6) Interstate 75: Connecting Business Schools on the Rise

Take a ride with me. Let’s go down I-95 – the artery of the East. We’ll start in Boston, home to MIT Sloan and Harvard Business School. In New Haven, we can take the Marsh Hill exit to get to the Yale School of Management. 90 minutes from there, we can pick between Columbia Business School or NYU Stern. In Philadelphia, there is the Wharton School – the #1 MBA program according to U.S. News and The Financial Times. Otherwise, Washington DC boasts Georgetown McDonough. If you want to take a nap…go ahead. It takes four hours to get from DC to Raleigh, which is a short drive from UNC Kenan-Flagler and Duke Fuqua.

Route 66 may be the gateway to Americana, but I-95 is the educational equivalent – the entry point to Ivys and research heavyweights alike. However, there is a different interstate that’s beginning to get notice among business school applicants: I-75. It starts in Northern Michigan. Like I-95, it ends in Miami. In between, it hits Detroit, Cincinnati, and Lexington before winding through Atlanta and Central Florida. Along the way, the I-75 corridor brings you near some of America’s emerging business schools.

Up north, it is a 45-minute drive from Detroit to Ann Arbor – and the University of Michigan’s Ross School. Further south, you can exit to I-40 West; in 2 hours, you’ll reach the outskirts of Nashville, home to Vanderbilt University’s Owen Graduate School. Stay south and you’ll eventually reach Emory University’s Goizueta School and Georgia Tech’s Scheller College. Then again, the University of Georgia’s Terry College is an hour east of the Atlanta Beltline.

Vanderbilt, Emory, Georgia Tech, and Georgia – those are four programs on the ascent in recent years according to U.S. News. Maybe the biggest rising star is Owen. Ranked 27th just two years ago, Owen has scratched its way into the Top 20 at 18th.  One advantage? Pay…as in a $183,075 mean…higher than programs like Texas McCombs ($180,588) and UCLA Anderson ($175,547). The school’s 93.4% three-month placement rate outpaces every school in U.S. News’ Top 10 too. Long known for outstanding leadership development and healthcare programming – along with Southern friendliness and personalized attention – Owen grabbed attention in 2024 for laying the groundwork for a $300 million-dollar campus in Florida. It is an effort that would grow the number of master’s and doctoral students by over 1,000 – scale that would undoubtedly impact the school’s rankings in coming years.

Georgia Tech’s Scheller College is another I-75 program poised for greater attention. Over the past four years, Scheller has risen from 28th to 21st. One eye-catching stat: the program’s 18.2% acceptance rate makes it more selective than the Wharton School (20.5%), Columbia Business School (20.9%), and Chicago Booth (28.7%). By the same token, Emory Goizueta has solidified itself as a Top 20 program over the past three years, topping out at 17th in the 2025-2026 ranking. Like Owen, Goizueta graduate mean pay – $181,374 – outpaces its ranking, as does its mean GMAT score (710). When U.S. News surveyed business school deans and MBA directors about its academics, Goizueta pulled in a 3.8 score out of 5.0 – higher than any of its I-75 counterparts.

Still, the latest U.S. News ranking served as a reckoning for the University of Georgia’s Terry College. Just four years ago, Terry ranked 39th before rocketing to 27th last year. However, the school hit a wall this year, slipping to 29th. The culprit? No doubt, it was pay, as its $147,893 mean salary ranked among the lowest in the Top 30. Then again, Terry’s 95.9% three-month placement rate tops nearly all peers – making Terry the go-to school for students seeking security and quick return.

Indeed, high placement defines the I-75 Corridor schools, with Emory Goizueta being the only program with a three-month rate below 90% (and 89.5% at that). It doesn’t hurt that they are located in fast-growing Nashville and Atlanta, Fortune 500 magnets diversified economies and unemployment rates under 3.5%. Will I-75 someday rival its I-95 cousin to the east? Doubtful…but there’s a good chance that its schools increasingly become a destination for MBAs who seek the small school experience with big league opportunities.

7) Ranking Logjams Create a Credibility Problem

There’s nothing worse than a tie. No one wins and no one is happy. It’s inconclusive: all a tie does is raise questions and spur second-guessing. I mean, what’s the point if there isn’t a winner?

Apply that logic to rankings. People look to business school rankings for clarity and confidence. They want to make comparisons side-to-side, to see where their target schools fall in the bigger picture. That’s because rankings aren’t designed to drive decisions, but guide readers where to focus time and energy.

That’s why the U.S. News Business School ranking is increasingly under fire. There isn’t enough differentiation. When schools are clustered together, it reflects a view that student quality, industry sentiments, and post-graduation outcomes are relatively the same. In reality, it is a sign that readers should skeptical of the methodology that produced such unusual results.

