Who’s up and who’s down? We look at the schools with the most rankings momentum over the past five years vs. the schools that are on a downward trend

4) Enjoy The Ride…Because It Rarely Lasts

On a few campuses, you’ll find business school leaders reserving afternoon spas and fancy dinners. A few may even be considering booking that once-in-a-lifetime cruise. Who could blame them? Between raising funds, pacifying constituencies, and staying current, education leaders rarely get time to breathe – let alone celebrate.

So don’t be too critical when they race out that press release and take a well-deserved victory. Just like sales, deans get one day to pop the champagne corks before they’re back to the grindstone. In education, leadership is only as good as its last ranking.

This year, you’ll find champagne corks popping in Berkeley, Charlottesville, and Austin. That’s because each of these public powerhouses climbed four spots in the 2025 U.S. News Best Business School Rankings. More than that, their moves placed them in a different light. UC-Berkeley’s Haas School returned to the Top 10, moving from 11th to 7th to become the highest-ranking public, full-time MBA program in the United States. Over the previous five years, the University of Virginia’s Darden School has ping-ponged between the 11th and 14th spots, never able to crack the Top 10 in U.S. News. That changed this year, with Darden claiming the 10th spot, topping Columbia Business School, Duke Fuqua, and Michigan Ross in the process. At the same time, the University of Texas’s McCombs School, which traditionally bops between the 18th and 20th spots, rose to 16th. In the process, McCombs added a perceived distance between itself and traditional rivals like UCLA Anderson, North Carolina Kenan-Flagler, and Emory Goizueta.

What was behind these surges? Let’s start with Haas. Here, starting pay and bonus was a BIG help. Carrying a 20% weight, Haas grads improved from $177,525 to $188,343 over the past year. This gain, however, stems from a larger trend, with the school reporting $168,041 in starting pay and bonus two years ago. Pay was particularly helpful to Haas thanks to an addition to the methodology, where 10% of the ranking weight is now conferred to industry pay. In Haas’ case, to borrow three examples, there was marked improvement in Marketing ($136,810 to $146,487), General Management ($144,973 to $156,565), and Finance ($142,282 to $156,770). As a whole, Berkeley Haas boasted the 5th-highest professional pay ranking according to U.S. News.

The school also enjoyed some luck. While Haas slipped in both graduation placement (77.5% to 75.4%) and three-month placement (92.7% to 90.8%), these areas saw their weight decrease by 3% and 7% share. Better still, GMAT median scores jumped from 730 to 740 – or a 6.5% weight.

Strangely, the Darden School experienced tiny decreases in areas such as three-month placement (96.5%) to 95.6%), though it’s important to remember that last year’s placement stat was for only one year and this time around it’s the average of the past two years. The entering class’ median GMAT also fell by ten points (720 to 710). Again, graduate pay turned out to be the school’s saving grace. Starting pay and bonus accelerated from $188,265 to $201,691. All the while, Darden ranked 10th for Professional Pay indicators, reinforcing just how important these new inputs have become in U.S. News’ methodology. McCombs followed a similar path as Darden. While its graduation (80.7% vs. 86.3%) and three-month (90.9% vs 92.9%) placement rates fell, average starting pay and bonus ($183,764 vs. $171,762) did improve. Even more, McCombs’s salaries by profession ranked 20th – which corresponds closely to its overall ranking (16th).

Are we witnessing a ‘new world order’ with Haas, Darden, and McCombs poised to become breakout stars? If history is any indicator, these schools will be lucky to hold their ground. Last year, Dartmouth Tuck leaped from 11th to 6th – and now share the 10th spot with Darden. USC Marshall pulled itself up to the 15th spot last year – and then slipped back to 18th last year. Call it ebb-and-flow, two steps forward and a step back process where tiny deviations can reverberate to take a school down a few pegs. In Tuck’s case, a $10,000 pay increase – while holding a 730 median GMAT – was torpedoed by an acceptance rate that jumped seven points.

So let the deans celebrate now…the next 364 days of uncertainty is bound to humble everyone at some point.

NYU MBA students outside New York University’s Stern School of Business

5) The New Prince of New York?

Columbia Business School gets all the love in the Big Apple. They ranked #1 in the 2023 Financial Times MBA ranking… and clung to the 3rd spot this year. They opened a brand-new campus – with a $600 million dollar price tag – in Manhattanville just two years ago. Now, they are making major in-roads in areas like climate change, digital innovation, and sustainability.

What can CBS do for an encore? Perhaps they can be good sports after their Greenwich Village cousin, New York University’s Stern School of Business, crashed their ongoing parade unannounced.

Long hovering near the Top 10, NYU Stern made the biggest statement in the 2024-2025 U.S. News Business School Ranking. Stern snapped up the #7 spot, putting it in the same neighborhood as Harvard Business School and the Yale School of Management. Better still, it distanced itself from Columbia Business School, which skated down to 12th.

Starting pay and bonus continued to be NYU Stern’s bread-and-butter. It ranked 4th in this measure, behind just Stanford GSB, Chicago Booth, and Dartmouth Tuck. All the while, Stern’s $201,727 starting compensation beat out the Wharton School ($201,296) and Columbia Business School ($196,9871). Even more, Stern built on previous growth, with previous graduates pulling in $196,143 (2023-2024) and $181,803 (2022-2023).

At a micro level, NYU Stern experienced noticeable one-year improvements in pay in areas like Marketing ($145,543 s. $134,795), and Consulting ($175,705 vs. $168,270). Take a deeper dive and the news isn’t so bubbly for NYU Stern, however. Exhibit A: Take a deeper dive and compare Stern’s Salary by Profession against Columbia Business School. In four of five relevant professions, Columbia Business School topped NYU Stern in four: Marketing ($146,773 vs, $145,543), General Management ($142,667 vs. $136,413), Operations ($150,172 vs. $136,667), and Finance ($171,425 vs, $166,182). That said, NYU did best their Manhattanville rivals in one all-important area: Consulting ($175,705 vs $173,793).

Beyond pay, NYU Stern and Columbia Business School could lean into their strengths. Stern dominated in graduate (85.7% vs 73.4%) and three-month (94% vs. 86.7%) placement. CBS enjoyed higher average survey scores from both academics (4.4 vs 4.1) and recruiters (4.2 vs. 4.1) on five-point scales. In terms of inputs, CBS posted the higher median GMAT scores (740 vs. 730), while median GRE averages were NYU Stern’s domain (163 vs. 162 Verbal and 163 vs. 161 Quant). The schools also remained deadlocked in terms of undergraduate GPA with Stern holding a nominal edge (3.61 vs. 3.60).

So who’s the real winner this year? Think New York City, which is home to two elite programs where graduates land some of the highest-paying starting paychecks in the industry. 7th or 12th? Who cares: their graduates win ether way.