the various MBA rankings can be useful in your initial research, you have to realize that rankings are mainly designed to benefit the organization that publishes the list, rather than you, the applicant. Further, most of the rankings are arbitrary nonsense, built on very, very shaky foundations.
As you might already be able to tell, we have mixed feelings about the overall usefulness of MBA rankings, and we want to be sure that they are consulted responsibly. So we have combed through the data, studied methodologies and underlying goals, and prepared breakdowns on the most popular listings that you are likely to encounter during your research, including global MBA rankings and rankings focused solely on US schools. You can read about our general findings on this page, with more links to focused pages below. We have also included some tips on how to choose a business school that is right for you—rankings be damned!
And if you want something that’s almost like a ranking, but a bit more applicant-focused, see our directory of top MBA programs, which doesn’t focus on a ranking formula, but on the curriculum, class profile, employment report and culture of each MBA program, with each school profile page containing resources including video interviews with students and admissions staff.
You can read in-depth analysis of each major ranking on their individual pages:
MBA rankings capture something real, in the sense that an HBS MBA commands more respect than a Columbia Business School MBA, which in turn is respected more than one from UCLA Anderson. If you are totally new to MBA world, a ranking can quickly orient you on which business schools are considered most desirable by applicants and post-MBA employers.
The ranking also correlates strongly with the selectivity of those business schools and your chances of admission. You know that you’ll need a great profile in order to be a realistic candidate for top programs, since those programs attract large numbers of highly qualified applicants. So if you’re applying with a low GPA, low GMAT and average work experience, you should not be targeting the programs at the very top of the rankings.
Beyond that? Once you generate a short list of target schools, you should put the MBA rankings aside.
In general, there are some broad considerations that you should make when looking at MBA rankings.
The easiest way for MBA programs to manipulate MBA rankings is to focus on raising their average GMAT and average GPA. There are always candidates in the applicant pool who have great stats, but slightly weaker professional experience. Admitting a few more students with this profile can help a school to boost its ranking, with the school hoping that they can “fake it until they make it” — after the ratings increase, and the increase in applications to the business school, they hope they can make things right by admitting students who have both great stats and great experiences.
Another way to manipulate rankings is to recruit students who obviously have high post-MBA earning potential. The most famous example of this was the Adam Allcock scandal, in which Stanford GSB awarded large financial aid packages to students with extremely high pre-MBA earnings, despite a stated policy that only need-based financial aid was available. The suspected motivation? Stanford wanted to give high earning private equity professionals a reason to prefer Stanford over Harvard, therefore helping Stanford to show the highest post-MBA earnings of any school.
Strategies like these can influence rankings, but don’t make the program more valuable to its students.
If you are having a miserable time during your two years, you will not get the full benefits of the degree. Don’t forget that a lot of the value of an MBA program is the network you build with your peers. It’s easier to build a strong network when you’re surrounded by people you admire and want to spend time with.
The ultimate purpose of MBA rankings is to generate page views and advertising revenue for the organizations that publish them. For this purpose, it’s great if the rankings are controversial, with many schools rising and falling each year so that everyone has to monitor the rankings obsessively for updates.
But, factors that influence the value of an MBA program actually change very slowly. For example, it takes time for top business schools to recruit new faculty, build relationships with new post-MBA employers, and raise donations from alumni to support expanded resources for the students. This means that the value of a given MBA program changes slowly, with very, very few events actually justifying a dramatic change over a single year.
Once you determine roughly which schools you are qualified to attend, we encourage you to focus on the practical questions that will help you figure out which program will provide value to your career. These are simple, practical questions:
Answering these questions will help you find a business school that can enhance your career.