How MBAs Rank Their Own Business Schools

Alumni Pick the Best MBA Programs for Networking

These days – if you can look hard enough – you can find an entire MBA curriculum online. Wharton has already made many of its required courses available in MOOC format. And pioneers like Laurie Pickard are cheerfully filling in any gaps.

But don’t assume that free fare will cannibalize the big ticket full-time and executive programs. Recruiters may give extra points to candidates who take MOOCs, but they still expect a degree. Book knowledge may be a commodity, but no MOOC can replicate the give-and-take of discussions between already seasoned professionals.  Plus, it’s hard to really know someone from a discussion board or a conference call. They may as well be some vaguely familiar connection from Facebook or Linkedin. You may scan their pictures or give a thumbs up to one of their accomplishments, but you’re not involved in their lives.

Compare that to business school, where your cohort becomes your confidants, siblings, and (occasionally) your spouse. The experience is inclusive, intimate and intense by design. Forget the high school analogies. In business school, you team up, travel, argue, drink, share, learn, and reflect. You face your confines and stretch beyond them – often with a push or pull from someone so unlike you (on the surface at least). As a result, MBAs become each other’s advocates, advisors, and partners. Their camaraderie is based on adult aspirations and shared pursuits. And it doesn’t stop with classmates.  Alumni shared the same life-changing journeys too. That creates an unspoken bond, with your degree proving you check all the right boxes.

Administrators know that peer and alumni networks are b-school’s real draw. And that’s why students pay a premium, particularly in top programs. Question is, where is the biggest return on investment? Bet you wouldn’t be surprised if I said it was Stanford, would you?

STANFORD PERCEIVED TO HAVE A STRONGER ALUMNI NETWORK THAN HARVARD

Yes, Stanford continues its domination of this week’s alumni choice awards. This week, Business Insider published data from GraduatePrograms.com on the perceived quality of business schools’ networks. Based on online surveys with 10,000 current and former graduate business students, GraduatePrograms.com applied a 1-10 scale (with 1 being the lowest and 10 being the highest) to gauge how satisfied alumni were with the relationships (and opportunities) they gained from peers and other alumni.

We present the results here but warn readers to treat this data with a very big grain of salt. One prominent school that is believed to have the strongest alumni network–at least as judged by the percentage of alumni who donate money annually to the school–isn’t even on the list: Dartmouth’s Tuck School (more on this later). That tells us it’s not all that reliable a measure of the true value of an alumni network.

Still, you can’t argue too much with first-place Stanford where graduates certainly stand on the shoulders of giants. Just flip through an alumni directory and you’ll find the Chairmen or CEOs at firms like Kimberly-Clark, Vodafone, Cisco, Lazard, Capital One, Sun Microsystems, Pfizer, Boeing, and General Motors. And you’ll find names like Philip Knight and Charles Schwab in there too. But Stanford just doesn’t churn out CEOs. They also cultivate engaged and wealthy alumni. They are among the most generous alumni, with 41 percent of graduates making donations to the school. They are also among the best-paid MBA graduates, earning (on average) $3,011,000 within 20 years of graduate according to a joint PayScale-Poets&Quants study. Aside from being located on the outskirts of Silicon Valley – and ranking among the top entrepreneurship programs– the program also sends the highest percentage of graduates into private equity and venture capital. Talk about friends in high places!

Columbia and Harvard rank second and third in alumni strength according to GraduatePrograms.com’s poll, with Columbia alumni network perceived as nearly equal to Stanford (9.90 vs. 9.88 to be exact). And that’s particularly true for alumni looking to work in finance, where Columbia is among the top feeder schools to Goldman Sachs, Citi, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, Credit Suisse, and Deutsche Bank according to Poets&Quants research.

However, this is a lagging indicator, as Columbia alumni are migrating more heavily into consulting and non-profits, creating additional avenues for Columbia students looking to leverage alumni contacts for jobs. As you’d expect, Harvard Business School have camped out in consulting, serving as the largest feeder to the big three consulting firms: McKinsey, Bain & Company, and the Boston Consulting Group. The school also earned some of the highest marks among alumni in Forbes’ 2014 MBA rankings, with student surveys touting both its academic rigor as well as its “hyper-supportive” atmosphere.

Among the top 10 programs, the biggest surprise in GraduatePrograms.com’s survey can be found in College Station, Texas. Here, the Texas A&M Mays Business School comes in at fifth, higher than traditional stalwarts like Wharton and Booth. The secret? In Bloomberg Businessweek, one survey respondent cited the school’s “devoted alumni base.” And that may stem from how students are treated during their time at Mays. “The program really cares about you as an individual,” writes one Bloomberg Businessweek survey respondent. “The administrators are committed to your success and to make the program better–from the dean on down they are working to fix it to make the program the best in the country.”

Go to the next page to see a ranking of the 25 MBA programs for network strength