NEW YORK, Oct. 12 /PRNewswire/ -- University of Chicago, for the first time, has vaulted to the top of BusinessWeek's 2006 biennial survey of "The Best B-Schools." Chicago has always held an esteemed place in the BusinessWeek rankings, landing in the top five a half-dozen times since the rankings began in 1988. The B-school has an award-winning faculty, but its reputation with students has been uneven. Dean Edward A. Snyder's reforms, which include weekly breakfasts with students and improved support services for them, seem to have made the difference.
The best-ranked programs from previous years continue to dominate the top of the list. The University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, which moved up a notch to No.2, did so on the strength of its core curriculum and extensive elective offerings, as well as unusual approaches to teaching. And even though Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management lost its grip on the No.1 perch it has held since 2002, it fell only two places, to No.3. The University of California at Berkeley's Haas School of Business, which until now had never broken into the top 10, catapulted nine spots, to No. 8, leapfrogging such perennial favorites as Cornell, Columbia, and Dartmouth.
Since 1988, BusinessWeek has published its Best B-schools ranking every other year as a way to help prospective students find suitable MBA programs. Over the years, BusinessWeek has nearly tripled the size of the report, added new schools, and updated the methodology. Through all of this, the ranking has centered on one thing: customer satisfaction. This is measured by surveying not just thousands of students but the corporate recruiters who hire them.
This year, BusinessWeek sent a 50-question survey to 16,565 Class of 2006 MBA graduates at 100 schools in North America, Europe, and Asia. Overall, there were 9,298 responses, the same 56% response rate as in 2004. On the Web-based student survey, grads were asked to rate everything from teaching quality to the effectiveness of career services at their schools on a scale of 1-10. The Class of 2006 graduate survey results count for 50% of a school's total student satisfaction score. An additional 25% comes from the responses of 11,518 graduates in the 2002 poll and 25% from 10,074 graduates polled in 2004. We also invited corporate MBA recruiters to fill out an online survey similar to that of the student survey.
"The Best B-Schools" is the cover story of the October 23, 2006 issue of BusinessWeek, on newsstands on Monday, October 16th. In addition, the B-School channel of BusinessWeek.com offers in-depth profiles of more than 400 B-school programs, exclusive listings of the best B-schools by specialty, calculators, search and comparison tools, interactive tools, and much more.
The top 30 schools in BusinessWeek's 2006 "Best B-Schools" rankings are:
2006 2004
Rank School Rank
1 Chicago 2
2 Pennsylvania (Wharton) 3
3 Northwestern (Kellogg) 1
4 Harvard 5
5 Michigan (Ross) 6
6 Stanford 4
7 MIT (Sloan) 9
8 UC-Berkeley (Haas) 17
9 Duke (Fuqua) 11
10 Columbia 8
11 Dartmouth (Tuck) 10
12 UCLA (Anderson) 14
13 Cornell (Johnson) 7
14 NYU (Stern) 13
15 Virginia (Darden) 12
16 Carnegie Mellon (Tepper) 15
17 North Carolina (Kenan-Flagler) 16
18 Indiana (Kelley) 18
19 Yale 22
20 Texas-Austin (McCombs) 19
21 USC (Marshall) 27
22 Georgetown (McDonough) 25
23 Emory (Goizueta) 20
24 Purdue (Krannert) 21
25 Maryland (Smith) 28
26 Notre Dame (Mendoza) 24
27 Washington University (Olin) 23
28 Rochester (Simon) 29
29 Michigan State (Broad) NA
30 Vanderbilt (Owen) 30
