Stanford is Back on Top Alongside Penn’s Wharton in U.S News’ 2024 Best MBA Ranking

The U.S. News and World Report has posted the 2024-2025 Best MBA rankings. Stanford GSB and University of Pennsylvania Wharton are tied for the top spot, followed by a tie for third rank between Northwestern Kellogg and Chicago Booth.

Notable changes to the top 25 from the last year’s rankings include: 

• Stanford’s five-rank jump, which moved it from 6th in 2023 back to 1st, a position it also held in 2021 and 2022. 

• Harvard, which has spent the past two years in 5th, dropped one spot into the 6th position in 2024.

• The biggest increases this year, apart from Stanford, were Vanderbilt Owen, which moved up seven ranks to the 20th spot, and Berkeley Haas and UVA Darden, which both moved up four positions to take 7th and 10th, respectively.

• Dartmouth Tuck and Michigan Ross experienced the largest declines from 2023, both falling four positions. Tuck now shares the 10th spot with Darden, while Ross joined Columbia and Duke in a three-way tie at 12th. 

According to Poets & Quants, U.S. News acknowledged that its addition of a new post-graduate salary metric explains some of the movement seen within this year’s ranking. The addition of the metric de-emphasizes post-graduate starting salary/bonus slightly, incorporating MBA graduates’ starting salaries based on the field in which they’re entering. A description is available here. 

Rank School Name, Change from 2023

1 Stanford University (tie), +5

1 University of Pennsylvania, Wharton (tie), +2

3 Northwestern University, Kellogg (tie), -1 

3 University of Chicago, Booth (tie), -2

5 MIT, Sloan, -1

6 Harvard University, -1

7 New York University, Stern, (tie), +3

7 University of California–Berkeley, Haas (tie), +4

7 Yale University (tie), +1

10 Dartmouth, Tuck, (tie), -4

10 University of Virginia, Darden (tie), +4

12 Columbia University (tie), -1 

12 Duke University, Fuqua (tie), -1

12 University of Michigan, Ross (tie), -4

15 Cornell University, Johnson (tie), – 

16 Carnegie Mellon, Tepper (tie), +2

16 University of Texas–Austin, McCombs (tie), +2

18 Emory University, Goizueta (tie), -1

18 University of Southern California, Marshall (tie), -3

20 Indiana University, Kelley (tie), +2

20 University of California–Los Angeles, Anderson (tie), -1

20 University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, Kenan-Flagler (tie), +2

20 Vanderbilt University, Owen (tie), +7

24 Georgetown University, McDonough, –

25 Georgia Institute of Technology, Scheller, +1

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. 

U.S. News Posts Updated 2023-2024 Best Medical School Rankings

The U.S. News and World Report has posted the final 2023-2024 Best Medical School (Research) rankings and Harvard Medical School is back on top. The final rankings are significantly different from the “preview” of the 2023-2024 top 15 programs published in April. A U.S. News spokeswoman explained the reasoning behind the changes in an emailed statement to Medpage Today. The preview, “did not include affiliated hospitals for NIH funding," she wrote.

Johns Hopkins and University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman each dropped by one rank to second and third, respectively. Vanderbilt and the University of Washington, which were not included within the top 15 programs in the preview, are now tied for the fifth and 13th ranks, respectively. 

See the top 13-ranked programs below, which due to a multitude of ties includes 17 schools. We also show the final and preview ranks. 

Final Rank Preview Rank School

1 3 Harvard University

2 1 Johns Hopkins University

3 2 University of Pennsylvania (Perelman)

4 6 Columbia University

5 9 Duke University (tie)

5 7 Stanford University (tie)

5 4 University of California—San Francisco (tie)

5 n/a Vanderbilt University (tie)

5 4 Washington University in St. Louis (tie)

10 14 Cornell University (Weill) (tie)

10 13 New York University (Grossman) (tie)

10 7 Yale University (tie)

13 14 Mayo Clinic School of Medicine (Alix) (tie),

13 12 Northwestern University (Feinberg) (tie)

13 9 University of Michigan—Ann Arbor (tie)

13 11 University of Pittsburgh (tie)

13 n/a University of Washington (tie)

U.S. News Will Delay Publication of Rankings After Unprecedented Number of Data Inquiries by Law Schools

U.S. News and World Report’s annual ranking of law schools will be delayed a week. In an email to law deans, published in part by Above the Law, U.S. News explained that during the law school data review period—a standard part of the pre-publication process—the organization received “an unprecedented number of inquiries from schools.” In order to fully address the inquiries, U.S. News added an additional week to the review period. Participating law deans are expected to receive access to the updated data on Wednesday, April 19th, and the final publication has been moved to April 25th. 

