Poets&Quant’s 2024-2025 MBA Ranking: For The First Time Ever, Kellogg Takes First

Celebrations at Poets&Quants’ Top Five Full-Time MBA programs in the U.S.

For the first time since Poets&Quants began ranking full-time MBA programs in 2010, Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management has earned top honors on our 2024-2025 list of the best MBA programs in the U.S. Kellogg slipped past last year’s winner, Stanford Graduate School of Business, by outdistancing the West Coast giant of business education in this year’s Financial Times ranking, where the GSB shockingly slumped to a 15th-place finish, and by scoring slightly higher on student experience.

Though this is Kellogg’s first time at the top, the M7 school is no stranger to winning big in MBA rankings. Kellogg has ranked first in Bloomberg Businessweek‘s rankings on five different occasions, with only one school winning more often: Stanford has sat at the top of that ranking a half dozen times. But Kellogg hasn’t sat atop a major MBA ranking since 2004 when it last came in first on Businessweek‘s list.

In the Top Five this year in Poets&Quants‘ composite ranking–a mashup of the five most credible MBA rankings published this year–are third place Chicago Booth, fourth place Harvard Business School, and in fifth, the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. It is Darden’s highest P&Q rank, rising from eighth last year to 14th in 2022. Rounding out the Top Ten are No. 6 Dartmouth Tuck, No. 7 Columbia Business School, No. 8 Yale School of Management, No. 9 Cornell Johnson, and finally No. 10 Duke Fuqua.

KELLOGG WINS BIG IN POETS&QUANTS’ 15TH ANNUAL MBA RANKING

That lineup may surprise many because it does not include Wharton or MIT Sloan, two M7 giants of business education that are often ranked in the Top Ten. It is certainly fair to ask why a Wharton or MIT fell below Kellogg, UVA Darden, Dartmouth Tuck, Cornell, and Duke. It’s because the quality of classroom teaching at these other institutions generally exceeds that of schools that often do well in most conventional rankings. Academic research at Wharton and MIT assumes so much importance that these schools are more tolerant of inconsistent teaching quality across their MBA courses.

That is less true at UVA Darden or Dartmouth Tuck, for example. So the actual student experience inevitably suffers to some degree. It’s why Wharton and MIT Sloan failed to rate among the Top Ten schools in any of the key categories measured by the Princeton Review, from the best professors to the best classroom experience. Poets&Quants strongly believes that the overall student experience, especially the quality of teaching and the engagement professors have with their students, should be given more weight than it is accorded by many business schools. Our ranking reflects this bias.

It’s also important to remember that less than 1% of the world’s 16,000 business schools are ranked at all. So any full-time MBA program that can boast of being in the Top 100 is truly exceptional, no matter where the program may rank on this or other lists of the best. Inevitably, programs that rise or fall the most do so because they have either dropped out of a major ranking this year or have been added back in.

HOW POETS&QUANTS RANKS FULL-TIME MBA PROGRAMS

A case in point: The University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business fell out of the Financial Times ranking this year because the school could not meet the minimum standards for a 20% response rate from Ross’ alumni base. The upshot: Ross plunged 20 places on the Poets&Quants list to uncharacteristically rank 29th from ninth place a year ago. This rank clearly undervalues Ross, though the school’s disappointing response rate also can be interpreted as a signal of the alumni’s commitment to the school.

Unlike other rankings, the 15th annual Poets&Quants list combines the most influential business school rankings in the world: U.S. News & World Report, The Financial Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, and for only the second time LinkedIn‘s second MBA ranking, and Princeton Review‘s annual list of the best. The latter two rankings were added last year after The Economist and Forbes decided to abandon their MBA ranking projects.

Instead of merely averaging the five lists, each ranking is separately weighted to account for our view of their credibility. (U.S. News is given a weight of 35%, the Financial Times is at 30%, Businessweek is given a 15% weight, and LinkedIn and Princeton Review are each given 10%. Adding these two latter rankings puts greater weight on two important measures: a longer-term view of career outcomes from LinkedIn and a fuller appreciation of the academic and educational experience of MBA students from the Princeton Review. The greater focus on those metrics helps to decrease rankings dependence on more traditional measures such as admission stats and starting compensation. For example, for the Princeton Review metric, we use the Top Ten MBA programs on ten core category measures: best professors, best classroom experience, best campus environment, best family-friendly campus, best administration, best career prospects, best for consulting, finance, marketing, and management. A separate Poets&Quants ranking on MBA programs outside the U.S. can be seen here.

JUST 19 OF THE TOP 100 RANK IN ALL FIVE OF THE RANKINGS WE TRACK

The highest assurance of quality in an MBA program is achieved by those that make all five lists, a difficult feat, indeed. Some schools decline to participate in rankings that their deans believe would lower their reputations. So they selectively pick and choose rankings to put their programs in the best light. This year, only 19 of the 100 programs on the P&Q list of the best U.S. MBAs earned ranks across all five lists. Some 23 schools, in fact, were only ranked by one of the five which makes their results less authoritative.

In truth, none of these rankings capture the true essence of the academic experience delivered in an MBA program. A school’s ups and downs may have more to do with the career choices of its graduates than it is a reflection of the caliber of an MBA program. Merging them all together provides a clearer picture of each program’s true place in the pecking order of business education. For applicants, it is also a way to see at a single glance how each program currently places on all five individual rankings in addition to whether a program has gone down or up in the past year.