NEW YORK, Nov. 13 /PRNewswire/ -- University of Chicago retained the No.1 spot on BusinessWeek's 2008 biennial ranking of "The Best B-Schools." The best-ranked programs from previous years continue to dominate the top of the list, including Harvard, which jumped two spots to No.2, Kellogg (No.3), and Wharton, which dropped to No.4.
On the nation's B-school campuses, hope used to spring eternal. No more. Students are downsizing their expectations, rejiggering career plans, and settling for less as the cascading effects of the global financial crisis start to be felt at MBA programs around the country. For current students, the only concern is finding a job -- and nowhere is that dream receding faster than on Wall Street. Second-year students without job offers appear to be in the most precarious position. With companies pulling back on second-year recruiting and competition for the few remaining finance jobs becoming fierce, students are entering what surely is the toughest MBA job market since the dot-com bust.
All the bad news for B-school students has turned out to be good news for B-schools, which tend to do brisk business when the economy falters. Already, admissions officers say they are experiencing double-digit increases in applications for 2009 and increased interest from students.
Since 1988, BusinessWeek has published its Best B-schools ranking every other year as a way to help prospective students find suitable MBA programs. The biennial ranking of full-time MBA programs is based on three elements: a survey of newly minted MBAs, a poll of corporate recruiters, and an evaluation of faculty research output. The MBA survey, which measures satisfaction with all aspects of the B-school experience, is combined with two previous MBA surveys, for a total pool of more than 20,000 responses over six years. The corporate poll, which asks recruiters to identify the schools that produce the best graduates, is also combined with two previous recruiter surveys, for a total of nearly 700 responses. Finally, BusinessWeek tallies the number of articles published by each school's faculty in 20 top journals and reviews of their books in three national publications. The total for faculty size is then adjusted and an intellectual-capital rating is assigned for each school. The MBA surveys and the recruiter polls each contribute 45% to the final ranking, with the intellectual-capital ranking contributing the final 10%.
"The Best B-Schools" is featured in the November 24, 2008 issue of BusinessWeek, on newsstands Monday, November 17th. In addition, the B-Schools channel on BusinessWeek.com (http://www.businessweek.com/bschools) 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 2008 "The Best B-Schools" rankings are:
2008 2007 Rank School Rank 1 Chicago (Booth) 1 2 Harvard 4 3 Northwestern (Kellogg) 3 4 Pennsylvania (Wharton) 2 5 Michigan (Ross) 5 6 Stanford 6 7 Columbia 10 8 Duke (Fuqua) 9 9 MIT (Sloan) 7 10 UC-Berkeley (Haas) 8 11 Cornell (Johnson) 13 12 Dartmouth (Tuck) 11 13 NYU (Stern) 14 14 UCLA (Anderson) 12 15 Indiana (Kelley) 18 16 Virginia (Darden) 15 17 North Carolina (Kenan-Flagler) 17 18 Southern Methodist (Cox) NA 19 Carnegie Mellon (Tepper) 16 20 Notre Dame (Mendoza) 26 21 Texas-Austin (McCombs) 20 22 Brigham Young (Marriott) NA 23 Emory (Goizueta) 23 24 Yale 19 25 USC (Marshall) 21 26 Maryland (Smith) 25 27 U. of Washington (Foster) NA 28 Washington U. (Olin) 27 29 Georgia Tech NA 30 Vanderbilt (Owen) 30
