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Thursday February 9, 2012

The Top Undergraduate Business Programs

How the mighty have fallen. For the first time since BusinessWeek launched its ranking of undergraduate business programs in 2006, University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School is not our No. 1 program. It was unseated by the University of Virginia-a program that, incidentally, costs a quarter of the tuition Wharton charges. Virginia, a distant second in 2006 and 2007, made significant gains in 2008. In 2009, Virginia-along with Notre Dame-both scored better on our student survey, which counts for 30% of the final ranking, allowing them to capture Nos. 1 and 2, respectively. Even so, Wharton didn't fall far. The school fared far better on the recruiter survey than Virginia did and had a higher median starting salary for graduates-$61,000 vs. Virginia's $58,000. It also has much higher SAT scores among business majors and a significantly smaller class size in core business classes.

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Note: Annual program costs include tuition and required fees for in-state students Starting salaries are 2008 medians. Letter grades represent only a part of the total student survey results; highly ranked programs may have low letter grades, while lower-ranked programs may have high letter grades. In each category, the top 20% among all 101 ranked programs earned A+s. The next 25% got As, the next 35% got Bs, and the bottom 20% got Cs. No Ds or Fs were awarded. NR=Not Ranked. Data: BusinessWeek, Cambria Consulting Research by: Geoff Gloeckler and Fred Jesepersen, with Brian Burnsed, Alison Damast, Lindsey Gerdes, Louis Lavelle, Dan Macsai, Alysa Teichman, Anne VanderMey