U.S. News MBA Ranking Leaked. Sort of.
Posted by: Louis Lavelle on April 23, 2009
By Anne VanderMey
A few enterprising B-school applicants may have uncovered the results for U.S. News & World Report’s rankings of the top MBA programs about 24 hours before they were officially released online today.
The news magazine’s possible gaffe came when it displayed a set of business school rankings in a two-minute video on graduate school trends. They apparently thought the list would be too small for anyone to make out. Clearly, they underestimated the entrepreneurial prowess—and incredibly keen eyesight—of this year’s class.
The list that has the online MBA sites atwitter, so to speak. Veritas Prep, the GMAT prep service, blogged on the list yesterday. And BusinessWeek’s own MBA forums have been buzzing with the news.
The rankings are displayed after the jump. The new rankings are on the far left, followed by the former rankings in brackets. To the right of the school name is the score assigned to each school in parenthesis, followed by last year’s score in brackets.
1 [1] Harvard (100) [100]
2 [1] Stanford (99) [100]
3 [4] Northwestern (93) [93]
3 [3] Wharton (93) [95]
5 [4] MIT (92) [93]
5 [4] Chicago (92) [93]
7 [7] Berkeley (89) [89]
8 [7] Dartmouth (87) [89]
9 [9] Columbia (86) [88]
10 [13] Yale (85) [80]
11 [10] NYU (83) [84]
12 [14] Duke (82) [79]
13 [12] Michigan (81) [82]
14 [11] UCLA (80) [83]
15 [17] Carnegie Mellon (79) [77]
15 [14] UVA (79) [79]
17 [14] Cornell (78) [79]
18 [18] Texas-Austin (74) [74]
19 [22] Georgetown (71) [69]
20 [19] UNC (70) [72]
20 [21] USC (70) [70]
U.S. News compiles its rankings mostly through a compilation of B-school deans’ opinions, a very different system than the one at BusinessWeek, which uses surveys of students and recruiters, as well as measure of each school's intellectual capital. This means that the two publications usually have substantially different results. By way of comparison, here are the top 10 schools from BusinessWeek’s 2008 MBA rankings.
1 University of Chicago (Booth)
2 Harvard University
3 Northwestern University (Kellogg)
4 University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)
5 University of Michigan (Ross)
6 Stanford University
7 Columbia University
8 Duke University (Fuqua)
9 MIT (Sloan)
10 UC Berkeley (Haas)
More or less the same schools make the top of the list, though U.S. News tends to lean more heavily to the classic Ivies—Dartmouth doesn’t make the top 10 in BusinessWeek’s list, and Yale (number 10 in the leaked U.S. News rankings) comes in at 24.
Kudos to whatever students scoured their screen closely enough to get this scoop. Just don't try it with us. ;)
