The Ross School of Business' new ultra-modern building in Ann Arbor, Mich.

Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and Michigan’s Ross School of Business may very well be more similar to each other than any other two top schools. They attract similar applicants–outgoing, highly collaborative, super smart, down-to-earth. They have similar program strengths, outside of Kellogg’s number one status in marketing. They attract similar corporate recruiters to campus, and grads from both schools tend to go into the same industries by nearly the exact same percentages. The only exception is that Kellogg produces a higher percentage of consultants than Ross.

There are some important differences between these schools, however, not least of which is the challenge for Ross of being near Detroit, one of America’s most troubled cities. “The single biggest misconception about Ross is that we’re all about the auto industry,” says Gene Anderson, senior associate dean of academic affairs. “What happened for us is we’ve gone from being a strong regional school to a strong national school. We now want to get a place in the group of really world-class premier schools.”

The most dramatic differences between these two MBA educational giants?

Geography: Ann Arbor, Mich., and Evanston, Ill., might not immediately come to mind as centers of culture or business. But they are among the most appealing college towns you’ll ever encounter, close American equivalents to Cambridge and Oxford. Evanston has the advantage of being just a 30-minute train ride from the heart of Chicago, one of American’s greatest cities. Chicago is an exciting place to be, with lots of music and cultural attractions. It’s a major advantage for Kellogg, though the downside is obvious: the winters can be absolutely brutal. Ann Arbor, of course, is a quick ride from Detroit, sadly a depressed and declining city that has seen better times.

Size: Michigan and Northwestern have among the biggest MBA programs in the world. Kellogg has a full-time MBA enrollment of 1,241 students, while Ross is slighly smaller, with 910. At either place, there’s a lot going on, from part-time MBA and Executive MBA programs to significant executive education programming. Ross also has a large undergraduate population of nearly 1,100 students. Bottom line: these are not small-scale, intimate settings where there is total focus on the MBA as there would be at Dartmouth’s Tuck School, Stanford, or a few other schools that rank lower.

The "Davidson Winter Garden" has become the gathering place for Ross community.

Culture: Despite its much larger size, Kellogg has managed to create a smart and down-to-earth community that is nearly as close-knit as Stanford or Dartmouth. Students are deeply engaged in every aspect of the school and deeply collaborative with each other. There are many reasons for this difference but probably the most influential one is the fact that Kellogg interviews every applicant to the school so that interpersonnel skills get greater attention than a many other schools. Put highly intelligent, yet friendly and outgoing people together, and you’re going to get a strong culture that approximates a sense of family. Ross isn’t quite Kellogg, but it also isn’t nearly as competitive as some of the top urban schools. “Ross has always had a strong collaborative culture and a willingness to try new things,” says Anderson, who has been at Michigan for 22 years. “You can see it in the way the students interact with each other. It’s a comfortable atmosphere. It’s a friendly place. People are willing to help each other. At some schools, the culture follows an eat-the-wounded credo. That’s not true here.”

Facilities: In early 2009, Ross moved into a brand new 270,000 square-foot, world-class building with 270,000 square foot of very modern space. The new place gives Ross a 320-seat auditorium, a 7,200 square-foot fitness center, along with a dozen tiered, u-shaped classrooms. Yet, the most striking feature of the structure is the “Davidson Winter Garden,” or town square that serves as a gathering place for everyone in the Ross community. “In a way,” says Anderson, “it’s architecture following culture. It creates an enviornment where the whole place comes together: students, faculty and staff.” The school knocked down three buildings to get this one new centerpiece, with about 90,000 additional square footage. In all, the Ross School has six buildings on the University of Michigan campus. The Kellogg School, in contrast, is largely housed in two connected buildings built in 1972, Arthur Andersen Hall and Leverone Hall. A six-story addtion was added to the northeast of Andersen Hall in 2001. Now known as the Donald Jacobs Center, it’s a compact and efficient facility that could use more updating.  A separate executive education facility, the James Allen Center, is a short walk away on Lake Michigan.

