Wacky Business School Rankings

Rankings reign supreme as the most-consulted information source for prospective MBA candidates. But not all of them have to be serious. The Princeton Review’s category rankings, ranging from the best campus to the most competitive students, offer a peek into the environment aspiring MBAs can expect at different schools.

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While it’s unlikely an admit to Harvard Business School will ditch an HBS diploma for UCLA Anderson’s balmy southern California campus, another student may opt for the Pacific coastline over two years at Michigan State’s land-locked Broad College of Business in East Lansing, Michigan.

For all their entertainment value, wacky rankings come with a few caveats. The Princeton Review’s  Top 10 lists are no exception. The publication surveys some 19,000 business students across 296 B-schools. However, in many cases the differences between schools are so slight as to be statically meaningless; in other words, a school’s score may represent a mere anomaly or a dip in another school’s fortunes.

The ranking methodology is also unclear. For instance, the best campus environment is assessed according to students’ opinions on their respective school’s safety, attractiveness, and location; however, The Princeton Review provides no indication of the questions used in the ranking or their weight in the final score.

Plus, it often boils down to comparing apples with oranges. After all, how does one really weigh Stanford’s Mission Revival architecture and palm tree-lined drives against Columbia Business School’s close proximity to a smorgasbord of culinary options, art installations, and top financial centers.

For all their faults, these rankings offer a handy way to find schools with your top attributes. They’re also just plain fun.

Best Campus Environment

1. Columbia University

2. University of California (Los Angeles)

3. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

4. Dartmouth College

5. Sanford University

6. The University of Texas at Austin

7. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

8. Vanderbilt University

9. The University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa

10. Pennsylvania State University

Source: The Princeton Review (2014)

Best Professors 

1. University of California (Berkeley)

2. Harvard University

3. The University of Texas at Austin

4. Yale University

5. University of Virginia

6. Vanderbilt University

7. The Ohio State University

8. Rice University

9. Cornell University

10. Dartmouth College

Source: The Princeton Review (2014)