List of United States graduate business school rankings


List of United States business school rankings is a tabular listing of some of the business schools and their affiliated universities located in the United States that are included in one or more of the rankings of full-time Master of Business Administration programs. Rankings are typically published by magazines or websites. This list is not a comprehensive list of business schools in the United States. These rankings are a subset of college and university rankings. Business schools are university-level institutions generally affiliated with a university or college that produces students who attain business administration degrees. Most of the schools listed in the rankings below are accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. Some of the publications shown here have related rankings for undergraduate, part-time and executive curricula.
There is currently some controversy among faculty and administrators in American institutions of higher education regarding the request by the surveyors to have college presidents give their subjective opinion of other colleges because some of the methodologies are deemed misleading and a disservice. This has resulted in a movement surrounding the President's letter.

History

Most modern university ranking systems are comparably young. The origins of ranking educational institutions based on their academic and other performance are usually traced back towards the end of the 19th / the beginning if the 20th century.

Marketing significance

Business school rankings are important to the various business schools because they are an important marketing tool used to recruit top students, and lure recruiters from the top companies. Business schools attempt to achieve higher rankings in order that they may obtain the top students who will over the course of their careers most likely benefit the school by achieving high ranking positions, attaining great influence, and accumulating great wealth. Such students often are able to help other students attain better jobs. Students use the rankings to choose their school, and creators of the rankings produce them to aid in this decision.
More than half of recruiters said they believe the quality of MBA graduates is the same or better currently compared with past years. Some of the most renowned schools, such as Harvard and Stanford, do not rank as highly as their stature might suggest. Recruiters complain that they often find graduates of some of the most famous institutions more arrogant and less collegial than the MBAs they meet at other schools. Recruiters also noted that "some of the large, elite schools also don't seem to enjoy as many close, personal relationships with recruiters as smaller MBA programs do."

Ranking techniques

The rankings are based on a variety of factors such as standardized test scores of students, salary of recent graduates, survey results of graduates and/or recruiters, the specific schools that choose to participate in a market survey, the number of top companies recruiting at the school and a variety of attributes. The ratings vary significantly by method used to determine the success of each program. For instance, the Forbes and Financial Times results are based on long-term graduate career progress concerns, the Bloomberg Businessweek and Economist polls evaluate short-term experiences of the students with their program, U.S. News & World Report consider the recent experiences of recruiters with the program, and other rankings like the Aspen Institute Beyond Grey Pinstripes measure integration of sustainability material into business programs.
The following is a short summary of the different recognized rankings:

Main rankings

''U.S. News & World Report''

The U.S. News & World Report uses a combination of the objective and subjective as well. The magazine seeks "expert opinion about program quality and statistical indicators that measure the quality of a school's faculty, research, and students." However, it ranks a broad spectrum of professional school programs such as business schools, law schools, and medical schools as well as a variety of programs specific academic disciplines such as the social sciences or humanities. The business opinion data incorporates responses from deans, program directors, and senior faculty about the academic quality of their programs as well as the opinions of professionals who actually do the hiring of the new MBA graduates from the schools. The statistical data combines measures of the qualities of the incoming students and as well as the faculty with measures of post graduate success as related to their degrees. There were 382 programs that responded out of 402 solicited, and the formula used a strict combination of quality assessment, placement success, and student selectivity.

''Bloomberg Businessweek''

The Bloomberg Businessweek rankings, which are based on three sources of data, are published in mid-October of even numbered years. The 2006 student survey of 45 online questions of students' ratings of their programs was distributed to 16,595 students three weeks before graduation; there were 9,290 responses. The recruiter survey determines how many MBAs a recruiter's company hired in the previous two years and which schools it actively recruits from. 223 respondents participated out of 426 solicited. The intellectual capital is determined based on a formula incorporating academic publications in journals, books written, and faculty size.

Forbes Magazine

The Forbes magazine methodology was to calculate a five-year return on investment for 2002 graduates. Forbes surveyed 18,500 alumni of 102 MBA programs and used their pre-enrollment and post-graduate business school salary information as a basis for comparing post-MBA compensation with the cost of attending the programs.

