Top Ten Most Viewed Business School Stories Of 2015

8. The MOOC Revolution: How To Earn An Elite MBA Education For Free

The rush by many of the world’s most prominent business schools to put some of their best professors and courses online for free in the form of MOOCs–the acronym for massive open online courses–has made it possible for students to earn the equivalent of an MBA for free. Wharton now has 18 separate MOOC courses, including all the foundational education that is the core of an MBA curriculum and there are dozens of elective courses available in areas like finance, marketing, and sustainability (far more electives, in fact, than would be available in a pricey Executive MBA program).

7. Highest & Lowest Paid MBAs of 2014

What’s the upper limit on MBA pay, the biggest number an MBA from a top business school could command in today’s marketplace? The high end for base salary alone can be nearly three times the median at some schools, according to this analysis of employment reports from the top business schools. But if you take into account sign-on bonuses and other year-end guaranteed compensation, the highest total compensation packages can easily reach half a million dollars. For the Class of 2014, the highest pay went to a Wharton MBA who received $350,000 in “other guaranteed compensation”–a number that exceeded every reported base salary for the year.

6. Class of 2015: The World’s Best & Brightest MBAs

In the first of what will be an annual Poets&Quants feature, we identified and profiled the year’s most promising MBA graduates. The best of the Class of 2015 turned out to be a rich and widely diverse group of talented young professionals who upend the stereotypes that MBAs are detached quants and sharp-elbowed climbers. They were former marines, athletes, actors, and lawyers. They have managed charities just as often as they’ve worked on Wall Street – and some have done both. And perhaps the biggest surprise of all is that women formed a solid majority of the 50 graduates on the list, 27 women to the 23 men, at a time when males typically outnumber females two to one on business school campuses.

Harvard Business School across the Charles River

5. The M7: The Super Elite Business Schools By The Numbers

The M7 is the informal super elite group of seven private business schools generally considered to have the world’s best MBA programs. If you’re in business, you know their names: Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Kellogg, Booth, Columbia, and MIT Sloan. You can quibble forever over whether the Magnificent 7 really should be the Terrific 10, with Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, UC-Berkeley’s Haas School, and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business thrown in for good measure. But this guide to the best is a handy glimpse into the truly elite group of MBA experiences.