Texas A&M’s Nate Sharp Says Mays Won’t Be Content Until It’s America’s No. 1 Public B-School

Early in his deanship at Texas A&M Mays Business School, Nate Sharp called an old friend for advice. Lilian Mills, then dean of UT Austin’s McCombs School of Business, had known him for more than 20 years, since his Ph.D. days in Austin. Sharp told her his plan. He wanted to visit the deans of the best business schools in the country, sit across the table from each one and ask what they wished they had known starting out, what kept them up at night and what advice they had for a new dean.

Mills didn’t mince words.

“She said, ‘It’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard,’” Sharp tells Poets&Quants. “She said they not only won’t visit with you, they don’t have time. They won’t even take your calls.”

Unusually for her, Mills couldn’t have been more wrong. The first dean Sharp contacted was Srikant Datar at Harvard Business School, a cold email to someone he had never met. Datar wrote back that he would be honored. Stanford GSB’s dean was named president of Stanford two weeks before Sharp’s scheduled visit, and Sharp waited for the cancellation email. It never came. Over his first year or so as dean, Sharp sat down with the deans of 12 top schools, among them Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Michigan, Carnegie Mellon and Wisconsin.

“It was one of the most important things I have ever done in this role,” Sharp says. “I learned from the very best.”

‘NOT CONTENT WITH ANY FORM OF MEDIOCRITY’

That refusal to take no for an answer says a lot about Texas A&M Mays right now. Sharp, an accounting scholar who earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at BYU and his Ph.D. at McCombs in 2007, joined the Mays faculty that same year. He led the accounting department before becoming dean i February 2023. Nearly four years later, the school posted the biggest gain of any program in Bloomberg Businessweek’s 2026-27 ranking. Its full-time MBA jumped 19 spots to No. 22 in the U.S. – ahead of both McCombs and Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business, making it No. 1 in Texas.

Sharp is quick to say that No. 1 in Texas – the second-largest U.S. state by population and share of national GDP – is not his, or the school’s, goal. Since his first day as dean, he has been consistent about the same aspiration: Mays will not be content until it is the No. 1 public business school in the country.

“One of the accomplishments is just the way the whole college has coalesced around that objective,” he tells P&Q. “We’ve hired new faculty who have said to me when they got here, ‘I just can’t believe how different it feels to be at a place where the aspirations are so high, and yet there’s such unity around those aspirations.’ There’s just something special about being at a place where people are not complacent, not content with any form of mediocrity.”

That ambition has been backed by money and bricks. Sharp’s tenure has brought record-setting fundraising, the school’s first national media campaign and the opening of the Wayne Roberts ‘85 Building, the first new Mays building in more than two decades. A second, dedicated graduate building is due in early 2029. It is anchored by a $25 million gift from the Mays Family Foundation, announced in April 2024 as the largest single donation in school history.

BEHIND THE BLOOMBERG LEAP

Sharp credits the school’s graduate programs team for Mays’ rankings gains – as well as a structural change most outsiders missed. For years, Mays sold its full-time MBA as an accelerated 16-month program, a way to get students out eight months faster than a two-year school like McCombs. It sounded like an edge. In practice, Sharp says, it put Mays out of sync with employers’ recruiting calendars and left little room in the curriculum for electives.

“It was kind of a generalist program,” he says. “And so we said it’s time to go like everybody else and have a two-year curriculum. We’ll get on the same recruiting cycles, the same placement cycle, and we’re going to offer far more electives to allow some specialization for our students.”

Bloomberg’s survey results reflected two strengths in particular. Mays ranked No. 4 in the nation for networking and No. 11 for learning. It ranked lower on the other two indexes, No. 28 for compensation and No. 44 for entrepreneurship. The ranking also changed this year, when Bloomberg dropped its inclusion index, previously weighted at 6%, and redistributed that weight among the remaining four.

Sharp calls the Aggie Network unlike any other.

“It’s so vast and so loyal, and people are so focused on helping the next generation of students,” he says. “It’s like they live to open doors and to make connections and to give a hand. You have to see it to believe it.”

The full-time MBA remains small, with a class of 46 students, according to Bloomberg. Sharp acknowledges the full-time MBA market remains challenging. Mays is also close to naming a new full-time MBA director, he says, after a search that began in May, when the previous director moved into a different role.