The Economist

The Economist Intelligence Unit, the business information arm of the Economist Group, gathered results from two internet questionnaires, one of business schools and one of their students and recent graduates, and used them to rate business schools located all over the world. Information provided by the schools made up 80% of the ranking, with student and alumni responses accounting for only 20%. Factors in the evaluation included faculty:student ratio, GMAT scores of incoming students, student body diversity, foreign languages offered, percentage of graduates finding jobs within three months after graduation, percentage of graduates finding jobs through the school's career service, graduates' salaries and the comparison of pre-enrollment and post-graduation salaries, and student/alumni evaluations of the program, facilities, services, and alumni network. Results were tabulated using a smoothing method incorporating the three previous years' results. The organization used strict data provision thresholds, with the result that some highly regarded schools were omitted from the list of 100 ranked schools.

Financial Times

The Financial Times poll was the result of over 10,000 respondents to nearly 23000 electronic questionnaires of alumni from 155 qualifying business schools. The survey began in July 2006 and all internationally accredited programs that are at least five years old and that have produced at least 30 graduates in each of the last three years were solicited. 113 of the 155 had at least 20 respondents and at least a 20 percent response rate. The questionnaire used twenty criteria in three main areas. The poll actually presents all twenty criteria to the reader. Eight criteria are based on alumni responses; eleven criteria are based on business school responses, and the final criterion is based on a research index produced by the Financial Times. The survey responses are audited by KPMG.
The Financial Times has also produced a "ranking of rankings" summarizing five of the individual rankings. They produce United States, and European summary rankings based on all five and a global summary ranking using the Wall Street Journal, Economist and Financial Times. The summary is based on underlying polls in which a school placed in the top ten using an average of the ordinal placements. The summary excludes the U.S. News & World Report results.

Academic Ranking of World Universities

The Academic Ranking of World Universities includes every institution that has any Nobel Laureates, Fields Medals, and highly cited researchers. In addition, major universities of every country with significant amount of papers indexed by Science Citation Index-Expanded and Social Science Citation Index are also included. Having alumni of an institution winning Nobel Prizes in Economics since 1951 attributes 10% of the score. Staff of an institution winning Turing Awards in computer science since 1961 contributes 15% of the score. Highly cited researchers in economics/business category get 25% weighting. Papers indexed in SSCI in economics/business fields gets 25%. Finally, the percentage of papers published in top 20% journals of economics/business fields to that in all economics/business journals gets 25% weighting.

Other

Aspen Institute

Rankings based on attributes other than standardized test scores, salary of graduates, and similar attributes also exist. The Beyond Grey Pinstripes ranking, compiled by the Aspen Institute and published biannually, is based entirely on the integration of social and environmental stewardship into university curriculum and faculty research. Data for this survey is solicited from university administrators at accredited colleges, and audited by teams of Ph.D. scoring fellows. Rankings are calculated on the amount of sustainability coursework made available to students, amount of student exposure to relevant material, amount of coursework focused on stewardship by for-profit corporations, and relevant faculty research. The 2011 survey and ranking include data from 150 universities.

Criticism

The ranking of business schools has been discussed in articles and on academic websites.
Critics of ranking methodologies maintain that any published rankings should be viewed with caution for the following reasons:
In the specific case of MBA programs, one study found that ranking MBA programs by a combination of graduates' starting salaries and average student GMAT score can duplicate some of the ranking order found in top 20 lists of Business Week and U.S. News & World Report.

Rankings

Historical rankings

The historical rankings of the top MBA programs show little variation, even over a long time period. In 1977, MBA Magazine surveyed business schools deans to come up with a ranking which listed The Wharton School, Harvard Business School, Stanford Graduate School of Business, the Booth School of Business, and the MIT Sloan School of Management as their top 5. These schools plus the Kellogg School of Management have always comprised the top 5 schools in every U.S. News & World Report ranking. With the addition of Columbia Business School, these seven schools which are most frequently listed at the top of various rankings have been referred to as "America's seven most powerful schools".

