Stanford Tops Sustainability Rankings

A new report finds dramatic growth in "business and society" programs in many business schools—driven by student demand

by Alison Damast

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Stanford students visit slums on a trip to East Africa. Stanford University

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Sustainability is not a vague pie in the sky concept for students at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Last year, students worked to make the business-school cafeteria a nearly entirely sustainable operation with biodegradable forks and an extensive composting system. Their schedules are filled with classes such as Environmental Entrepreneurship and Frontiers of Social Innovation, while winter and spring break service trips to countries including Guatemala and Thailand have become so popular they are routinely overbooked.

The efforts undertaken by the school have not gone unnoticed by the Aspen Institute, a leadership think tank, which ranked Stanford as the top school in its "Beyond Grey Pinstripes" biannual alternative rankings of business schools released Oct. 10. This is the second time that Stanford topped the list: In 2005 it also was rated first.

Indeed, the outlook is bright this year for business-school students with an environmental leaning, says Rich Leimsider, director of New York's Aspen Institute Center for Business Education. According to the ranking, the percentage of business schools that require students to take a course focused on "business and society" issues has increased dramatically over the past five years, jumping from 34% in 2001 to 63% in 2007. Of the 111 surveyed schools, 35 offer a special concentration in social and environmental issues. There has been an "absolute explosion" of interest in this subject area over the past decade, Leimsider notes. "Considering the [typical] rate of change in higher education, this is lightning fast."

Top 10 for Teaching Green

Unlike general business-school rankings conducted by BusinessWeek and others, which evaluate schools on everything from career services to job placement, the Aspen Institute's "alternative" ranking solely examines how MBA programs are integrating social and environmental topics into their core classes, electives, and academic research. The institute surveyed 111 institutions, 71 in the U.S. and 40 international schools, representing a total of 18 countries.

The other business schools in the top ten are the University of Michigan, York University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Notre Dame, Columbia University, Cornell University, Duquesne University, Yale University, and Instituto de Empresa.

For the ranking, the institute reviews the schools in these four ways: a count of the number of courses with content in this area; students' overall exposure to these issues while in school; how the concepts are woven into other required classes; and faculty research published in journals. "Our goal is to provide a useful tool to prospective students that really focuses on some issues that we think are missing from a lot of other surveys and rankings," says Leimsider. The data is taken from the 2005-06 and 2006-07 academic years.