Teaching Methods: At both schools, there’s a fairly strong mix of lectures, case studies, experiential learning and simulation. One of the big overall differences between Kellogg and Ross goes to the root of the Kellogg culture: collaborative team work. You would be hard pressed to find a school that requires more work in different teams across the entire two-year experience than Kellogg. Sure, almost all the schools talk the teamwork and collaboration game these days. But Kellogg was the first major business school to make working in teams a core part of the MBA experience. It remains a profound difference between Kellogg and just about every other school. “Part of what makes Kellogg different,” says Dean Sally Blount, “is what is underneath the words ‘team’ and ‘collaborative.’ It’s about making everyone in the room more productive. We get ahead in the world by having everyone win, not by eating someone’s lunch.” That’s what the Kellogg difference is about. The average Kellogg grad will have been in roughly 200 team meetings by the time he or she graduates. Each student grades his fellow teammates on most of the group work and those grades go to the professor so there are no free rides. Some Kellogg grads actually think that the school puts too much emphasis on teamwork and not enough on independent thinking and study, but they tend to be in the minority. Adds former Kellogg Dean Dipak Jain: “I always believed that attitude is the best indicator of aptitude, how high someone will rise. At Kellogg, we bring in people who are best at working with each other and it makes a a difference.”

Kellogg's Don Jacobs Center at Northwestern University.

Program Focus: The most obvious difference is that Kellogg has long been known as the business school for marketing. In U.S. News & World Report’s latest survey of B-school deans and directors, Kellogg takes first place in marketing (Michigan is eighth), third place in general management (Michigan is a strong sixth directly behind Wharton and Dartmouth), seventh place in finance (Michigan is 12th). In entrepreneurship, the survey shows Michigan in 12th place direclty behind Northwestern which is in 11th place. It should be noted, however, that only .5% of the Class of 2009 at Ross started their own companies straight from school (compared to 10% at Stanford). in non-profit management, Northwestern is rated fourth, while Michigan is sixth, and in production/operations, Northwestern is considered fourth, with Michigan right behind it at fifth. The only specialty area of study where Michigan beats Northwestern is international business where the Ross school is ranked fourth, behind Thunderbird, Wharton, and the University of South Carolina, and Kellogg is ranked 13th. These are exceptionally strong showings for Michigan, which almost beats every other public university business school in every key specialty.

Curriculum: At Kellogg, the incoming class is divided into cohorts of some 65 students, each dubbed a specific name, from “Poets” and “Cash Cows” to “Jive Turkeys” and “Bucket Heads.” You can opt out of one of the nine fundamental courses in the core and take a higher-level offering, a so-called turbo class, but you pretty much move through the core curriculum with your section. About half of Kellogg’s students waive at least one course. The schools’ offerings are based on the quarter system in which you’ll take between three and five courses per quarter. Kellogg requires a minimum of 24.5 courses. Again, the key differentiator in the Kellogg experience is teamwork and collaboration which is pushed to the maximum. At Ross, incoming students are divied up into six cohorts and go through a set menu of courses together for the first semester and a half. You can waive out of some of these coures but few do other than CPAs who duck the basic accounting course (about 20% of Ross students waived accounting last year). At Ross, each semester is 14 weeks long and then also divided into seven-week mini-terms.

More importantly, the single biggest difference from the Ross perspective is its unique (and this is truly one-of-a-kind) emphasis on so-called “action learning.” After going through the core curriculum, every full-time MBA student is assigned to a five-person team and then lent to a company and a project that starts in the third week of January. There are 150 possible projects to choose from, with a bewildering array of global companies, for the 500 first-year students. This isn’t part of a course and the experience is not optional, as it often is at other business schools. It’s mandatory, intense, all-consuming, and occupies your complete time for seven straight weeks. Each team has two faculty advisers who act as coaches on the project. Some second-year students are assigned to help with team dynamics. In 2010, Google had the most popular project: 246 of the 497 students asked to be assigned to the Google team which had to come up with a strategy and plan for Google to successfully launch a new product in the European and East African markets. The logistics of pulling this off, with companies as varied as Amazon, Citigroup, Colgate-Palmolive, Barclays, General Electric, and Hershey’s, among others, in places as farflung as Peru, Malaysia, Italy, India and South Africa, among others, represents as huge an investment as any business school has ever made to create a truly differentiated experience for MBAs. Ross has four full-time staffers on this one part of the MBA program, while 35 faculty members are involved in advising the student teams and another 10 professors offer support to improve the presentations and deliverables for the client companies. Needless to say, this is Ross’ secret weapon (not only providing a unique MBA experience to students but helping to get more companies interested in the school’s grads), just as the mandatory application interviews at Kellogg have had an outsized impact on getting some of the best student material available in the world).

