Year in Review: Poets&Quants’ Most Popular Stories Of 2023

It’s long been known that business schools have a love/hate relationship with MBA rankings. When they go up, you’ll find little complaint. But when they go down, the knives come out.

Well, there will be plenty to love and much to hate in the 2023-2024 composite ranking from Poets&Quants. Few would likely disagree with Stanford’s re-emergence at the top of the list for having the best full-time, residential MBA program in the U.S. After all, Stanford Graduate School of Business has rightly claimed that title five times in the 14 years of the ranking, including four of the last five. And few would likely argue with the No. 2 ranking for Harvard Business School, which has topped our list for seven of the 14 years. But then the surprises come fast and furious.

Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business has its best showing, securing third place, while No. 4 Columbia Business School and No. 5 Yale School of Management also have their best showings ever in this ranking. Rounding out the Top Ten are No. 6 Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, No. 7 Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Business, No. 8 UVA’s Darden School of Business, No. 9 Michigan’s Ross School of Business, and No. 10 New York University’s Stern School of Business. The higher-than-expected ranks for these schools is a testament to their outstanding quality, often diminished in many traditional rankings.

For the very first time in a quarter of a century of rankings, Columbia Business School has captured first place in the Financial Times Global MBA ranking. But the biggest bombshell in the new 2023 ranking is the complete disappearance of The Wharton School, which claimed top honors last year. It’s the most glaring of many surprises on FT ranking which is celebrating its 25th iteration since launching in 1999.

The Financial Times tossed Wharton out of its ranking after it failed to reach the minimum threshold of responses to its alumni survey. While other MBA programs have suffered a similar fate over the years, that has never happened to as prominent an MBA program as Wharton, particularly because the FT‘s survey requirement is a low bar to overcome for a school with ample resources to track and keep in touch with its alums. Wharton’s absence is an embarrassment for both the school and the Financial Times, particularly for a school that has won more No. 1 places on the FT lists than any other business school (see below table). Wharton’s MBA program has topped this list 11 out of the 25 times it has been published. Wharton’s inability to generate enough responses is a sign of the lingering resentment and anger among alumni who believe the school poorly managed the pandemic.

Yet, there are plenty of other surprises on the list. Only four of the M7 business schools made the Top Ten: Columbia in first,  Stanford and Harvard tied in fourth place, while Northwestern Kellogg took ninth. INSEAD lands in second, while IESE Business School in Spain takes third place just ahead of both HBS and the GSB. Italy’s SDA Bocconi, UC-Berkeley Haas and Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Business all make notable jumps into the Top Ten.

In spring 2022, Poets&Quants reported that the window of opportunity to get into a “reach” business school in the United States had narrowed dramatically. Applications were up, acceptance rates were down, and yield — the percentage of admits who actually enroll — was on the rise across the board, all of which suggested that the leading MBA programs had fully recovered from the coronavirus pandemic and were returning to their normal, highly selective selves.

That was an assessment based on 2021 data. With 2022 data available in spring 2023 with the release of the U.S. News MBA ranking, it’s clear that declarations of “the window” closing were a bit premature.

At the elite B-schools of the top 50 U.S. MBA programs as ranked by Poets&Quants, acceptance rates have climbed back up, meaning more applicants are gaining admission even as class sizes have shrunk (in some cases severely). These elite schools (including all of the M7 schools), where applications plummeted in the 2021-2022 cycle, responded by admitting significantly more applicants (and watching their yield slip as more of those applicants enjoyed the luxury of choosing other schools).

If you ever doubted the ROI of an MBA, 2022 should dispel them — though after 2021, you’d be forgiven for having those doubts.

Starting salaries for MBAs graduating from the top 30 business schools flat-lined between 2020, the first year of the coronavirus pandemic, and 2021. But a year later, salaries and signing bonuses are looking robust, with new school records aplenty, whether those B-schools measure in averages or medians.

In 2020, the average starting salary at 18 schools that reported means was $135,874; a year later, that number had actually declined by 0.6% to $135,098. Not good!

But in 2022, the average at 17 schools — minus Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, which switched last year to reporting medians — was $147,648, up $12,550 or 9.3%. Indeed, the MBA had made a dramatic comeback.

U.S. college enrollment numbers are finally rising after years of decline, though the number of first-year students is still down overall since the Covid-19 pandemic. But by one key measure, higher education in the U.S. is thriving: It is still the preferred destination of a huge and growing population of young people around the world who hope to climb the socioeconomic ladder to a better life.