Recent individual rankings

Below all schools that ranked on any of the lists below are ordered alphabetically and presented with their numerical rankings in the respective lists. The following abbreviations are used in the column headings: USN - U.S. News & World Report, BW - Bloomberg Businessweek, Ec - The Economist, FT - Financial Times, BI - Business Insider, QS - Quacquarelli Symonds and ARWU - Academic Ranking of World Universities.
Business SchoolUniversityLocation USN 2019BW
2019
Forbes 2019USN 2017BI 2016FT 2016BW 2015Ec 2015QS 2015
A. Gary Anderson Graduate School of ManagementUniversity of California RiversideCalifornia, Riverside91NR93-10001000100069
Argyros School of Business and EconomicsChapman UniversityCalifornia, Orange85NR-1000681000
Atkinson Graduate School of ManagementWillamette UniversityOregon, Salem99-13182571000-1000701000
Babcock Graduate School of ManagementWake Forest UniversityNorth Carolina, Winston-SalemNRNR1000-100010001000
Bauer College of BusinessUniversity of HoustonTexas, Houston9574931000100010001000
Bennett S. LeBow College of BusinessDrexel UniversityPennsylvania, Philadelphia84NR8810001000100010001000
Binghamton University School of ManagementBinghamton UniversityNew York, Binghamton89NR771000100010001000
Booth School of BusinessUniversity of ChicagoIllinois, Chicago341328214
Brandeis International Business SchoolBrandeis UniversityMassachusetts, WalthamNR9010001000100010001000
Busch School of Business and EconomicsCatholic University of AmericaWashington, DCNRNR
Carl H. Lindner College of BusinessUniversity of CincinnatiOhio, Cincinnati97867910001000631000
Carlson School of ManagementUniversity of MinnesotaMinnesota, Minneapolis353532321000714555
Carroll School of ManagementBoston CollegeMassachusetts, Chestnut Hill43494410006910001000
Raymond J. Harbert College of BusinessAuburn UniversityAlabama, Auburn698583-1000100010001000
Charlton College of BusinessUniversity of Massachusetts DartmouthMassachusetts, DartmouthNRNR
Columbia Business SchoolColumbia UniversityNew York, New York City6979766125
Cox School of BusinessSouthern Methodist UniversityTexas, Dallas43424552100010003282
Crummer Graduate School of BusinessRollins CollegeFlorida, Winter ParkNRNR5110001000100010001000
Manderson Graduate School of BusinessUniversity of AlabamaAlabama, Tuscaloosa50NR50541000100010001000
Daniels College of BusinessUniversity of DenverDenver, Colorado9183
Darden Graduate School of Business AdministrationUniversity of VirginiaVirginia, Charlottesville125131411100012237
David Eccles School of BusinessUniversity of UtahUtah, Salt Lake City5451365710001000591000
E. J. Ourso College of BusinessLouisiana State UniversityLouisiana, Baton Rouge69NR791000100010001000
E. Philip Saunders College of BusinessRochester Institute of TechnologyNew York, Henrietta9393911000100010001000
Eli Broad College of BusinessMichigan State UniversityMichigan, East Lansing3839273738653035
Eller College of ManagementUniversity of ArizonaArizona, Tucson52614910001000100093
Fisher College of BusinessOhio State UniversityOhio, Columbus31414127753931
Florida International University College of Business / Chapman Graduate School of BusinessFlorida International UniversityFlorida, MiamiNR9410001000100010001000
Foster School of BusinessUniversity of WashingtonWashington, Seattle2116232731492037
Fox School of BusinessTemple UniversityPennsylvania, PhiladelphiaNRNR3210001000100053
Freeman School of BusinessTulane UniversityLouisiana, New Orleans636959731000100010001000
Fuqua School of BusinessDuke UniversityNorth Carolina, Durham10201412132182013
F. W. Olin Graduate School of BusinessBabson CollegeMassachusetts, Wellesley6356694090561000
Gabelli School of BusinessFordham UniversityNew York, New York City6357587310001000721000
Gatton College of Business and EconomicsUniversity of KentuckyKentucky, Lexington67868610001000731000
Gies College of BusinessUniversity of IllinoisIllinois, Champaign47NR404391571000