U.S. News Announces Updates to the Law School Rankings in an Open Letter to Law Deans

Earlier this week, U.S. News announced that it will make updates to the 2023-2024 Best Law Schools ranking in response to the public criticism and boycott of its rankings by a number of leading law schools. In an open letter to law deans, which was published on Monday just prior to the start of the American Association of Law Schools meeting, Robert Morse, Chief Data Strategist, and Stephanie Salmon, Senior Vice President of Data and Information Strategy, described the organization’s reaction to the recent public discourse. They wrote that the U.S. News interviewed more than 100 law school deans and representatives to gain a better understanding of the criticisms and strengths of the current ranking. Generally, they said, complaints were centered around a few key topics, including the weight placed on peer assessment surveys, a need for greater emphasis on outcome measures (e.g. bar passage, employment), re-consideration of the weight assigned to various employment outcomes, and a review of student expenditures and student debt metrics. The organization also conducted an internal review. 

As a result, U.S. News will make the following changes to the ranking:

• All law schools will be ranked using publicly available data required by the ABA, regardless of whether school representatives respond to the annual U.S. News survey. However, U.S. News will publish in-depth profiles for those schools that do respond to the survey. 

• There will be updates to the methodology that increase the weight on outcome measures and reduce the weight given to peer assessment survey results.  Additionally, the employment outcomes measure will be updated to give full-weight to those who receive fellowships (including school-funded fellowships) or enroll in further graduate studies. 

• U.S. News will make more of the collected data available to students in order to allow them to make more informed comparisons between law schools. 

• Over time, the organization will work alongside key stakeholders to better recognize and represent other key factors such as loan forgiveness/repayment and student aid/financial assistance, as well as socio-economic and diversity metrics.

For some deans, the updates are still not enough to reverse their position. Heather Gerkin, Dean of Yale Law School, spoke to Law.com. “Having a window into the operations and decision-making process at U.S. News in recent weeks has only cemented our decision to stop participating in the rankings,” Gerkin said. Similarly, University of New Hampshire Law School Dean, Megan Carpenter, noted to Law.com that because U.S. News did not specify the modifications they plan to make to the formula, it raises concerns that the response “simply devolves into an exercise about tweaking their monolithic formula.” 

Related:

• Two Law Schools Announce Continued Participation in U.S. News Ranking

• Yale and Harvard Law Schools Will No Longer Participate in the U.S. News Law School Rankings

Duke Takes Top Spot in Above the Law’s Top 50 Law Schools

Duke University’s Law School ticked up three spots to take top billing in the 2022 Above the Law Top 50 Law Schools. The ranking, which relies solely upon graduate outcome data including legal employment (quality and quantity), educational cost, and student debt (see full methodology here), may be of particular interest to prospective law students interested in pursuing law firm employment.  

Duke Law is followed by the University of Virginia, Cornell, University of Chicago, and Vanderbilt, which jumped ten places from 2021 to enter this year’s top five. University of Michigan Law dropped out of the top five in 2022. Yale, Harvard, and Stanford all dropped from the top ten in 2022 due to lower scores in the employment categories. 

Medical Community Lauds Addition of Public Health Priorities to Methodology of U.S. News’ Medical Rankings

In response to criticism from the medical community, the U.S. News & World Report updated the methodology behind their 2022 Best Medical Schools in Primary Care ranking. A recent JAMA Viewpoint article entitled, “Increasing Transparency for Medical School Primary Care Rankings—Moving From a Beauty Contest to a Talent Show“ by Robert L. Phillips Jr, MD, MSPH, Andrew W. Bazemore, MD, MPH, and John M. Westfall, MD, MPH described the updates: “The rankings were modified in 2021 such that 30% of the score is now based on graduates practicing primary care after their residency training, rather than those entering primary care training. Initial residency comprises 10% of the score, which still overestimates primary care, but this measure has been reduced from its previous weighting of 30%. The remaining score (60%) is still largely based on reputation, which is assessed by (1) surveys of medical school deans, internal medicine chairs, or admissions directors (15%); (2) survey of primary care residency directors (15%); (3) student selectivity (median Medical College Admission Test score, 9.75%; median undergraduate grade point average, 4.5%; acceptance rate, 0.75%); and (4) faculty to student ratio (15%).” The authors call the updates to the methodology “a step in the right direction,” although they continue to express that the reputation portion of the score is subjective and self-perpetuating. 

