After a three-year tie for first with Harvard Business School, the Stanford University Graduate School of Business this year snagged the coveted number one spot all for itself in U.S. News & World Report’s 2012 rankings of best business schools.
The annual rankings, released earlier this week, are based on a weighted average of several indicators, including overall program quality, peer assessments, recruiter assessments, placement success, mean starting salary and bonus, average GMAT score and GPA and more.
To compile this year’s rankings, 437 master’s programs accredited by AACSB International were surveyed in fall and early 2011, 398 of which responded.
Rounding out the top 10 full-time programs this year were MIT Sloan’s School of Management (3), University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School (4), Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management (5), University of Chicago Booth School of Business (6), Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business (7), UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business (8), Columbia Business School (9), and NYU’s Stern School of Business and the Yale School of Management, which tied for 10th.
In addition to its best overall business school rankings, U.S. News also ranks MBA programs according to a range of 12 specialties, including international, part-time and executive MBA programs, as well as subject specialties such as accounting, finance, nonprofit and supply chain/logistics.
In addition to Stanford GBS’s ousting HBS from the top spot, U.S. News cited a few noteworthy findings as part of the 2012 rankings. For example, top programs like the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and the Yale School of Management have announced major changes to their curricula this year designed to better reflect the increasingly global nature of the business world.
Survey results also revealed that Executive MBA (EMBA) programs were not as hard hit by the economic downturn in terms of student placement upon graduation and continue to flourish as the market improves, U.S. News reports. And more and more ranked schools are looking to create online components of their programs that are on par with traditional on-campus offerings. Two examples include the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, ranked 19th, and Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, tied for 23rd this year.
As always, those of us at Clear Admit encourage prospective applicants to use rankings as just one component in a thorough investigation of schools and programs when trying to assess where to apply. To access the complete U.S. News 2012 Best Business Schools rankings, click here.
Read the full article: Stanford Graduate School of Business Edges Out Harvard Business School in U.S. News’s 2010 Rankings