Goizueta Business SchoolEmory UniversityGeorgia, Atlanta2123222023551525
Graziadio School of Business and ManagementPepperdine UniversityCalifornia, Malibu7463616510001000741000
Haas School of BusinessUniversity of California, BerkeleyCalifornia, Berkeley681171079612
Hankamer School of BusinessBaylor UniversityTexas, Waco5779651000100010001000
Harvard Business SchoolHarvard UniversityMassachusetts, Boston334132141
Howard University School of BusinessHoward UniversityWashington, D.C.674510001000501000
Hult International Business SchoolHult International Business SchoolMassachusetts, CambridgeNR661000100010006265
Iowa State University College of BusinessIowa State UniversityIowa, Ames47NR651000100010001000
Isenberg School of ManagementUniversity of Massachusetts AmherstMassachusetts, Amherst74NR571000100010001000
Poole College of ManagementNorth Carolina State UniversityNorth Carolina, Raleigh85475710001000291000
Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of ManagementRice UniversityTexas, Houston26312629411000531945
Chaifetz School of BusinessSaint Louis UniversityMissouri, St. LouisNRNR1000100010001000
Katz School of BusinessUniversity of PittsburghPennsylvania, Pittsburgh435437531000984469
Kelley School of BusinessIndiana UniversityIndiana, Bloomington2125192134542829
Kellogg School of ManagementNorthwestern UniversityIllinois, Evanston61034611376
Kenan-Flagler Business SchoolUniversity of North Carolina, Chapel HillNorth Carolina, Chapel Hill1918151820411733
Kellstadt Graduate School of BusinessDePaul UniversityIllinois, ChicagoNRNR931000100010001000
Kogod School of BusinessAmerican UniversityWashington, D.C.99-13191100010001000281000
Krannert School of ManagementPurdue UniversityIndiana, West Lafayette747840501000531000
Leavey School of BusinessSanta Clara UniversityCalifornia, Santa ClaraNRNR10001000100010001000
Leeds School of BusinessUniversity of Colorado at BoulderColorado, Boulder7967607910001000711000
Liautaud Graduate School of BusinessUniversity of Illinois at ChicagoIllinois, ChicagoNRNR1000100010001000
Lubin School of BusinessPace UniversityNew York, New York City99-131NR10001000100010001000
Lundquist College of BusinessUniversity of OregonEugene, Oregon9788
Marriott School of ManagementBrigham Young UniversityUtah, Provo322724344480271000
Scheller College of BusinessGeorgia Institute of TechnologyGeorgia, Atlanta2924282939100071231000
Marshall School of BusinessUniversity of Southern CaliforniaCalifornia, Los Angeles1722212432522571
Martin J. Whitman School of ManagementSyracuse UniversityNew York, Syracuse89658810001000671000
Mason School of BusinessCollege of William & MaryVirginia, Williamsburg5434445710001000371000
Massry Center for BusinessUniversity at Albany, State University of New YorkNew York, Albany99-131NR91
Mays Business SchoolTexas A&M UniversityTexas, College Station405333384210001000221000
McCallum Graduate School of BusinessBentley UniversityMassachusetts, WalthamNR8410001000100010001000
McCombs School of BusinessUniversity of Texas at AustinTexas, Austin1921181721472139
McDonough School of BusinessGeorgetown UniversityWashington, D.C.2419312125442640
Mendoza College of BusinessUniversity of Notre DameIndiana, South Bend2628252924763144
Merage School of BusinessUniversity of California, IrvineCalifornia, Irvine43464344100057541000
Michael F. Price College of BusinessUniversity of OklahomaOklahoma, Norman58648310001000521000
MIT Sloan School of ManagementMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyMassachusetts, Cambridge3774594157
Moore School of BusinessUniversity of South CarolinaSouth Carolina, Columbia74707110001000100096
Naveen Jindal School of ManagementUniversity of Texas at DallasTexas, Richardson3836463810001000421000
D'Amore-McKim School of BusinessNortheastern UniversityMassachusetts, Boston58755410001000611000
Neeley School of BusinessTexas Christian UniversityTexas, Fort Worth614071100010003863