U.S. State Department data show that U.S. colleges have largely rebounded from the Covid enrollment slump: In the first nine months of 2023, the U.S. issued over 372,000 F-1 student visas, compared with 335,000 for the same period of 2022. Thats 11% growth. According to Sasha Ramani, chief strategist at MPOWER Financing, a leading international student loan lender, the U.S. is on track to issue over 460,000 visas during 2023.

“The story in American higher education is empty seats in classrooms,” Ramani tells Poets&Quants. “There are fewer American students in their late teens and twenties who are at university-going age. There’s actually a lot of room to fill those seats with international students, since we also need to fill jobs in healthcare, high-tech, manufacturing — the growth areas in the American labor force.”

Who is Tyler Kelley? That’s tough to pin down in a few words. A first-generation student who grew up in a low-income home headed by a single parent? That’s where he started. The student president of the University of Virginia’s Darden School who’ll be joining McKinsey & Company after graduation? That’s where he is now. In between, Kelley was named the Outstanding Male Leader for Bloomington, Indiana, and won the heart of the eventual first runner-up for Mrs. America.

Come May, Kelley can add another feat to the list: Darden MBA (to go along with his MEd in Education Innovation).

Kelley describes himself as a “storyteller” who seeks to “build bridges and empower others” – an example of someone who “pushed past [the] odds.” More than that, Kelley is a Renaissance Man who embraces leadership and pursues service. In the process, he has fostered an environment where everyone feels “seen, heard, valued, and supported.” This track record of elevating talent and building consensus makes Kelley a force among the Class of 2023.

How would ChatGPT rank business schools? And how accurate would a list of full-time MBA programs actually be from the AI chatbot?

To put it to the test, we asked the former question to get at the latter query. The result?

Naming the top MBA programs was too complex a task for ChatGPT-4. Though the artificial intelligence program that is all the talk of the technosphere generated a list of reputable programs, the rankings were contextually vague and inconsistently founded upon further interrogation. Some information the AI chatbot identified as its ranking evidence was plainly false. ChatGPT also changed ranking placements in different answers with no real sense of justification, but one always remained first. By and large, ChatGPT’s ranking is more a reflection of a business school’s longstanding reputation, rather than a revealing list that uncovers MBA programs that are more likely to slip through the cracks.

ChatGPT named Harvard Business School the best program in the world. But while HBS is undoubtedly a world-class school, it has been languishing in the rankings lately, generally situated somewhere in the top five but not No. 1 in any reputable list since 2020. Harvard has ranked fifth in Poet&Quants’ aggregate ranking the last two years; in 2023, The Financial Times named HBS’ MBA program the third best, while U.S. News & World Report ranked it fifth in 2022; the latter’s 2023 ranking is due in mid-April.

For the fifth straight year, Stanford Graduate School of Business came out on top of the 2023 Bloomberg Businessweek MBA ranking published today (Sept. 13). But the more surprising news on this year’s list is the continued rankings slump for Harvard Business School and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, widely regarded as the two other business schools that form the triumvirate at the top of the business education pecking order.

If you stare long enough at columns of MBA salary figures, the numbers start to run together, becoming a blur. It’s a form of semantic satiation where even as you search for trends and distinctions, the data become a meaningless blob of numbers, and your mind zones out.

Fortunately, there’s a cure. Nothing breaks the spell faster than a juicy seven-figure number.

In the mountain of salary and bonus stats released in conjunction with U.S. News‘ annual ranking, two graduates of Harvard Business School’s MBA Class of 2022 earn special notice. Even as HBS took the prize for highest MBA salary for a U.S. citizen, a cool $550,000, one of Harvard’s international MBAs nearly doubled up his classmate, reporting a $1 million starting salary at a finance/accounting job based in the U.S. Northeast. Both of these HBS grads’ salaries dwarf the highest salaries reported in 2021.

$1 million is a special number, a pinnacle rarely reached but always dreamed of by elite MBA students, and it’s no surprise to see someone from Harvard reach it. Yet Harvard did not corner the market on flashy numbers in 2022. Six schools reported high U.S. salaries of $300K or more, and four reported the same for foreign graduates. Bonuses of the eyebrow-raising variety were abundant as well. One international student at Hawaii Manoa Shidler College of Business — a school with 14 total students in its latest MBA class — reported a $200K sign-on bonus, and a graduate at Michigan State Broad College of Business reported a bonus of $107K. The latter student was, again, a non-U.S. citizen.

Harvard Hit Hard By The 2023 MBA Job Market: Offers, Accepts & Total Comp All Decline