Poets&Quants’ 2025-2026 MBA Ranking

Kellogg has done it again. For the second year in a row, Northwestern University’s business school finishes No. 1 in Poets&Quants’ ranking of the best full-time MBA programs in the U.S., solidifying the momentum that began in 2024 when the school took the top spot for the first time.

Harvard rises to No. 2 in the composite ranking – now in its 16th year – which assesses placement in five of the most reputable MBA rankings. Columbia Business School, in the year it is honored as the MBA Program of the Year by Poets&Quants, climbs to No. 3, its strongest finish in years. Dartmouth Tuck lands at No. 4, and UVA Darden completes the top five, right where it finished last year. Wharton, No. 12 in 2024, jumps to No. 8.

But the most dramatic movements occurred in Palo Alto and Ann Arbor. Stanford Graduate School of Business plunges to No. 26 – one of the steepest single-year drops ever recorded for an elite B-school in the P&Q ranking – after being excluded from one of the major 2025 rankings. Meanwhile Michigan Ross, one of the biggest decliners last year, posts one of the largest jumps of 2025, soaring from No. 29 to No. 9, its highest-ever finish.

Poets&Quants separately ranks full-time MBA programs outside the U.S. This year’s winner is INSEAD, followed by IESE Business School in Barcelona, London Business School, Italy’s SDA Bocconi, and IMD in Switzerland.

In the U.S. ranking, Stanford’s drop – explained on the next page – reshaped the upper tier and created space for one of the most dynamic top-ten reshufflings P&Q has seen in years. Harvard climbs two spots to No. 2, Columbia surges four places to No. 3, and Dartmouth Tuck rises to No. 4, continuing a steady ascent driven by exceptional student experience and strong career outcomes. NYU Stern makes one of the biggest leaps in the upper tier, jumping five places to No. 6 after stronger FT and Princeton Review performance. Cornell Johnson also advances, moving from No. 9 to No. 7 with one of its most balanced composites in more than a decade.

2025 Rank & School	Y-O-Y Change	2024 Rank	Newest Cohort	Women	International	U.S. Minority	First Gen
1. Northwestern (Kellogg)	——–	1	534	Undisclosed	37%	Undisclosed	Undisclosed
2. Harvard Business School	+2	4	943	44%	37%	16%	10%
3. Columbia Business School	+4	7	982	46%	41%	19%	Undisclosed
4. Dartmouth (Tuck)	+2	6	304	44%	34%	15%	13%
5. Virginia (Darden)	——–	5	361	35%	30%	21%	13%
6. New York (Stern)	+5	11	336	45%	43%	18%	Undisclosed
7. Cornell (Johnson)	+2	9	276	38%	42%	14%	Undisclosed
8. Pennsylvania (Wharton)	+4	12	888	44%	26%	22%	11%
9. Michigan (Ross)	+20	29	379	39%	40%	25%	22%
10. UCLA (Anderson)	+4	14	307	46%	35%	31%	Undisclosed

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THE TOP OF THE TABLE: SHARP CLIMBS AND A HISTORIC REBOUND

Two schools, however, define the 2025 top 10: Michigan Ross and Wharton. Ross delivers the largest upward move in the entire top 50, climbing 20 places – a dramatic reversal of last year’s FT-related slide. With its FT score restored and long-term alumni mobility showing more clearly in the LinkedIn component, Ross reestablishes itself as a top-ten mainstay.

Wharton climbs four spots to No. 8 – its strongest finish since its own FT-survey stumble two years ago. UCLA Anderson rounds out the group, rising four places to No. 10 on the strength of improved student-experience scores. Collectively, these shifts highlight how fluid the top of the ranking has become in a year when consistency, coverage, and survey participation mattered more than ever.

Two of the more consequential declines occurred at Chicago’s Booth School of Business, which suffered setbacks in four of the five rankings tracked by Poets&Quants for this composite ranking. Booth lost ground in U.S. News, the Financial Times, and Bloomberg Businessweek and completely fell out of Princeton Review‘s key ranking categories.  The result: A nice-place drop to 12th from its far more customary perch of third place.

Yale School of Management also took a similar nine-spot decline, dropping to 17th from eighth last year. In common with Booth, the school’s MBA program received lower rankings from U.S. News, the FT, Businessweek, and also disappeared from the Princeton Review‘s core ranking metrics.

HOW KELLOGG DID IT AGAIN

Last year’s ranking story framed Kellogg’s rise as “Kellogg’s moment,” highlighting how the school’s collaborative, broad-based leadership culture was well aligned with the modern MBA landscape. This year’s result reinforces that view: Kellogg did not ride a one-year wave – it expanded its lead.

Kellogg’s repeat reflects two converging strengths: consistently strong performance across the five rankings that inform the composite and rising institutional momentum under Dean Francesca Cornelli.

“I feel the time here is the right time for a culture like Kellogg,” Cornelli says. “Our focus on leadership and cooperation is one piece, but another is truly broad education. The world is changing so fast that if you are too specialized, you are too vulnerable.”

Her point echoes what P&Q’s ranking showed last year: Kellogg’s culture – rooted in EQ, collaboration, and interdisciplinary leadership – is tailor-made for an era defined by AI acceleration and constant reinvention. In 2025, Kellogg deepened those advantages. Its interdisciplinary expansion, new AI curricular spine, and multi-school sustainability and innovation initiatives have amplified the forces driving its rise.

“That approach has been Kellogg’s identity for 30 or 40 years,” Cornelli says. “What everyone says now is what Kellogg has been doing all along.”

AI MOMENTUM AND A WAVE OF EXPERIMENTATION

Cornelli notes that Kellogg’s rise predates the generative AI boom that now dominates business-school strategy.

“Kellogg entered the AI area longer ago than people know,” she says, citing years of executive-education collaborations with Microsoft and Accenture. That foundation enabled this year’s sweeping refresh of analytics and AI coursework across the MBA.

“We did not want ‘AI for everyone’ in a vague way,” she says. “Finance faculty teach AI through finance. Marketing faculty teach it through marketing.”

Kellogg also launched the Abrams Climate Academy, expanded cross-registration with engineering and law, and created pathways for MBAs to embed in Northwestern science labs. “Interdisciplinarity is absolutely the future,” Cornelli says –the same direction Poets&Quants identified last year as the hallmark of emerging top programs.

HOW THE P&Q COMPOSITE WORKS

Poets&Quants does not average rankings. Each list is weighted based on methodological rigor. For 2025, the weights remain: U.S. News at 35%, the Financial Times at 30%, Bloomberg Businessweek at 15%, and LinkedIn and Princeton Review at 10% each.

The inclusion of LinkedIn and Princeton Review continues to shift the composite toward long-term career mobility and student experience – and, as predicted last year, schools strong in those areas are climbing. Vanderbilt Owen, which jumped from 30th last year to 18th this year, and WashU Olin rose this year in exactly that pattern.

This year’s results also highlight a structural shift P&Q flagged in 2024: fewer schools being evaluated across all five rankings. Only 16 of the top 100 MBA programs appeared on every list in 2025, down from 19 last year. Meanwhile 33 schools appeared on only one ranking, up from 23 in 2024.

As predicted, shrinking multi-ranking coverage increased volatility. Programs evaluated on only one or two lists experienced larger swings than at any point in the composite’s history.

The methodology continues to reward consistency. Programs strong across all five lists rise. Programs with gaps – especially missing FT data – fall quickly and sometimes dramatically.

Next page: What the hell happened to Stanford?

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