How A Dean Would Rank Business Schools

When you add all four metrics together–applications per available seat, yield rates, average pay and job offers–you get a fuller view of the best schools based on Hubbard’s input-and-output formula. There are essentially two ways to blend the results. Most often, existing rankings apply a score to the numerical rank of an MBA program in each metric so that the number one program in pay would get a score of 100 and the number two would get a score of 99. That system fails to take into account the full difference in pay, or any other metric, among the schools. An MBA program that has a more significant lead over its competitors, such as Stanford in applications per class seat, should be given more credit for having a meaningful statistical difference over its rivals. So we’ve added these metrics together in a way that more accurately gets at the differences among the schools in each category (more detail on our methodology is on the last page).

The results? As Hubbard predicted, the schools that generally dominated the upper-tier list of MBA programs is fully present and solidly positioned under this new ranking system. In fact, Stanford and Harvard simply duplicate their ordering in Poets&Quants’ 2014 ranking. But after that, the results become far more interesting and revealing. The schools that gain considerable ground include MIT Sloan, UC-Berkeley, New York University, UCLA and the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business.

MIT jumps to third from a rank of seven in Poets&Quants’ latest composite ranking, while UC-Berkeley’s Haas School rises to fourth from tenth. The single biggest rise, however, goes to the Washington’s Foster School which leaps to a rank of 12th, ahead of Yale, Cornell, Michigan, and Texas, from 23rd.

The schools that lose some status by the inputs-outputs ranking system include Wharton, Chicago Booth, Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, Duke University’s Fuqua School, and the University of Michigan’s Ross School. Wharton slips just one spot but that slight fall puts it behind MIT and Berkeley. Chicago drops four places to eighth place, while Northwestern falls five places to 11th.

And what of Hubbard’s Columbia Business School. The dean’s methodology results in a one-place drop from the composite ranking. Columbia is sixth, between Wharton above it and NYU Stern just behind it. Of course, Hubbard could do the actual ranking somewhat differently. But the way we’ve crunched the numbers suggested by him certainly appear to make the most sense.

A New Ranking Of The Top Business Schools

School	Index	P&Q Rank	Apps per seat	Yield	Pay	Jobs
1. Stanford	100.0	1	17.9	78.7%	$142,834	92.1%
2. Harvard	91.3	2	10.2	88.8%	$144,750	89.4%
3. MIT	86.2	7	11.7	62.3%	$142,936	92.8%
4. Berkeley	85.3	10	14.4	52.5%	$140,935	86.7%
5. Wharton	82.0	4	7.1	68.0%	$142,574	95.6%
6. Columbia	81.6	5	7.8	70.4%	$139,006	91.1%
7. NYU	79.8	10	11.3	48.7%	$135,933	90.4%
8. Chicago	79.0	4	7.2	59.4%	$137,615	97.2%
8. Tuck	79.0	8	8.7	52.2%	$142,489	93.8%
10. UCLA	78.1	14	11.7	48.2%	$127,535	88.6%
11. Kellogg	77.2	6	6.7	63.9%	$136,357	88.6%
12. Foster	75.9	23	9.8	44.7%	$125,367	95.8%
13. Darden	75.5	13	8.4	45.8%	$136,474	93.4%
14. Duke	75.4	9	7.8	50.9%	$137,154	89.8%
15. Yale	73.9	12	8.5	49.5%	$126,871	88.9%
16. Olin	73.1	24	12.1	30.9%	$111,974	96.9%
17. Cornell	72.8	15	6.3	52.6%	$132,316	89.8%
18. Emory	72.5	20	7.5	43.5%	$128,347	94.8%
18. Michigan	72.5	11	5.5	50.9%	$140,497	89.7%
20. Texas	72.0	19	7.9	44.4%	$126,160	91.3%
21. Tepper	71.4	17	6.9	46.6%	$131,865	88.3%
22. Kelley	68.4	20	6.6	45.6%	$119,581	88.1%
23. UNC	67.6	18	6.8	37.9%	$124,641	89.0%
24. Owen	66.3	25	5.3	44.7%	$113,830	90.8%
25. Georgetown	64.4	22	6.1	34.5%	$118,938	88.5%

Source: P&Q analysis from publicly available data

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