<p>the title says it all =]
is the ranking, comments…etc accurate???
i mean, can we rely on it?</p>
<p>heres the url, which im sure many ppl have viewed already:) :</p>
<p>[Undergrad</a> - BSchools](<a href=“http://bwnt.businessweek.com/bschools/undergraduate/08rankings/]Undergrad”>http://bwnt.businessweek.com/bschools/undergraduate/08rankings/)</p>
<p>MIT Sloan at 9 makes me quesiton it. The easiest way to know if an undergrad bschool ranking is legit is if Wharton is #1 (which it is). If Wharton is anything else, the ranking is complete bs 9 times out of 10.</p>
<p>No ranking is “accurate” as in gospel truth. ALL of them are subjective. Its a matter of opinion. What does it matter? Not at all.</p>
<p>Go to the school which OVERALL is the best fit for you, not based solely on its ranking. Many of those schools are OUTSTANDING in their local areas for job opportunities, some are more national in scope.</p>
<p>It sort of depends on what you want to do and where you want to do it. If you are going to work for Proctor and Gamble, it sort of doesnt matter. </p>
<p>Many undergrad business students go onto MBA school, or even Law School. Some feel like undergrad is a special time and thus they want the “complete college experience”, and worry about rankings for grad school.</p>
<p>There’s not much difference between the two. Unless you’re the type that likes to argue between who’s #79 and #80.
Only Richmond and 1-2 others are ranked significantly different. BusinessWeek seems to focus on post-graduate employment and alumni network more than USNews.</p>
<p>Judged alone on the basis of the undergrad business schools, BW is pretty good, but it’s not a complete picture. The part that Business Week misses is that many students study in other areas and then compete for these same jobs with students coming out of these business schools. So, if you want to compare your job prospects coming out of a highly ranked undergrad business school, you have to also factor in students like the French Lit major coming out Georgetown who might be really, really smart and very, very attractive to a potential employer.</p>
<p>As for the BW rankings, here is how the Top 25 stack up to each based on their total score.:</p>
<p>Score , College</p>
<p>100% , U Penn (Wharton)
99% , U Virginia (McIntire)
97% , Notre Dame (Mendoza)
92% , Cornell
91% , Emory (Goizueta)
91% , U Michigan (Ross)
89% , BYU (Marriott)
89% , NYU (Stern)
88% , MIT (Sloan)
85% , U Texas (McCombs)
82% , UC Berkeley (Haas)
81% , U North Carolina (Kenan)
80% , Villanova
80% , Boston College
78% , Wash U (Olin)
77% , Indiana U (Kelley)
77% , USC (Marshall)
76% , U Illinois
75% , Georgetown (McDonough)
75% , U Richmond
75% , Wake Forest
73% , Carnegie Mellon (Tepper)
73% , SMU (Cox)
73% , Miami U (Farmer)
72% , Lehigh</p>
<p>and here is how they compare on the quality of Teaching you’ll see at these colleges:</p>
<p>Teaching Quality Score , College</p>
<p>A+ , NYU (Stern)
A+ , U Penn (Wharton)
A+ , U Virginia (McIntire)
A+ , Notre Dame (Mendoza)
A+ , Cornell
A+ , Emory (Goizueta)
A+ , MIT (Sloan)
A+ , Villanova
A+ , Boston College
A+ , Wash U (Olin)
A+ , Georgetown (McDonough)
A+ , U Richmond
A+ , Wake Forest
A+ , SMU (Cox)
A+ , Lehigh</p>
<p>A , USC (Marshall)
A , Carnegie Mellon (Tepper)
A , Miami U (Farmer)
A , BYU (Marriott)
A , U Texas (McCombs)
A , UC Berkeley (Haas)
A , U North Carolina (Kenan)
A , Indiana U (Kelley)</p>
<p>B , U Michigan (Ross)</p>
<p>C , U Illinois</p>
<p>and here is how they compare for Job Placement</p>
<p>Job Placement , College</p>
<p>A + , UC Berkeley (Haas)
A+ , NYU (Stern)
A+ , U Penn (Wharton)
A+ , U Virginia (McIntire)
A+ , Notre Dame (Mendoza)
A+ , Cornell
A+ , MIT (Sloan)
A+ , Villanova
A+ , Boston College
A+ , SMU (Cox)
A+ , USC (Marshall)
A+ , U Texas (McCombs)
A+ , Indiana U (Kelley)
A+ , U Michigan (Ross)
A+ , U Illinois</p>
<p>A , Emory (Goizueta)
A , Lehigh
A , Miami U (Farmer)
A , BYU (Marriott)
A , U North Carolina (Kenan)</p>
<p>B , Georgetown (McDonough)
B , U Richmond
B , Wake Forest
B , Carnegie Mellon (Tepper)</p>
<p>C , Wash U (Olin)</p>
