Top Ten Business School Stories Of 2013

5. Guide To The Best One-Year MBA Programs

— If you’re intent on picking up your MBA in a single year, your options of attending one of the very best schools in the world narrow considerably. In the U.S., for example, only nine of the top 100 business schools ranked by Poets&Quants offer one-year options. In Europe, where the 12-month degree is more common, there are far more opportunities to get a quickie MBA at a prestigious school, from INSEAD to IE Business School in Madrid, Spain. So if you really want to compress the learning in 12 months, this is the very best guide to the top schools that offer accelerated programs.

6. Where Six-Figure Pay Is A Done Deal

— Let’s face it. While learning the ins and outs of business is a critical part of the MBA experience, most applicants are going to business school in search of a meaningful career and higher pay. So going to an MBA program where students graduate into six-figure compensation packages is both a lure and an objective for many applicants. After all, money talks and BS walks. Here is our guide to the schools that pretty much guarantee base pay and sign-on bonus of $100,000 and up for graduates. It may surprise you that there are nearly 40 schools in the U.S. where that is the case.

7. Social Entrepreneurship: The Best Schools & Programs

— One very important trend in recent years has been the versatility of the MBA degree. People who get it can do a wide variety of things with the education and an increasing number of graduates are going into the social sector. They are launching their own social enterprises or joining existing organizations with explicit social missions, whether they are non-profits or hybrids. That’s why our guide to the business schools that do the best job in social entrepreneurship is such a popular read.

8. The Worst MBA Placement Records of 2012

— We do far more best lists than worst lists, but this one seems to get everyone’s attention: Which top-rated business schools suffer the dubious distinction of being among the schools with the worst record in placing their graduates into jobs. Obviously, no school wants to be on this list which we update annually. Yet, figures don’t lie and in this case they are absolutely shocking. There are prominent business schools ranked by U.S. News & World Report and other organizations where as many as seven or eight out of ten graduates don’t have jobs at commencement.

9. Harvard Business School vs. Stanford Graduate School of Business

— When we launched Poet&Quants in August of 2010, one of the unusual features on the site was a series of smackdowns between peer business schools. Not surprisingly, our smackdown analysis of Harvard vs. Stanford, the two schools that attract the most applicants year after year, is one of the most viewed. The fact that it is still among the top ten reads reminds us of the need to both update all of the existing smackdowns and to add considerably to this genre of story at Poets&Quants. Rest assured, the new year will bring a new emphasis on our highly popular smackdown series.

10. University of Chicago Booth School of Business vs. Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management

— Yet another smackdown closes out our list of the top ten stories on Poets&Quants for 2013. This analysis is of two of the great rivals in business education in the Chicago market–the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. The full-time MBA programs of these two world-class institutions have distinct personalities and cultures and tend to attract substantially different people to them. Yet, they are fierce competitors as well for the best and brightest.

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