Ten Biggest Surprises In The 2023-2024 U.S. News MBA Ranking

5) USC Marshall Starts Delivering On The Promise

USC Marshall’s MBA program is blessed. Los Angeles is packed with startups and tech firms thanks to its Silicon Beach footprint. The school boasts one of the country’s top online and undergrad business programs – a scale that delivers a wealth of subject matter expertise to MBAs. Of course, there is the Trojan Family – an alumni network that is constantly looking to give its successors a leg up in a highly competitive marketplace.

Location, Versatility, Engagement – with those assets, Marshall should be a Top 10 shoo-in, right?

Make no mistake: Marshall has made major strides since Dean Geoffrey Garrett departed the cradle of liberty for the casket of congestion in 2020. This past year, the former dean of the Wharton School saw average GMATs climb to 732, a number comparable to Stanford GSB, Columbia Business School, and the Wharton School. The school has reached gender parity two years straight during his tenure. Of course, the school has deepened its commitment to data-driven, STEM-oriented programming in recent years. Despite this, USC Marshall has suffered from a ‘two steps forward and one step back’ dilemma in U.S. News. It bobbed between 16-17 from 2020-2022, before settling at 19th last year.   

Outside U.S. News, USC Marshall’s rankings have also been decidedly mixed. Since 2018, the school has leaped from 59th to 21st. That said, Marshall ranked 33rd in the final Economist ranking, a major backtrack from being 18th three years earlier. Last year, the school reached 16th in Bloomberg Businessweek – after pinballing from 14th to 22nd to 13th to 30th over the previous four years. In other words, every ranking – regardless of methodology – has struggled to pinpoint exactly where USC Marshall belongs.

The optimist might say the school’s 15th-place finish in the 2024 U.S. News ranking represents a moment of clarity. Considering the school’s ranking history, it’d be hard to fault a pessimistic assessment of this improvement as an aberration. After all, projections that ‘USC Marshall is on the cusp’ have become almost cliché. So let’s look at the glass half full vs. half empty arguments.

Half full: starting pay and bonus have risen from $156,581 to $180,033 in the past two years. And average GMAT has soared by 25 points over the same period. The 90-day placement has also climbed from 91% to 97% between the 2022 and 2024 rankings. More telling, graduation placement has surged from 74.9% to 90.5% since the 2022 ranking. At the same time, the school’s recruiter peer assessment average has moved from 3.6 to 3.8. Together, those four measures account for 75.5% of the U.S. News ranking.

Half empty: Start again with pay. Marshall’s California counterparts, UC Berkeley Haas and UCLA Anderson, pulled in $177,525 and $172,382 – which translates to 18th and 19th among Top 20 MBA programs (with Marshall itself ranking 16th). Translation: regional pay constraints may act as an albatross in a measure that carries a 20% weight. For GMAT, good for a 13% weight, USC Marshall would be hard-pressed to improve nominally beyond 732. The same is true for the school’s 90-day placement rate. Let’s be honest: USC Marshall’s peer and recruiter assessment scores lag behind every school ranked above them (along with a handful of programs ranked below them).

Translation: USC Marshall could be stuck playing defense thanks to a ranking that doesn’t play fully to its strengths. In the end, Marshall could end up like Virginia Darden and Cornell Johnson – programs proverbially hovering between 13th and 15th in U.S. News, never able to crack the exalted Top 10.

There are worse fates for great schools.

 

6) The Top Ten Big Winner: Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business

By almost any measure, the big winner in this year’s MBA ranking is Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business.

Tuck’s prestige MBA program now ranks solidly in the Top Ten, even ahead of several M7 programs, including Stanford Graduate School of Business and Columbia Business School. The school’s MBA program gained five places to rank sixth in the U.S., dislodging UC-Berkeley’s Haas School and Columbia from the Top Ten.

What’s behind the rise? A pair of changes to U.S. News’ methodology. By putting less weight on its peer assessment surveys and more weight on placement and starting pay, Tuck moved ahead of schools that always get more respect from academics and earned more points for its more typically solid career outcomes. When you put MBAs into the market in Hanover, New Hampshire, those students are more likely to seek jobs from mainstream MBA recruiters who come to campus and hire on a set schedule that makes job rates at graduation and three months later look better.

Some 91.4% of last year’s graduating MBAs at Tuck were employed at commencement, a placement rate that was better than any other school in the Top Ten with the exception of Michigan Ross which was only slightly better at 91.8%. In fact, Tuck’s employment rate beat 94 of the Top 100 MBA programs. Three months later, Tuck’s employment rate was an equally impressive 96.5%.

And when it comes to starting salary and bonus, Tuck is one of only seven schools where MBAs reported average pay packages of $190,000 and up. At average pay of $191,712, Tuck grads were only ecliped by Harvard ($198,180), Stanford ($198,032), NYU Stern ($196,143), Chicago Booth ($194,792), and Columbia ($194,363), schools in either urban centers or Silicon Valley–not rural New Hampshire.

Unlike earlier years, the penalty imposed for trailing many peer schools on U.S. News survey scores from deans and senior faculty was much less significant. On peer assessment, for example, Tuck manages only a 4.1, well below the highest score for any school of 4.8 for Harvard Business School and Stanford GSB. It’s a similar story on U.S. News corporate recruiter survey where it scores a 4.3, below Stanford’s 4.7. Yet, Stanford ranks behind Dartmouth Tuck.

All of this is an important reminder that a school’s standing in any ranking is directly dependent on what is meassured and what isn’t. There is no doubt that Tuck offers students among the very best MBA experiences in the world in an intimate residential setting where students bond more deeply than at many peer schools. Neither is there any doubt that Tuck, as a result of that bonding, boasts one of the stongestMBA alumni networks in the world.

But how many applicants would turn down Stanford, Yale, Berkeley or Columbia, all lower ranked schools this year, to go to Tuck?