MBA Rankings: Best Business Schools For Careers, Culture & Curriculum

Age is just a number, you’ll hear. It doesn’t reflect talent, fitness, or motivation. That number analogy could apply equally to a business school ranking. After all, that number is just a snapshot, a neatly-packaged closeup.

The Princeton Review rankings are different. That plural s isn’t an accident. Forget the chaotic methodology of The Financial Times, which bundles 21 data points together to pull out one number. Instead, The Princeton Review is more à la carte. Readers can access 18 different rankings in areas ranging from the quality of teaching to admissions standards to discipline-specific programming. In other words, readers can choose what matters most to them — and see which programs perform best in those areas.

For example, looking for responsive and forward-thinking administration? Princeton Review survey-takers gave the highest scores to the University of Virginia’s Darden School and the Harvard Business School. Wondering which schools might give you an edge in landing a consulting career? The same respondents rated Northwestern University’s Kellogg School and Dartmouth College’s Tuck School the highest for its consulting programming.

“We don’t believe that any one business school is the best overall,” according to FAQs supplied by The Princeton Review. “Instead, we believe there is a best business school for you.”

BRINGING IN THE MOST IMPORTANT VOICE: STUDENTS

By breaking out rankings individually, The Princeton Review represents a major shift from a traditional ranking. In the latter, each data point carries a weight — and each methodology reflects a certain value system (and the biases inherent to them). Take U.S. News & World Report, the top American-centric MBA ranking. It emphasizes outputs, with 30% of the weight revolving around starting paychecks and another 20% focused on post-graduation placement. Logically, pay reflects an institution’s reputation among employers. Problem is, U.S. News only covers the starting point, paying no heed to future career progress and earnings.

Inputs and surveys are equally problematic in U.S. News. Another 25% of its weight is anchored to inputs — test scores, GPAs, and placement. While these inputs measure how students arrive, they don’t quantify how they grow. U.S. News devotes another 25% to school surveys given to recruiters and rival school leaders. While the former can mine past hires for guidance, the latter enjoys minimal exposure to other schools’ day-to-day programming. Even more, both surveys ignore the most important people in the chain: students themselves. As a result, the U.S. News MBA ranking downplays stakeholder feedback on which schools provide the best services, resources, teaching, and programming.

In other words, U.S. News fails to hold business schools accountable for student experience. That’s The Princeton Review’s strength. Relying heavily on student surveys about their programs, it scores business schools across seven satisfaction metrics. Pulling from the same surveys, The Princeton Review sprinkles in school data to rank business schools across seven academic specializations. This mix of student ratings and school data also produces rankings for three categories: Resources for Women, Resources for Minorities, and Career Prospects. Finally, The Princeton Review supplies a data-only ranking for admissions.

DARDEN AND KELLOGG RACK UP THE MOST TOP 10 FINISHES

Bottom line: The Princeton Review has taken a more personalized approach since launching the rankings in 2004, writes Rob Franek, The Princeton Review‘s Editor-in-Chief, in a press release. “The schools that made our lists for 2025 share four characteristics that inform our criteria for designating them as ‘best’: excellent academics, robust experiential learning components, outstanding career services, and positive feedback about them from enrolled students we surveyed. No b-school is best overall or best for all students.”

Released on July 22nd, The Princeton Review rankings are based heavily on on-campus and online surveys completed by 22,800 students across 213 graduate business schools during the 2024-2025 school year. The rankings cover categories that the editorial team believes “prospective applicants might want to know or would ask [about] during a campus visit, including academics, career prospects, and campus diversity.” Between surveys and institutional data, The Princeton Review collects 60 data points, with student responses using a scale of 60 (low) to 99 (high). After compiling the data, The Princeton Review provides Top 10 lists across each of the categories.

