Yale Breaks Into U.S. News’ Top Ten

U.S. News & World Report will publish its newest rankings of the best business schools on Tuesday (March 15), but a “sneak preview” reveals that Yale University’s School of Management has cracked into the top ten.

U.S. News named what it called “the top 10 highest-ranked business schools,” listing them in alphabetical order. The only school on that list that failed to make the top ten last year was Yale, which placed 11th behind Columbia Business School and New York University’s Stern School of Business. The top ten list includes 11 schools “due to ties,” according to U.S. News.

Last year, there were four ties alone among the top ten schools. Only two of the eight–No. 3 MIT Sloan and No. 4 Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management–occupied their places alone.

The magazine’s ranking has been severely criticized recently by Malcolm Gladwell, the bestselling author and New Yorker staff writer. Gladwell lambasted the U.S. News methodology, arguing that it was based on relatively arbitrary judgments about how much different variables should be weighted. He also wrote that asking deans and MBA program directors to rate other schools–the single most important metric U.S. News uses–is less a measure of a school’s reputation than it is a collection of prejudices. Those dean surveys account for a quarter of the final ranking of a business school.

Nonetheless, the U.S. News ranking is a widely watched and followed rating system for graduate business and other schools.

When the new ranking comes out on Tuesday, It’s possible that there will be some reshuffling of the top ten, but otherwise, it’s a familiar list of prominent schools. They include, alphabetically, Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard, MIT, NYU, Northwestern, Stanford, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and then Yale.

Last year, Harvard and Stanford tied for first place in the U.S. News poll, MIT’s Sloan School was third, Northwestern University’s Kellogg School was fourth and Wharton and Chicago Booth were tied at fifth. Next up was Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business which was tied for seventh place with Berkeley’s Haas School. Columbia and NYU were tied at number nine.

U.S. News said it surveyed more than 430 accredited master’s programs in business to come up with its ranking of the top 100 schools. The magazine only ranks U.S.-based schools, unlike BusinessWeek, The Financial Times, or The Economist which publish global rankings, either combined or separate.

The magazine ranks U.S. schools every year, using a vast amount of information and data. The methodology takes into account its own survey of b-school deans and MBA directors (25% of the score), corporate recruiters (15%), starting salaries and bonuses (14%), employment rates at and shortly after graduation (14% to 7%), student GMATs (about 16%), undergrad GPAs (about 8%), and the percentage of applicants who are accepted to a school (a little over 1%).