<p>As is often the case with these rankings, the raw data are more informative than the final ordinal rank. I especially look for outliers, e.g.:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Among the top-ranked schools, Virginia (#44), Cornell (#33), Emory (#38), and perhaps most surprisingly MIT (Sloan) (#49) are not held in particularly high regard by recruiters. Obviously these schools had some compensating strengths to make it into the top 10, but it seems the me there’s more of a story to be told here. I’d want to know more: why don’t the recruiters like them so much? [Hawkette, take note: you’re constantly arguing for recruiter surveys and suggesting schools like Emory would do better if US News surveyed recruiters rather than academics; here’s evidence to the contrary].</p></li>
<li><p>Can the student-faculty ratio really be 2.41/1 at MIT, and at the other extreme 42.22/1 at Texas? I find both figures barely credible. If the Texas figure is correct, how could it possibly be a top 10 school? That’s a true “factory school.” Also disturbingly high at #11 is Berkeley (35/1). But #4 Cornell (19.14/1), #7 Brigham Young (18.16/1), and #3 Notre Dame (18.07/1) are only marginally better; and as you go further down the overall ranking, there are actually quite a few schools approaching Texas and Berkeley-level numbers. I guess I never paid much attention to B-schools; I didn’t realize they were such mass production operations.</p></li>
<li><p>Michigan is the only top 10 school to get a grade of B for teaching quality (all the others were A or A+), and at #17 ranks the lowest among the top 10 in student satisfaction (though Texas is close behind at #15). But the BW editorial comment is intriguing: it says Michigan students are “no fans of strict grading.” I find this interesting. I’m not in a B-school, but in my experience in academia there’s often an inverse correlation between student teaching evaluations and the rigor of the professor’s grading curve: the stricter the grading the lower the student evals, and vice versa. It’s not the only factor, but it’s a big reason for grade inflation over the years: a lot of academics aren’t tough enough to stand up to the students and give them low Bs or Cs when they deserve it. That’s one of many reasons I always take student teaching evaluations with a large grain of salt; they’re as often an indicator of a professor’s charisma, entertainment value, or generous grading as they are a measure of teaching quality. Case in point? I guess if I were a recruiter I’d thank Michigan for its rigorous grading, rather than seeing the student grumbling it generates as a negative.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>I found the recruiter ranks interesting, but often contradictory with the results from the job placement grades which I thought were a better representation of a school’s ability to get its graduates to the places they want to go. For example, consider the recruiter ranks of those schools that placed A+ in job placement:</p>
<p>Recruiter Rank, Job Placement Grade, College</p>
<p>12th, A+ , UC Berkeley (Haas)
17th, A+ , NYU (Stern)
7th, A+ , U Penn (Wharton)
44th, A+ , U Virginia (McIntire)
18th, A+ , Notre Dame (Mendoza)
33rd, A+ , Cornell
49th, A+ , MIT (Sloan)
25th, A+ , Villanova
5th, A+ , Boston College
90th, A+ , SMU (Cox)
3rd, A+ , USC (Marshall)
2nd, A+ , U Texas (McCombs)
14th, A+ , Indiana U (Kelley)
15th, A+ , U Michigan (Ross)
4th, A+ , U Illinois</p>
<p>I think that anyone with decent exposure to these colleges would agree that they do a pretty good job of placing their students and wouldn’t likely balk at the A+ grades. Much more confusing, however, are the recruiter ranks. MIT is 49th?? U Virginia is 44th?? There are six business schools that are more highly regarded by recruiters than Wharton??? I doubt it. </p>
<p>I’m not sure how BW did their job placement and recruiter ranks, but the placement grades look credible to me; the recruiter ranks do not. I’d be interested to read if others have a contrary view.</p>
<p>^BYU and Michigan State beat out Wharton in the recruiter rank. What? Tulane is 95 after schools like Texas-Dallas and College of New Jersey Ewing. What? I don’t think I can trust those numbers.</p>
