The top five MBA programs in the U.S., according to PoetsandQuants’ tenth annual ranking for … [+]
Before departing the deanship at Yale’s School of Management in July, Dean Edward Snyder was asked what was his biggest surprise in the job he held for eight year. His answer: The enduring value and prestige of an M7 MBA degree.
“The durability of the M7 schools has been a little bit surprising to me,” said Snyder, who has also been dean at both Chicago Booth and UVA Darden. “People really want to affiliate with the top schools. It’s so powerful, and it’s counter to what you see in other industries where technology is playing a big disruptive role.”
And sure enough, once we crunched the numbers for our tenth annual MBA ranking at Poets&Quants this week, the M7 schools held onto all of the top seven positions. Stanford’s Graduate School of Business was first, followed by the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, Harvard Business School, Wharton, Northwestern Kellogg, MIT Sloan, and Columbia Business School.
The M7 schools were followed by UC-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business in eighth place, while Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business finished ninth. Yale School of Management broke back into the top ten, capturing the very last rung on the ladder in tenth place, displacing the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.
The M7 did it again. You can disagree with the order of our latest ranking but the point is clear: when it comes to the sheer quality of an MBA education, it’s hard to beat the M7 schools with their formidable endowments, great faculty and the ability to consistently attract among the best students in the MBA applicant pool.
Sure there are plenty of other very good schools. In fact, I would argue that some of them are better suited for some MBA candidates than M7 schools. If you’re keen on having the best MBA teaching faculty in the world, look no further than the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. If you’re eager to have the quintessential residential experience, the Tuck school is hard to beat. If you want the best experiential learning among MBA programs, you should consider Michigan Ross.
If you’re keen on an MBA that brings you deeply into the future of artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotics, you would be wise to choose Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business. And if you’re using the MBA to switch careers, you can do that successfully at a number of schools, including Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business or Emory University’s Goizueta School of Business.
I could go on and on. Truth is, when it comes to an MBA experience, there is a surplus of fantastic options well beyond the M7, the top ten, and even the top 25. Our latest ranking of the best 100 U.S. MBA options is a great place to start.
Unlike other rankings, the tenth annual Poets&Quants list combines the latest five most influential business school rankings in the world: U.S. News & World Report, Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek, the Financial Times, and The Economist. Instead of merely averaging the five, each ranking is separately weighted to account for our view of their credibility.
Combining these five major rankings doesn’t eliminate the flaws in each system, but it does significantly diminish them. When an anomaly pops on one list due to either faulty survey technique or biased methodology, bringing all the data together tends to suppress oddball results in a single ranking. So the composite index tones down the noise in each of these five surveys to get more directly at the real signal that is being sent.
The overall list takes into account a massive wealth of quantitative and qualitative data captured in these major lists, from surveys of corporate recruiters, MBA graduates, deans and faculty publication records to median GPA and GMAT scores of entering students as well as the latest salary and employment statistics of alumni.
What’s more, users can see at one glance where their target schools fall across the spectrum of core rankings. And for the fourth year in a row, we’ve included year-over-year changes in each of the five lists that comprise our overall ranking (see this year’s ranking tables.) As a result, you can more clearly assess why a school moved up or down on the new 2019-2020 list of U.S. MBA programs. That’s why we think it is the definitive MBA ranking.