Taken as a whole, The Princeton Review rankings challenge ranking canon while reinforcing established perceptions. Among the big winners, you’ll find the Darden School, which scored among the Top 10 in 10 of 18 categories. That was higher than any other school (though no different than its total in the 2024 rankings). Last year, the Kellogg School led all MBA programs with 12 rankings among the Top 10. This year, Kellogg’s total fell to 9, including tumbling out of the Top 10 in Campus Environment. Stanford GSB and the University of Michigan’s Ross School each claimed the Top 10 in 8 categories. The GSB and Ross were joined by New York University’s Stern School, which added Top 10 finishes in Classroom Experience and Campus Environment. Like previous years, Vanderbilt University’s Owen School and Georgia Tech’s Scheller College punched above their traditional ranking weight. At the same time, Harvard Business School, Columbia Business School, and Washington University’s Olin School made notable gains over their 2024 results.

HOW DARDEN’S CASE METHOD PREPARES FUTURE CONSULTANTS

How do business schools fare in individual categories? Let’s starts in the broader area of Academic Specializations. Among the criteria used to formulate these rankings, The Princeton Review includes the percentage of graduate entering a specialization and their starting salary, coupled with student responses on how well schools prepared them for a career in that field. Call it an upgrade over U.S. News’ approach to specializations, which relies on scoring from rival business school deans and MBA directors over students who actually completed the programs.

Like previous years, The Princeton Review ranks seven academic areas:

Consulting
Finance
Management
Marketing
Operations
Non-Profit
Human Resources

In Consulting, the Kellogg School replaced Yale SOM in the #1 spot, moving up three spots in the process. Unranked in 2024, Dartmouth Tuck claimed the runner-up spot in Consulting, with the Darden School rounding out the top three. The latter’s high score is hardly a surprise.  Darden’s emphasizes the case teaching, which requires intensive preparation and debate across a wide range of industries and scenarios – ones that often simulate engagements they’ll eventually face in the field.

“The case method allows you to gain insights from countless perspectives on the same subject matter while learning from your peers as you do it,” explains first-year Brittany Terrell. “My classmates come from different industries across different companies all over the world – and so do the cases we’re reading about. I can’t imagine a better way to get a more well-rounded business education. The pressure is on in every class for all of us to be prepared to contribute to the classroom. At the same time, the pressure is also off because there’s always going to be something we don’t know. Everyone in the class has a perspective we don’t have and an experience we’ve never encountered before. We’re all learning at the same time, and we all have something to gain from each other.”

IS IT MARKETING … OR STRATEGY?

Kellogg also achieved the highest score in Marketing – the only business school to reach the top spot in two areas. Equally impressive, it finished with the 2nd-best score for its Management programming. Long regaled as THE graduate business school for Marketing, you could say the #1 Marketing ranking was a long coming at Kellogg. After all, it produced the 6th-best score in the field last year after being unranked in 2023. Still, ’24 alum Dorian Allen asserts that Kellogg’s strength isn’t necessarily marketing. Instead, it is something more fundamental: excellence in strategy and analytics.

“A common misconception is that marketing means advertising and pretty logos. Kellogg is the renowned business school for marketing because it recognizes that marketing is the cornerstone to a firm’s strategy. Kellogg understands that best-in-class marketers leverage data and cross-functional expertise to deliver value to customers.”

That said, the Kellogg School ceded the #1 spot in Management to the Darden School. However, NYU Stern tightened its grip at #1 in Finance, the third year in a row it has held the spot. Arizona State’s W. P. Carey School replaced Purdue University as the top MBA program in Operations, while Bard College and Brigham Young University’s Marriott School remained the business schools to beat in the Non-Profit and Human Resources sectors respectively.

Among the outliers, the Marriott School also ranked 3rd in Operations. The Wisconsin Business School boasted two Top 5 finishes: Human Resources (2nd) and Marketing (4th). At the same time, Rice University’s Jones Graduate School – long known as an entrepreneurship powerhouse – posted the 3rd-best score in Finance. This ranked the Rice MBA ahead of Columbia Business School, Wharton School, and the University of Chicago’s Booth School according to actual students. When it comes to across-the-board curriculum excellence, Stanford GSB and the University of Michigan’s Ross School led the pack with 4 Top 10 finishes – though Vanderbilt University’s Owen School made the running interesting by ranking in the Top 10 in 3 specializations (Consulting, Operations, and Human Resources).

Next Page: Links to 18 Princeton Review MBA Rankings

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