Ten Biggest Surprises In Businessweek’s 2023-2024 MBA Ranking

5) Short-Term vs. Long-Term: Which Do You Prefer?

We have always believed that any one ranking is an imperfect snapshot of a moment in time. Schools go up, and schools go down. Anomalies are inevitable when you are dealing with lots of disparate data.  That’s why we prefer looking long-term at how an MBA program fares over time.

Looking back on a historical basis, from the launch of the Businessweek ranking in 1988 to the present, only six business schools have occupied the No. 1 rank over the 22 individual rankings published by the magazine. Stanford Graduate School of Business and Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management lead the pack, each achieving the top rank five times (see table below). Wharton and Chicago Booth follow, with four No. 1 rankings, followed by Harvard, with three, and Duke Fuqua with one.

Harvard Business School, however, has done much better when looking at the schools that have reached a Top 3 rank over all those years. HBS achieved a Top 3 listing 15 out of the 22 rankings, more than any other MBA program. It was closely followed by Chicago Booth (13), and Wharton and Kellogg (12 each).

So if you are in the long-term camp–and you buy into the magazine’s ranking logic–you might agree that the schools on the table below are the best MBA programs in the U.S. Well, that’s if you think the Businessweek ranking over time has had more credibility than it does now.

Schools With The Most #1 & Top 3 Ranks in Businessweek’s MBA Rankings

Source: Poets&Quants analysis of Bloomberg Businessweek MBA rankings from 1988 to 2023
* Bloomberg Businessweek began ranking annually in 2015, skipping 2020 due to the pandemic

Darden MBA students arrive for a new academic year

6) The Ascendence Of The Darden School Of Business

If any school deserved to bring out the champagne over this ranking, it was the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. Ranked third in a tie with Tuck, Darden’s MBA program gained its highest Businessweek ranking ever, a third-place tie with Tuck. The highest Darden had ever gotten in the Businessweek ranking was fifth place in 1996. As recently as 2017, the school’s MBA program ranked 17th.

How did Darden do it? Among the Top Ten MBA programs, the highest-scoring school in learning was UVA Darden, ranking fourth overall in the category. Darden’s rise to third place in the overall ranking can be attributed to gains in three categories: Darden rose to fourth in compensation (up six places from tenth), fourth in learning (up six places from tenth) and 11th in networking (up 11 places from 22nd). Businessweek said that “The big move was a result of recent alumni reporting higher starting salaries upon graduation. Darden’s median starting salary, according to this year’s ranking, of $175,000—up from $144,500—tied with Stanford, Wharton, Booth, Columbia, Dartmouth and Harvard for the highest.”

More important than Businessweek‘s assigned rank is the new-found attention Darden’s No. 3 position puts on what has long been one of the world’s very best MBA experience. Applicants accepted to H/S/W may routinely turn down an invitation from Darden, but the fact is that no business school can claim to have better and more consistent teaching in MBA classrooms than Darden. Survey after survey over many years has shown that Darden has the best MBA teaching faculty in the world. It is one of the precious few business schools where teaching prowess is cultivated and awarded, at times above scholarly research.

That’s why Darden has won, for ten straight years, the top U.S. ranking for educational experience in the now-retired MBA rankings published by The Economist. It is also why the school secured the most Top 10 rankings of any business school in The Princeton Review’s annual assessment earlier this year.