University of Chicago's Booth School of Business

3. University of Chicago

Booth School of Business

5807 South Woodlawn Avenue
Chicago, IL 60637
Admissions: 773-702-7369
Email: admissions@chicagobooth.edu
Website: www.ChicagoBooth.edu/fulltime
Apply Online: http://www.chicagobooth.edu/fulltime/admissions/index.aspx

Admission Deadlines for Class of 2014:
Round One: 10/11/11
Round Two: 1/4/12
Round Three: 4/4/12

The mantra of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business is it’s all about the idea. Students focus on generating, analyzing, comparing and refining ideas in order to elevate them to better ideas.

The full-time MBA program consists of 20 classes plus Leadership Effectiveness and Development (LEAD). The flagship of the program is its flexible curriculum. Unlike many other top schools with lockstep first-year MBA programs, Booth pretty much requires MBAs to go through one course together–its leadership exercise in LEAD. Otherwise, students design a program tailored to fit their own career goals. There are still several required courses in the four major components that make up the flexible curriculum: foundation courses that focus on developing analytical tools and knowledge that support the rest of the curriculum, but they are chosen among a menu of options.

In 2009, after a faculty review of the curriculum, the school added a new academic concentration in analytical management. and also require all students in the evening MBA program and weekend MBA program to take a leadership development course similar to one required of full-time students.

In addition to analytic management, the school’s 14^th concentration, students can graduate with an academic focus in accounting, econometrics and statistics, economics, entrepreneurship and finance. Other choices are analytic finance, general management, human resource management, international business, managerial and organizational behavior, marketing management, operations management and strategic management.

Graduation requirements for students in the full-time MBA program include nine required courses, 11 electives and a leadership course, though in 2009 more approved substitute classes have been added to satisfy the nine required courses. To meet the 11 elective requirements students can choose from several hundred courses at the business school and other departments of the University.

Some of the new courses added since the curriculum review in the required portion of the program are more rigorous, an adjustment made to account for the more varied group of students entering the mainstream MBA program. The school added a hybrid finance class containing five weeks of corporate finance and five weeks of investments, for example, that is much more difficult than the standard finance or investment courses.

The three foundation areas of accounting, microeconomics and statistics remained the same through the curriculum review. But the requirement to take breadth and general management courses is replaced by selecting classes representing functions (finance, marketing, and operations), management (decisions, people, and organizations), and the environment in which firms operate.

Latest Up-to-Date MBA Rankings:

Poets&Quants: 3
BusinessWeek (2010): 1
Forbes (2011): 4
U.S. News & World Report (2011): 5
Financial Times (2011): 12 (Global), 9 (U.S.)
The Economist (2011): 2 (Global & U.S.)

Rankings Analysis:

Booth maintained its No. 3 P&Q ranking in 2011, after debuting at that highly coveted spot on the inaugural P&Q list a year earlier. But the school’s P&Q rank tells only a small part of the Booth success story. While the school still ranks third as it did in our last ranking, it has gained significant ground. The index score for Booth this year is 98.5, just .3 behind Stanford Graduate School of Business. A year ago, the difference in the index score between Stanford and Chicago was twice that level. If Poets&Quants kept its methodology the same, Chicago would would have nudged aside Stanford as the No. 2 school in the ranking. Because P&Q decreased the weight of BusinessWeek’s ranking (to 25% from 30%) and increased the weight of U.S. News’ ranking (to 25% from 20%), Stanford maintained its 2010 position.

The school improved its standing in the 2011 biennial Forbes list to third from fourth place in 2009, but also slipped one spot from first to second. Much of the school’s improvement in the rankings can be traced to the previous Dean Edward “Ted” Snyder who had a highly successful nine-year run in the job from 2001 to 2010.

The year before Snyder arrived in 2001, Booth had sunk to a lowly rank of 10 in the BW survey, which largely measures student and corporate recruiter satisfaction with the MBA program. By 2006, it captured the number one spot and it has never given it up, coming out on top three consecutive times. A big test will occur in 2012 when BusinessWeek comes out with its new ranking. It will be fascinating to see if the new dean, Sunil Kumar, an academic from Stanford,  is able to extend that record.

Pages: 1 2