Stanford Tops Bloomberg Businessweek Best Business Schools 2018 U.S. List

Stanford Graduate School of Business has topped the Bloomberg Businessweek Best Business Schools 2018 ranking for US institutions for the first time in 30 years, moving up four spots from its 5^th rank in the previous year.

The ranking is based on a survey of 26,699 MBA students, alumni and recruiters in 2018 about their goals and experiences. The U.S. rankings are based on their responses, as well as compensation and job-placement data from each school. A full global ranking will be published on December 11.

At the 2^nd place is University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton followed by Harvard Business School at number 3, MIT Sloan number 4, Chicago Booth 5^th, UC at Berkeley (Haas) 6^th, Colombia 7^th, Northwestern Kellogg 8^th, University of Virginia Darden 9^th and Cornell Johnson 10th.

The methodology for this year’s ranking had undergone some changes due to which some schools have moved up several places. Darden had climbed 8 spots and Georgetown McDonough moved up 15 places to rank number 20.

Among those who saw a fall in the rankings, Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business dropped nine spots to rank number 15. Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business too fell 12 places to rank 19.

Changes in Ranking Methodology

Bloomberg Businessweek said, during discussions to update the methodology, it was felt that the best judges of MBA programs would be graduating students, recent alumni and companies that recruit MBAs. The survey sought to find out whether the schools were offering what the millennial students needed if recent graduates were able to leverage what they learnt and tapped into their schools’ networks and what businesses valued most in the recruits.

The survey teams visited 15 business schools, met representatives of MBA programs at the New York headquarters, and interviewed others from schools around the world. “In total, we spoke with deans, professors, administrators, and analysts from 43 schools. Based on our conversations, we set out to create an interactive ranking that would help potential students make one of the most important personal and professional decisions of their lives.

“With the help of the business schools, we surveyed 10,473 students, up 11% from 2017. A total of 15,050 alumni took our survey, an increase of more than 50%. And the number of surveys completed by participating employers who recruit at business schools surged more than fivefold, to 3,698,” it said.

“Our new design is meant to make customization easy. Prospective students can filter school choices by geography, compare schools by the median salaries earned by graduates, and discover where industries recruit their MBA hires and how much they pay them,”

“From the information they provided, along with job-placement and compensation data provided by the schools, we created four indexes: Compensation, Learning, Networking, and Entrepreneurship. These new indexes are the building blocks for our 2018 overall ranking.”

The Bloomberg methodology places most weight on compensation (38.5%) followed by networking (27.9%), learning (23.1%), and entrepreneurship (10.5%).

“Rather than assign the indexes their relative weightings ourselves, as most rankings systems do, we took an approach recommended by the business schools we spoke with: Let the stakeholders decide. So in our surveys, we asked students, alumni, and recruiters what was most important to them. Their answers determined the weightings of each of our indexes. Then, based on our survey results and compensation data, we calculated the overall ranking.

“Our new design is meant to make customization easy. Prospective students can filter school choices by geography, compare schools by the median salaries earned by graduates, and discover where industries recruit their MBA hires and how much they pay them,” Bloomberg-Businessweek said.

Because the new ranking methodology is different from the one we’d used in previous years, it does not allow us to compare these rankings to our 2017 findings.

Stanford captured the first rank on account of its overall score of 100, Compensation 100, Learning 77.3, Networking 100 and Entrepreneurship 100. The 2^nd ranked Wharton had an overall score of 92.6, Compensation 98.5, Learning 61.3, Networking 99.2 and Entrepreneurship 61.1.

Harvard at number 3, had an overall score of 91.9, Compensation 99.3, Learning 54.4, Networking 95.3 and Entrepreneurship 65.0.