Kellogg School of Management. Photo by John A. Byrne.

On-Campus Recruiting: Both Kellogg and Ross attract the top MBA corporate recruiters in the world and, just as importantly, both schools have best-in-class career services offices to help with job searches. Getting an MBA at either school will expose you to an amazing array of world-class companies that actively recruit large numbers of MBAs. Outside of consulting, which draws a much higher percentage of Kellogg grads, the stats are remarkably similar in terms of what industries grads from both schools enter. Frankly, the biggest surprise is that Ross has been able to pull off in Ann Arbor. Everyone knows the decline of Detroit has put the regional economy in a tough place. You’d think that would impact recruiting at Ross to at least some extent. It has–but only in the positive. Ross’ career services staff has done an exceptional job at diversifying the recruiters who come to the school, even attracting a large number of high-tech companies including Amazon, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, Dell Computer, and Genentech. Ross also does well on the consumer marketing side, with 11% of its class going into that industry–roughly the same percentage that Kellogg puts into consumer marketing despite Kellogg’s number one marketing strength. After consulting (which takes one in four students) and high tech (which takes a surprisingly high 17%), consumer marketing is the third most popular employer at Ross. Finance has much less allure at most these schools: At both Kellogg and Ross, financial services, including investment banking, private equity, and securities firms, hired just 15% of the grads. Part of this can be explained by the financial collapse, however, because at Kellogg alone the percentage of grads going into investment banking fell to only 5% from 12% a year earlier. Kellogg MBAs also seem to do extremely well with the top management consulting firms, including McKinsey, Bain, BCG and Booz, probably because of the high level of interpersonnel skills Kellogg MBAs are known for thanks to those mandatory application interviews. In fact, consulting as an industry hired 38% of Kellogg’s Class of 2009.

Alumni Network: You can’t go wrong by having an MBA degree stamped by either of these schools. That punched ticket allows you entree to very strong alumni networks that will help you throughout your career. Realistically, you can’t expect hese networks to boast the strength or support of the very best, which exist at Dartmouth, Harvard, and Stanford, but they are very good. Kellogg has an edge, given the extreme amount of bonding that goes on in its MBA experience. Kellogg claims about 50,000 alums (a number that includes everyone). Ross boasts more than 40,600 alums in 89 countries, and has more than 50 alumni clubs, in cities ranging from Boston and Hartford to Phoenix and Seattle, as well as in 25 countries. Kellogg has more than 90 alumni clubs spread across the U.S. and the world in some 50 countries. In Texas, Kellogg has three clubs in Dallas, Houston, and Austin, while the Ross club is centered in Austin alone. We can’t vouch for how active and engaged these clubs are, but Kellogg alums have shown a greater degree of support for hanging together in more places over the years. Kellogg alums even have their own Twitter feed.

Rankings:

In the latest rankings, Kellogg has beaten Ross fairly decisively across every major poll in recent years. BusinessWeek’s customer satisfaction methodology clearly favors Ross, which gets its best ranking of all at number five from BusinessWeek. That’s an important vote of confidence for students who want to insure that they come away with a blockbuster MBA experience. On the other hand, the school tends to trail on other quality indicators as seen by its showing especially in the U.S. News and Forbes polls. The P&Q rank–which factors into consideration all the major rankings weighted by their individual authority–puts Kellogg at number 7 and Ross at number 12, largely because the other rankings bring Michigan down a few pegs. These are the up-to-date rankings from each ranking organization.

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Historical Rankings by BusinessWeek:

The Kellogg School has had an extraordinary good run over the 22-year period of BusinessWeek rankings as pointed out above. When BusinessWeek began ranking business schools, Kellogg debuted at number one. and held onto that spot for the following six years, regaining the number one title for two straight surveys in 2002 and 2004. Kellogg has bested Michigan in every single year with only one exception. In 1996, Michigan edged out Northwestern by just one spot when Ross was number two and Kellogg was number three. In any case, Michigan has done extraordinarily well in this survey. It’s the only public university to remain competitive with private business schools.