<p>^ Yeah, very suspicious. I think it shows just how difficult it is to do a meaningful recruiter survey, given the multiplicity and diversity of types of recruiters, disparate job markets, etc. BW says they sent their survey to “618 corporate recruiters for companies that hire thousands of business majors each year” and asked them not only which schools turn out the best graduates but also “which schools have the most innovative curricula and most effective career services.” Problem right there: they’re being asked to weigh incommensurables, including dimensions that arguably aren’t terribly relevant to their own recruiting (“most innovative curricula”? Why should the recruiter care, so long as they’re getting the kinds of graduates they want?)</p>
<p>BW says 244 of 618 recruiters responded–a respectable 39% response rate. But it could be that the responses were somehow skewed by type of recruiter or jobs for which they were recruiting. My first thought was maybe some kind of regional skew, given that Wharton finished 7th and Sloan a lackluster 49th in recruiter survey. After all, two Southwestern schools (BYU #1 and Texas #2) and two Midwestern schools (UIUC #5 and Michigan State #6) beat out Wharton. But that’s not it: a whole bunch of Northeastern schools finished ahead of Sloan in this category: Boston College #5, Wharton #7, Penn State #8, Binghamton #11, Fordham #13, NYU #17, Rutgers #21, RPI #22, Temple #23, Lehigh #24, Villanova #26, Drexel #27, Loyola-Baltimore #28, Carnegie Mellon #31, Seton Hall #32, Cornell #33, Buffalo #34, Syracuse #37, RIT #39, Georgetown #42. </p>
<p>Who knew that recruiters would rank MIT-Sloan the 21st-best undergrad B-School in the Northeast? lol</p>
<p>I’ve said before it would be really difficult to construct a recruiter survey that was truly representative. I think this is confirmation.</p>
<p>MIT just offers management, no? That’s as wide a scope of business as economics.</p>
<p>Are Penn and MIT really that good, or do people think they’re good because they’re prestigious?</p>
<p>^What do you think goes into a top business program? I would say the main things are name recognition and job placement. The prestige of Wharton and Sloan help do this a lot. I would also say that their acaemics are a lot more quantitiative and rigirous than your average business program. Also, they are the only undisputed top tier MBA programs (Harvard, Stanford, Kellogg, Chicago GSB, Columbia, Tuck) to have an undergraduate business program.</p>
<p>Wharton has the largest, most published, and most cited business school faculty in the world. That helps.</p>
<p>From what I have seen, BBA programs would rate as follows:</p>
<p>Wharton (truly in a league of its own)</p>
<p>Haas (Cal), Ross (Michigan), Sloan (MIT)</p>
<p>Cornell, McIntire (UVa), Stern (NYU), Tepper (CMU)</p>
<p>Kenan Flagler (UNC), Marshall (USC), McCombs (Texas), McDonough (Georgetown)</p>
<p>Goizuetta (Emory), Kelly (Indiana), Mendoza (Notre Dame)</p>
<p>Very little separates one group from the next. I am sure I missed a couple of programs, but those are the top as far as I am concerned.</p>
<p>Venkat, Cal, Michigan and perhaps NYU also have undisputed top tier MBA programs and they too offer BBA programs…certainly on par with Sloan, Columbia and Tuck.</p>
<p>I wasn’t sure if Haas Ross and Stern made it to CC’s standards of <em>top</em> MBA programs. Have you seen some of the nit picking that goes on here?</p>
<p>Alexandre, for the record, Wharton (and perhaps some others, e.g., Sloan) is technically not a BBA program–all Wharton undergrads are awarded a B.S. in Economics, regardless of concentration. Just to be hypertechnical. :D</p>
<p>“I wasn’t sure if Haas Ross and Stern made it to CC’s standards of <em>top</em> MBA programs. Have you seen some of the nit picking that goes on here?”</p>
<p>Oh, I was not referring to CC wisdom! hehe! Generally speaking, recruiters and academics rate Ross and Haas at the same level as Columbia and Tuck.</p>
<p>^^–^^</p>
<p>Isn’t that why Wharton is truly in a league of its own … to paraphrase Alexandre. </p>
<p>Fwiw, 45%, the differences between a LAC-based program such as Wharton and the typical factory produced BBA are far from being of a simple hypertechnical nature. There are a lot fewer differences between a “business” education one can obtain at Wharton, Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and other highly ranked economics/finance programs than at the typical BBA producing schools.</p>
<p>butchokoy wrote: “Any ranking for business school that does not follow in that chronological order above is highly questionable”</p>
<p>what does chronology have to do with the ranking? I wish people would use words properly</p>