10 Biggest Surprises In The 2018 Bloomberg Businessweek MBA Ranking

University of Pittsburgh’s Katz Graduate School of Business

2. The Most Undervalued MBA Programs In This Years’ Businessweek Ranking

At first glance, many of the numerical rankings assigned to schools by Businessweek can appear to be reasonable. What you really need to do is compare how these programs rank on this list with others. To do that, we took the top 50 schools according to Businessweek and juxtaposed them against Poets&Quants’ composite ranking which brings together all five of the most influential rankings weighted by our own view of each system’s credibility. We looked for the biggest gaps to identify the most undervalued programs by Businessweek.

The gaps expose ranks placed on schools by Businessweek that are clearly outliers. Their ranks are a misrepresentation of the true intrinsic quality of the MBA program at a business school. We consider a five-point gap to be significant enough to state unequivocally that the rank has questionable merit. Discard or at the very least discount what Businessweek appears to be telling you about the quality of the school and its MBA experience.

The most undervalued schools include publics and privates, some that might be on your target list of where to go. They range from such elite private players as Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business and the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business to such stellar publics as Michigan State’s Broad College of Business and Ohio State University’s Fisher School of Business. The biggest gap among the top 50 schools? It’s the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz Graduate School of Business. Businessweek ranks its MBA program a lowly 53 vs. the P&Q composite of 29, a gap of 24 places.

Howard University

3. The Most Overvalued MBA Programs By Businessweek

At the risk of offending a very good group of business schools who are basking in their Bloomberg Businessweek ranking, we have to do the flip side of the undervalued analysis. Naturally, you can look at this in two very different ways. On the positive side, you can argue that Businessweek discovered some hidden value in these programs. On the other hand, because Businessweek’s more upbeat view of these programs runs counter to most rankings you can say that the magazine is just plain wrong.

Adopt whatever perspective you wish to have on this. We believe these business schools are overvalued by Businessweek’s ranking (but also want to remind you that we are still talking about the top 1% of all MBA programs).

We applied the same analysis we used for the undervalued list, looking for the biggest gaps between our composite ranking and Businessweek. The single biggest gap was huge: 61 places for Howard University’s School of Business. Businessweek‘s ranking claims Howard is the 33rd best MBA program in the U.S. The Poets&Quants composite ranking places it 94th.

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