Just look at this year’s results. Stanford GSB and Northwestern Kellogg tied at 2nd? Well, at least this year wasn’t a cheat; there wasn’t a tie between Wharton and Stanford at #1 like last year. Dartmouth Tuck, Harvard Business, and NYU Stern locked together at 6th? A three-way tie is tough to pull off – especially at the upper echelon of a ranking. UC Berkeley Haaas and Virginia Darden both holding down the 11th spot? That’d be easier to swallow if it wasn’t followed by Duke Fuqua and Michigan Ross tethered at 13th. And a three-way logjam between Vanderbilt Owen, UCLA Anderson, and Carnegie Mellon Tepper at 18? That means 12 of 20 programs are tied with a rival school!

Pretty hard for schools to write gushing press releases with asterisks next to their rankings.

And it only gets worse the further down you drill in the U.S. News ranking. Georgia Tech Scheller and Indiana Kelley are deadlocked at 22. There is a four-way tie at 24 and three-way ties at 35, 43, and 46. That doesn’t count further gridlock at 29, 32, 38, 40, and 50. In sum, 37 of 51 schools ranked in U.S. News’ Top 50 are tied with another program. Seems suspicious, particularly since ties artificially inflate many school rankings.

Oh, and it doesn’t get much better further down, with four-way ties at 54, 61, 88, and 100 and three-way logjams at 58, 68, 73,79, 82,92, and 97.

Regardless, these ties render the ranking meaningless, in some ways. To restore credibility, maybe U.S. News needs to further adjust weights, add new variables, and simply build in a tie-breaking mechanism. Until then, the 2025-2026 Business School ranking adds fuel to the sentiments that the fix is in or the results are arbitrary, both of which undermine reader confidence as a whole.

8) Go (South)West, Young Man

In the mid-19th century, “Go West, young man” became a popular slogan. With California fueling a gold rush, the young and ambitious struck out to the rugged wilds beyond the Mississippi to seek their fortune. For them, there was nothing new where they were – the opportunities had dried up and their fate had been cast. That’s why the wide-open spaces beckoned. Heading West meant being free, reinventing themselves, and starting something they could own.

In graduate business education, the major players have built their brands and the rankings have established their pecking order…to some extent. There aren’t any adventure-seeking applicants flocking to the next big thing. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a region that’s slowly making strides in the MBA space. That’s Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, and even Arkansas and Louisiana – the American Southwest.

Yes, the region is headlined by the University of Texas’s McCombs School at 16th according to U.S. News. Looking for big gainers? The University of Arkansas’s Walton College jumped 24 spots to 50th – the 2nd-largest gain of any school during the 2025-2026 cycle. The third-largest belonged to Oklahoma State’s Spears School, which moved from 76th to 58th. At the same time, Louisiana State’s Ourso College and Texas Tech’s Rawls College climbed 12 and 11 spots respectively.

The Southwest’s momentum is also reflected by the positioning of its marquee schools. Rice University’s Jones Graduate School and the University of Texas at Dallas’s Jindal School occupy the 29th and 31st spots in the U.S. News ranking – with the latter moving up 7 spots this year. Not too far behind, you’ll find Southern Methodist University’s Cox School and Arizona State’s W. P. Carey School at 34th and 35th respectively. Texas A&M’s Mays School and Texas Christian University’s Neeley School are tied at 43rd, with the latter rising 24 spots in the past three years. That’s eight schools in the Top 50 – the same as the West Coast region (and one more than the South). And the number would’ve been even better if the University of Arizona’s Eller College hadn’t dropped out of the Top 50 this year (or Baylor University’s Hankamer School or Tulane University’s Freeman School had inched up a few spots beyond 54th).

Get the picture. There is a large cluster of Southwest schools, whether sitting outside the Top 25 or Top 50, poised to eventually crash the ranking’s inner sanctum. From a U.S. News methodology standpoint, many bring something formidable to the table. Rice Jones grads, for one, enjoy higher pay. Last year, graduate mean pay came in at $176,163, better than higher-ranked programs like Georgia Tech Scheller and USC Marshall. In fact, Jones’s Salary by Profession Ranking is 12 points higher than its overall ranking. Up north, the Jindal School boasts a 4.3 Recruiter Score, a number equal to NYU Stern, Columbia Business School, and UC Berkeley’s Haas School. And the program’s Three-Month Placement Rate is 92.5% — better than any Top 10 program. However, that isn’t the best placement rate in Texas. At TCU Neeley, the rate is 95.7% within three months of graduation. If you think it is hard getting into Ivy’s like Columbia Business School or the Wharton School, get a load of Arizona State’s W. P. Carey School. Here, the placement rate is 18.8%, two points below the aforementioned schools.

Bottom line: If you want to break out of the ordinary and find an MBA degree gaining value, go to the Southwest. Dallas, Houston, Austin, Phoenix – they may be humid, but they offer first-rate business schools and job markets that can lead to lucrative careers.