Forbes has just released its list of the top business schools in America. The Forbes’ ranking methodology is based on the return on investment achieved by the class of 2006. They surveyed 16,000 alumni at over 100 schools and received feedback from 30% of those grads. They then compared the earnings of the respondents from 2006-2011 to the cost of business school.
While Forbes lists 74 top schools, the top ten are:
- Harvard
- Stanford
- Chicago (Booth)
- Pennsylvania (Wharton)
- Columbia
- Dartmouth (Tuck)
- Northwestern (Kellogg)
- Cornell (Johnson)
- Virginia (Darden)
- MIT (Sloan)
Poets and Quants analyzes the Forbes’ data in terms of winners and losers, those who went up in the Forbes’ rankings and those who went down; it provides a useful table comparing the salary data by school to previous years’ salary data.
Of greater interest to me is the overall profitable MBA picture presented by the Forbes data: every single program in the top 74 has positive ROI, admittedly less in more expensive locales and a few in single digits, but the overwhelming majority showed a greater than 20% gain after five years. And that’s despite the recession.
So for those of you who have professional goals that require an MBA, it looks like a solid investment.
By Linda Abraham, President and Founder of Accepted.com
Read the full article: Forbes Announces Top Ten Business Schools