Historical Rankings by The Financial Times:

Unlike BusinessWeek’s rankings, The Financial Times includes business schools from all over the world. So the FT is ranking both Michigan and Northwestern against such places as London Business School, which ranked number one in this survey in 2010 and 2009, and INSEAD, which ranked fifth these last two years. Neither U.S. school has fared all that well in the FT rankings, compared to how well these institutions tend to perform in BusinessWeek, U.S. News, and Forbes. Nonetheless, Kellogg has beaten Ross ten out of the last 11 surveys  by the Financial Times. Only once did Ross manage to tie Kellogg and that was in 2007. The worst performance ever turned in my Ross was in 2004 when the FT ranked the school 30th. It’s best showing? In 2006, when the school was ranked 14th. Kellogg has turned in very weak performances in recent years with its lowest FT rank ever in 2010 at number 22. We wouldn’t take this all too seriously: The FT survey has had some head-scratching results over the years. Instituto de Empresa in Spain, for example, is ranked the sixth best school in the world by the newspaper. Eight years earlier, it was ranked 35th. Meantime, Hong Kong’s UST, ranked 9th by the Financial Times in 2010, had a rank of 69 in 2004. These wild swings in the rankings undermine their credibility and authority.

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Admissions:

These are both highly selective business schools, with Kellogg accepting fewer than 20% of its applicants and Ross saying yes to fewer than 24% of those who apply.

Kellogg received 5,545 applications for the Class of 2011, while Ross got 2,697 applications. It’s worth noting that the average GMAT score for Kellogg’s entire applicant pool is an extraordinarily high 700. For admits to the Class of 2011 at Kellogg, it’s 706–just five points higher than Ross’ average. The GMAT ranges for each school is based on the 80th percentile which is how both schools report the data.

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Enrollment:

Both Kellogg and Ross are major MBA schools with large enrollments. Of the top business schools, only Harvard, Wharton and Columbia have total full-time enrollments that exceed Northwestern. Those schools plus Chicago are the only business schools that have more full-time MBA students than Ross. Once you add the sizable part-time MBA programs that both Kellogg and Ross offer, as well as Ross’ undergraduate student population, these two institutions are even larger than Harvard, Wharton and Columbia. Kellogg enrolls slightly more full-timers than Ross, 1,241 vs. 910. The numbers below are for the Class of 2011.

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Poets & Quants:

The poets are greatly outnumbered at both these schools. Other rivals have managed to get a better balance which is surprising given the softer, general management reputation that these two schools have in the marketplace. With only 18% of its students with humanities undergraduate degrees, Kellogg has among the least number of poets of all the major business schools. That’s a bit shocking due to the reputation that Kellogg MBAs have for having high interpersonnel skills. Obviously, the fact that Kellogg interviews all its applicants pays off. Ross is just a sliver of a percentage point higher.

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Jobs and Pay:

The severe recession of 2009 wrecked a bit of havoc in Ann Arbor and Evanston. Northwestern and Chicago hard as it did all the best business schools. More than a third of the graduates lacked jobs at graduation at Ross, while things weren’t much better at Kellogg with 32% of the grads unemployed at commencement. Kellogg grads recovered more quickly than those from Ross, by a full nine percentage points three months after graduation. In both the short-term and the long-term, Kellogg MBAs tend to do better than those from Ross–but the real difference shows up over a lifetime career. The gap between a Kellogg and Ross grad is more than half a million dollars! The estimates of median pay over both 20 years and a full career come from a study by PayScale done for BusinessWeek and do not include stock options or equity stakes by entrepreneurs.

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Who Hires Who:

Michigan’s Ross School has done an exceptional job of getting a wide range of corporate recruiters to come to Ann Arbor to recruit its students. You might think that because Detroit is ailing, the Ross School would be on the ropes as well. Even though General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler recruited a combined three MBAs in 2009, a surprisingly broad group of companies more than offset the gap. Surprisingly, technology companies seem to love Ross MBAS: Amazon and Microsoft hired 10 each in 2009, Dell brought abroad 9 MBAs from the school, Cisco Systems hired a half dozen grads, and biotech leader Genentech took four MBAs. Those stats show that a Michigan MBA can open the doors to a prestige job in technology–not something that many schools in the midwest can claim. On the other hand, Kellogg predictably does a bit better with the highest paying and most prestigious traditional MBA employers. McKinsey scooped up 26 grads from Kellogg vs. 10 at Ross, Boston Consulting Group carried away 23 Kellogg MBAs vs. five from Ross, and Monitor Group took five from Kellogg and not a soul from Michigan. NA does not necessarily mean that a company didn’t hire any graduates from Kellogg, but rather that the number of grads it did hire was fewer than four.

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