Washington D.C. Named Best Metro Area to Launch Post-MBA Career

When selecting the schools to where you’ll apply for your MBA, we encourage prospective students not to overlook the importance of geography. Attending a program in or near a city where you would like to live post-graduation increases your networking and relationship-building opportunities and makes local internships and employment a possibility throughout your time in school. 

If you’re still thinking through your longer-term plans and researching target schools, consider Coworking Cafe’s recently released “Best Places for MBA Grads to Launch their Careers.” The analysis includes over 100 U.S. metro areas (with populations of at least 500,000) and incorporates employment, business, financial, and lifestyle metrics to assess professional and personal opportunities. It is important to note that all of the locations boast excellent MBA programs within the city or region.

Here are the top 10-ranked cities. For more detail on the cities and methodology click here. 

1 Washington, D.C.

2 San Jose, CA

3 Durham, NC

4 Denver, CO (tie)

4 Austin, TX (tie)

5 Madison, WI

6 Atlanta, GA

7 Boston, MA

8 Raleigh, NC

9 San Francisco, CA

10 Baltimore, MD

LinkedIn Names Harvard as Top Business School in Inaugural Rankings

LinkedIn just unveiled its first ranking of full-time MBA programs, The 50 Best U.S. Business Schools to Grow Your Career, which uses data culled from the site itself. It includes only U.S.-based MBA programs, with at least 500 alumni, who graduated between 2018 to 2022. Its methodology is based on five pillars:

1. Hiring and Demand: Uses LinkedIn hiring and recruiter InMail data to track job placement rates for graduates and labor market demand

2. Ability to Advance: Uses standardized job titles to track promotions among recent cohorts, and the pace at which alumni reach director or VP-level leadership roles

3. Network Strength: Uses member connection data to track the average connections alumni have with individuals in director-level positions or above (network quality) and the network growth rate of recent cohorts before and after graduation (cohort connectivity)

4. Leadership Potential: Tracks percentage of alumni who take on entrepreneurial or C-suite roles post-graduation

5. Gender Diversity: Tracks gender parity within recent graduate cohorts

LinkedIn also provides some unique insights alongside its rankings, which include the most common industries, job titles, locations, and skills for each program based upon aggregated data collected from the LinkedIn profiles of alumni. The platform also allows the reader to click into each school to see who in their own network attended the school. Find the full ratings here.

Rank Business School

1 Harvard Business School

2 Stanford GSB

3 Dartmouth (Tuck)

4 Penn (Wharton)

5 MIT (Sloan)

6 Northwestern (Kellogg)

7 UC Berkeley (Haas)

8 Yale SOM

9 Chicago (Booth)

10 Duke (Fuqua)

11 Columbia Business School

12 Virginia (Darden)

13 UCLA (Anderson)

14 Cornell (Johnson)

15 Emory (Goizueta)

16 New York University (Stern)

17 Carnegie Mellon (Tepper)

18 Michigan (Ross)

19 USC (Marshall)

20 Texas (McCombs)

Not all stakeholders are impressed with LinkedIn’s initial effort. Poets & Quants called it a “Shrewd concept, botched execution.” Noting a lack of transparency in the methodology, P&Q calls out LinkedIn’s failure to provide index scores so that readers can understand how schools compare to each other. Also missing: an explanation for how the analysis weights the five pillars, or how the methodology accommodates for different class sizes (e.g., HBS graduates double the number of students in one five-year period compared to Michigan Ross). P&Q is also critical of the fact that, for an outcomes-based ranking, LinkedIn neglects metrics on salary or salary growth in its analysis. Read the full critique here. 

Chicago Schools Come Out on Top in U.S. News’ Best MBA Rankings

University of Chicago Booth took the top spot in the newly released U.S. News and World Report’s “Best MBA” ranking. Booth was followed by Northwestern Kellogg at number two. University of Pennsylvania Wharton dropped to number three after sharing the top rank with Booth last year. This year’s rankings utilized an updated methodology with a greater emphasis on outcomes, which caused some shifts within the top 15. Highlights include:

• Dartmouth Tuck saw the largest uptick, moving from the 11th rank in 2022 to share the 6th rank with Stanford. 

• USC Marshall climbed four spots to the 15th rank, which it holds alongside Cornell Johnson.

• Harvard maintained its 5th rank position for the third consecutive year.

• Stanford, Columbia, and Berkeley Haas all dropped three spots from their positions last year. Columbia and Berkeley fell out of the top 10 into a three-way tie for the 11th rank with Duke Fuqua.

