Our MBA Ranking of the Top 50 Business Schools in the U.S.

There are significant and telling flaws in every MBA ranking, no matter where it comes from or how it is put together. The vast disparities in rank across the major rankings shows that where a school ranks is more a function of the methodology than any overall indication of quality. That’s why we carefully studied the pros and cons of each ranking, weighted each of them based on their authority and credibility, and then used all of those inputs to come up with our own ranking.

The beauty of this methodology is that each of the five major MBA rankings—BusinessWeek, U.S. News & World Report, Financial Times, Forbes, and The Economist—are brought together for the very first time. By blending these rankings using a system that takes into account each of their strengths as well as their flaws, we’ve come up with what is arguably the best and most reliable ranking of MBA programs ever published.

This composite index also naturally accommodates some of the wild disparities that you find from one survey to the next. Consider the University of California’s excellent Anderson School of Management. The Economist ranks it 50th, well behind L.A. rival the University of Southern California and the University of Notre Dame. The Financial Times puts UCLA at 33rd. BusinessWeek rates it 14th, U.S. News at 15th, and Forbes at 19th. Those are some pretty big differences of opinion on UCLA’s Anderson School. We think it’s the 16th best school in the U.S., a rank that is the sum total of all of them, adjusted for the authority we believe the major rankings have. For our critique of the major rankings and the reasoning behind the weights we applied to each, see our ranking of the rankings.

Harvard, Stanford, Chicago, Wharton and Dartmouth Rank At the Top

To some long-time watchers of MBA education, there may be little surprise at seeing the Harvard Business School and Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business at the very top as No. 1 and No. 2. The most influential ranking by BusinessWeek, however, has never had either Harvard or Stanford in the top spot. Through 11 rankings over 22 years, BusinessWeek has awarded that accolade to Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management five times, to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School four times, and to the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business twice. In the global MBA rankings published by The Financial Times, Harvard last ranked first back in 2005. Since then, Harvard has lost out to Wharton (four times in a row) and to London Business School (in the current 2010 FT ranking). The highest rank Stanford has ever achieved in The Financial Times ranking is third and that was four years ago in 2007. Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, which is penalized in some surveys due to its smaller size, comes in a strong fifth in the P&Q ranking.

But the power of this newest ranking by Poets&Quants is that it awards consistency across the various surveys, eliminates the greatest anomalies in any one ranking, and takes advantage of the largest amount of qualitative and quantitative data ever compiled in a single study of the best business schools. One problem we could not overcome: it was impossible to make this a true global ranking because BusinessWeek and Forbes separate international schools (with Forbes carving up the overseas market into one-year MBA programs and two-year MBA programs), U.S. News doesn’t rate any non-U.S. institutions, and the Financial Times and The Economist mix them. The lack of standardization across the surveys prevents a fair and credible blending of non-U.S. schools. However, it is possible to rank the non-U.S. schools separately, and that’s what we did in our list of the top 30 non-U.S. business schools.

Differences in Rank Can Be Statistically Insignificant

Unlike the majority of rankings, we also give you our index numbers, which gives you an understanding of how far ahead or behind one school is over another. In many cases, the differences are so slim that they are statistically insignificant, yet most of the organizations that rank schools hide this data from you. So you can see that Wharton at an index number of 95.6 is only 1.2 percentage points behind Chicago in this ranking. Showing you index numbers provides you with the analytical context to better make decisions on which schools to apply to and which schools to say yes when accepted. The index numbers reveal where the statistical differences are so slim as to matter very little, if at all.