MOMENTUM – AND A MIXED SCORECARD

The Bloomberg leap isn’t the only upward move. In U.S. News’ 2026 ranking, the Mays full-time MBA rose to No. 15 among public schools and a tie for No. 36 overall, up from No. 20 and No. 43 the year before. The executive MBA, based at Mays’ CityCentre campus in Houston, ranked No. 1 in Texas and No. 3 among U.S. public schools in this year’s Financial Times EMBA ranking, with a No. 1 U.S. finish for career progress. The MS in Finance debuted at No. 2 among U.S. publics in the FT’s ranking – the first year Mays submitted data for the program. And U.S. News ranked Mays’ suite of online master’s programs No. 1 among public schools.

At the undergraduate level, Mays rose to No. 13 among public schools in the 2027 U.S. News ranking, with four of its five academic departments in the public top 10.

“Our rise in these rankings year over year tells us we are building something special,” Sharp said when the ranking was released in September.

Not every measure moves in lockstep. U.S. News’ undergraduate ranking is based entirely on peer surveys of deans and senior faculty. Poets&Quants’ 2026 undergraduate ranking, which weighs admissions standards, career outcomes and alumni surveys, placed Mays 57th in 2026, down from 50th, with a career outcomes rank of 95th out of 110 schools. In the Financial Times’ 2026 global MBA ranking, Mays held steady at a tie for 70th. In P&Q’s composite MBA ranking, Mays rose modestly, to No. 38 in 2025-26 from No. 41.

MBA placement has also swung, most recently in the right direction. Mays reported that 96% of its Class of 2024 had job offers within 90 days of graduation, followed by a dip for the Class of 2025. Bloomberg reports that 82% of that class’s job seekers found work within three months. For the Class of 2026, Mays reports that 96.3% received offers within 90 days, with an average starting salary of $133,075 and signing bonuses averaging $20,000.

THE SCHOOL FOR THE TEXAS TRIANGLE

Ask Sharp what Mays’ single biggest advantage is, and he doesn’t hesitate.

“Our location,” he says. “We are right in the middle of the Texas Triangle.”

The region linking Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Austin and San Antonio has an economy Sharp says would rank among the world’s largest, with energy in Houston, aerospace in Fort Worth, finance in Dallas, tech in Austin and commercial real estate booming across the state. That gives Mays graduates a microcosm of the American economy within a few hours’ drive.

It’s also where Sharp draws his sharpest contrast with his alma mater. McCombs, he says, is seen as an Austin school, tied to the Austin economy. Mays isn’t tied to any one metro.

“What Mays can do that McCombs really can’t do is we are agnostic between Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, Houston, San Antonio,” Sharp says. “Our students come here from all over Texas, and they want to go back to all over Texas. We feel like we are the school for the Texas Triangle.”

BUILT FROM THE GROUND UP

When Sharp became dean in 2023, Mays had no online portfolio to speak of. The MIS department had launched a small online master’s on its own, and Sharp himself had launched an online master’s in accounting as department head just before moving into the dean’s office. In his first week as dean, he set a different course.

“Not only are we going to do a portfolio of master’s degrees in the online space, but I want to build all of them completely from the ground up,” he says. “We’re not going to outsource to Coursera or anybody else. We’re going to hire all the people to build it, and we’re going to do it at a world-class level.”

That decision has paid off in a way he couldn’t have predicted. Because Mays owns all of its content, it can point its own AI models at that material to build customized tutors and practice exercises for students.

Today the Flex Online portfolio enrolls more than 1,100 students, Sharp says. About 85% are Texans, with an average of nine to 10 years of work experience, and the gender split is nearly even. He says that’s a far higher share of women than Mays has typically recruited into its residential MBA in College Station, likely because the online format spares students the cost of quitting their jobs and uprooting their families.

The first Flex Online MBA cohort, which graduated in December 2025, posted a graduation rate of about 98.7%, according to Sharp. He credits the personal attention students receive. The program’s director handwrites a birthday card to every student in each cohort of roughly 225.

Every Flex Online master’s program includes a weekly 90-minute live session with faculty, and the investment is going up a notch. The fourth floor of the new graduate building will house extended-reality production stages for the online programs. Sharp says the most gratifying feedback of his four years has come from graduates on LinkedIn.

“They’ll say things like, ‘That was the single best educational experience I have ever had in my life,’” he says. “It doesn’t get better than that.”

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