Along with the rankings, U.S. News shared key updates to its methodology, which increased the weight for “Placement Success,” to 50 percent of the overall rank. This is up significantly from 35 percent last year and includes two employment metrics as well as the mean starting salary and bonus for graduates. The overall rank de-emphasized the “Quality Assessment” to 25 percent of the total, down from 40 percent, and includes a peer and recruiter assessment score. “Student Selectivity” makes up the final 25 percent of the rank. It includes undergraduate GPA and acceptance rate, weighted slightly more than in previous years, and standardized test scores, weighted slightly less. 

Rank/School

1 University of Chicago (Booth)

2 Northwestern University (Kellogg)

3 University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)

4 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan)

5 Harvard University

6 Dartmouth College (Tuck)

6 Stanford University

8 University of Michigan--Ann Arbor (Ross)

8 Yale University

10 New York University (Stern)

11 Columbia University

11 Duke University (Fuqua)

11 University of California, Berkeley (Haas)

14 University of Virginia (Darden)

15 Cornell University (Johnson)

15 University of Southern California (Marshall)

17 Emory University (Goizueta)

18 Carnegie Mellon University (Tepper)

19 University of California--Los Angeles (Anderson)

20 University of Texas--Austin (McCombs)

20 University of Washington (Foster)

22 Indiana University (Kelley)

22 University of North Carolina--Chapel Hill (Kenan-Flagler)

24 Georgetown University (McDonough)

24 Rice University (Jones)

U.S. Schools Dominate the Financial Times’ 2023 Global MBA Rankings

The Financial Times just released its 2023 Global MBA rankings. Schools located in the U.S. performed well, making up three of the top five spots and twelve of the top fifteen. For the first time in the ranking’s history, Columbia University took the top rank. Notably, last year’s number one ranked program, University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School was not ranked at all due to not meeting the minimum response threshold on the alumni survey. Poets & Quants notes that while other schools have suffered the same fate in previous years, it has never occurred at such a prestigious program, likely causing embarrassment at both Wharton and the FT. In addition to last year, Wharton has garnered the top rank ten times since the ranking’s debut in 1999.

Also of note, amidst the controversy surrounding the U.S. News’ rankings for medical and law schools, the FT updated its methodology for this year’s ranking. While the ranking still maintains an emphasis on outcome measures, including employment three years past graduation, salary, and salary change from pre- to post-MBA, the FT has also increased the weight given to metrics related to societal goals. These include social mobility, which uses metrics such as financial aid, study costs, and post-MBA earnings, as well as gender parity and student diversity, and sustainability and the environment. 

Rank School Name

1 Columbia

2 Insead, France/Singapore

3 IESE, Spain

4 Harvard

4 Stanford

6 SDA (Bocconi), Italy

7 UC Berkeley (Haas)

8 Cornell (Johnson)

9 Northwestern (Kellogg)

10 Yale

11 Duke (Fuqua)

11 MIT (Sloan)

11 University of Chicago (Booth)

14 UCLA (Anderson)

15 Dartmouth (Tuck)

Princeton Review Releases On-Campus MBA Rankings

The Princeton Review just released its rankings of top on-campus MBA programs. They do not show all schools for a “best of” view because the Princeton Review believes each of the 243 schools included provide an excellent academic experience. Rather, their rankings are organized by categories which are designed to provide prospective students with insights and data (gathered from 20,300 student experience surveys of on-campus enrollees of the MBA programs, as well as institutional data collected from an administrator survey) on various aspects of the program’s experience.  

You can access the top 10 lists for each of the 18 topic areas here. Below, we highlight three of the Princeton Review’s MBA rankings. 

Best Classroom Experience: (student response data only)

1. Stanford Graduate School of Business

2. UVA Darden 

3. Georgia Tech Scheller 

4. University of Michigan Ross 

5. Duke Fuqua 

6. UCLA Anderson 

7. University of Florida Hough 

8. UNC Kenan-Flagler 

9. University of Washington Foster 

10. Rice University Jones 

Best Campus Environment: (student response data only)

1. Cornell University Johnson 

2. UVA Darden 

3. Dartmouth Tuck 

4. Duke Fuqua 

5. Southern Methodist University Cox 

6. Vanderbilt Owen 

7. Carnegie Mellon Tepper 

8. UNC Kenan-Flagler 

9. University of Washington Foster 

10. Texas Tech Rawls 

Best Career Prospects: (combination of administrator surveys/school reported data and student response data)

1. NYU Stern 

2. UVA Darden 

3. Cornell Johnson 

4. Stanford Graduate School of Business

5. University of Michigan Ross 

6. Duke Fuqua 

7. UCLA Anderson 

8. Rice University Jones 

9. Columbia Business School

10. Harvard Business School