Undergrad Business Program Rankings

Answers to your burning questions about BusinessWeek's annual undergraduate business programs rankings

When is the Undergraduate Business Program ranking published?

Every year in late February or early March.

How does BusinessWeek determine who is eligible for rankings?

To be eligible, schools must have an accredited undergraduate business degree program that meets our criteria for program size, age, test scores, grade point averages for business majors, and number of full-time tenured faculty, among other things.

If a school has never been ranked before, how does it get considered for ranking?

Click on this link and complete our online submission form. BusinessWeek will consider your answers to these questions to determine eligibility.

What sources of data does BusinessWeek use to rank programs?

There are five sources for the undergraduate ranking: a student survey, a recruiter survey, median starting salaries for graduates, the number of graduates admitted to 35 top MBA programs, and an academic quality measure that consists of SAT/ACT test scores for business majors, full-time faculty-student ratios in the business program, average class size in core business classes, the percentage of business majors with internships, and the number of hours students spend preparing for class each week. The test scores, faculty-student ratio, and class size information come from a survey to be completed by participating schools; the internship and hours of preparation data come from the student survey.

When does each of the surveys get distributed? How long are they available for completion?

The student survey is distributed in November and remains live for approximately three months; the recruiter survey is distributed in December and remains live for two months. The school survey is distributed in January, and the schools have approximately six weeks to complete it. The details of survey distribution may change in future years.

How is the student survey conducted?

It's conducted online. Using e-mail addresses supplied by the programs, BusinessWeek and Cambria Consulting contact students and direct them to a site where they can complete the survey. BusinessWeek sends out several reminders to ensure an adequate response rate.

The survey consists of about 50 questions that ask students to rate their programs on teaching quality, career services, alumni network, and recruiting efforts, among other things. Using the average answer for each of the questions and each question's standard deviation, we calculate a student survey score for each school.

Next, for each school, we combine that score with those from the two previous rankings to calculate each school's overall student survey score. (For schools that did not participate in one or more previous surveys, BusinessWeek employs the services of statisticians David Rindskopf and Alan Gross, professors of educational psychology at City University of New York Graduate Center. They calculate estimates of the missing scores using statistical regressions and the survey results from schools with complete data.) The most recent year's survey counts for 50% of the school's overall student survey score; the two previous years count for 25% each.

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