Olin Business SchoolWashington University in St. LouisMissouri, St. Louis2638292130803541
Owen Graduate School of ManagementVanderbilt UniversityTennessee, Nashville2930302528713436
Pamplin College of BusinessVirginia Polytechnic Institute and State UniversityVirginia, BlacksburgNRNR10001000100010001000
Peter F. Drucker and Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of ManagementClaremont Graduate UniversityCalifornia, ClaremontNRNR10001000100010001000
Rady School of ManagementUniversity of California, San DiegoCalifornia, San Diego696082100059651000
Rawls College of BusinessTexas Tech UniversityLubbock, Texas99-13173
Robert H. Smith School of BusinessUniversity of Maryland, College ParkMaryland, College Park402647471000513342
Ross School of BusinessUniversity of MichiganMichigan, Ann Arbor10171011142010278
Rutgers Business SchoolRutgers UniversityNew Jersey, New Brunswick and Newark5862501000100010001000
Questrom School of BusinessBoston UniversityMassachusetts, Boston5050394436714867
Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of ManagementCornell UniversityNew York, Ithaca15119161531162325
Sam M. Walton College of BusinessUniversity of ArkansasArkansas, Fayetteville87NR731000100010001000
School of BusinessCollege of CharlestonCharleston, SC99-13191
Simon Business SchoolUniversity of RochesterNew York, Rochester402942431000863651
Smeal College of BusinessPenn State UniversityPennsylvania, University Park333334361000894362
Stanford Graduate School of BusinessStanford UniversityCalifornia, Stanford2124457131
Stern School of BusinessNew York UniversityNew York, New York City121320121619241110
Sykes School of BusinessUniversity of TampaTampa, FloridaNR81
Tepper School of BusinessCarnegie Mellon UniversityPennsylvania, Pittsburgh1715171922331830
Haslam College of BusinessUniversity of TennesseeTennessee, Knoxville5455545410001000641000
Terry College of BusinessUniversity of GeorgiaGeorgia, Athens37444848100010005172
The George Washington University School of BusinessGeorge Washington UniversityWashington, D.C.6151784081
The Wharton SchoolUniversity of PennsylvaniaPennsylvania, Philadelphia1651145101
Thunderbird School of Global ManagementArizona State UniversityArizona, GlendaleNRNR8810001000100010001000
Tippie College of BusinessUniversity of IowaIowa, Iowa CityNRNR641000945573
Trulaske College of BusinessUniversity of MissouriMissouri, Columbia6980536910001000661000
Tuck School of BusinessDartmouth CollegeNew Hampshire, Hanover1225882214324
UC Davis Graduate School of ManagementUniversity of California, DavisCalifornia, Davis474256421000100010001000
UCLA Anderson School of ManagementUniversity of California, Los AngelesCalifornia, Los Angeles1612161517341399
University at Buffalo School of ManagementThe State University of New York at BuffaloNew York, Buffalo6676497310001000471000
University of Connecticut School of BusinessUniversity of ConnecticutConnecticut, Storrs79596510009610001000
University of LouisvilleUniversity of LouisvilleKentucky, Louisville87NR861000100010001000
University of Miami Business SchoolUniversity of MiamiFlorida, Coral GablesNR725557100010005797
University of Mississippi School of Business AdministrationUniversity of MississippiMississippi, Oxford99-1316810001000691000
W. P. Carey School of BusinessArizona State UniversityArizona, Tempe33483825100010004947
Warrington College of Business / Hough Graduate School of BusinessUniversity of FloridaFlorida, Gainesville253240100010004158
Weatherhead School of ManagementCase Western Reserve UniversityOhio, Cleveland7477527710001000100086
Wisconsin School of BusinessUniversity of Wisconsin at MadisonWisconsin, Madison353735481000684657
Yale School of ManagementYale UniversityConnecticut, New Haven914119918111911
Zarb School of BusinessHofstra UniversityHempstead, New YorkNR89
Zicklin School of BusinessCUNY Baruch CollegeNew York, New York City5271571000100010001000