More important than the methodology update, the authors say, is U.S. News's addition of four new data-based rankings. The newly added rankings include: 1) graduates practicing primary care; 2) most diverse medical schools; 3) graduates practicing in medically underserved areas; and 4) graduates practicing patient care in rural areas. These rankings were created with the Robert Graham Center, a division of the American Academy of Family Physicians, and were defined to measure medical schools’ performance on key health care issues. The graduate-based rankings use data collected five-to-seven years after a physician’s training, making them more reflective of student outcomes and better able to showcase the public health contributions of schools that are hidden within the broader rankings. For example, the authors point to the disparity seen in the Harvard Medical School rankings; the medical school, ranked 8th for Best Primary Care, ranks 141st for graduates practicing in primary care fields. Conversely, the Pacific Northwest University of Health Sciences, which is unranked in the primary care ranking, ranks second for graduates practicing in primary care fields, second for graduates working in medically underserved communities, and seventeenth for graduates working in rural areas.  

One of the article’s authors, Dr. Phillips, speaking with the AMA, notes that students should understand the large role that reputation plays in the mainstream rankings and should proceed with caution when using the rankings to inform their medical school options. “Students should be careful in using medical school rankings to inform their choices as many rankings are opinion-driven.” Rather, he recommended that students consider the more objective, data-driven rankings based on where and what graduates end up practicing. “We also hope that the new ranking heralds continued improvement of the information that help students make career decisions. 

On a wider-scale, the authors call out the importance of the four new rankings in providing transparency into how schools contribute to key social outcomes, for policy decisions by both states and medical schools themselves. “These outcome measures should help medical schools to assess fidelity to their missions and alter admissions, curriculum, and training settings if different outcomes are desired.”

U.S. News’ Best Online MBA Ranking Released with Three-Way Tie for First

Yesterday, the U.S. News & World Report released its rankings for the best online MBA programs of 2022. In a three-way tie, Indiana University’s Kelley, University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler, and University of Southern California’s Marshall all took the number one spot.  

UNC’s Kenan-Flagler received the top ranking for the second year in a row, sharing the 2021 accolade with Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business (ranked fourth in 2022), while Indiana increased two spots from last year and USC increased three spots. 

Indiana’s Kelley also ranked highest for Best Online Finance MBA and Best Online General Management MBA.  

U.S. News & World Report Top 10 Online MBA Programs 

Make the Most of The MBA Tour: Create a Targeted School List

The MBA Tour presents an incredible opportunity for you, as a prospective MBA student, to gather information, make contacts, and advance yourself in the admissions process. But to make the most of the event, you will need to consider it a targeted mission rather than merely time to explore. The MBA Tour will have many booths distributing information, including school tables with admissions representatives expounding on their latest and greatest offerings. It is an easy environment in which to get distracted. As such, prior to the event, you should carefully consider your preliminary school list, the programs that are most compelling to you, and information you’d like to collect at the tour to help you finalize a sound school selection strategy. This preparation will help you to stay focused on your own priorities, rather than ending up overwhelmed with extraneous information.

We recommend utilizing the following three criteria to compile a list of ten schools’ tables that you want to visit at the event, and to prioritize your top choice schools (3-5), which you will likely want to spend additional time researching and networking with while there.

1.       Rankings/Prestige: While we would discourage you from judging schools on rankings alone, US News & World Report’s list of Best Business Schools, for example, is still important to consider when gaining an in-depth understanding of how potential employers will view your investment. Many rankings are also based on algorithms that incorporate various factors of interest to students such as quality assessments, placement success, and student selectivity. As such, you might want to research various rankings and find the one that most closely suits your interests.

2.       Geography/Network. The second, and perhaps somewhat surprising aspect to consider when putting together a school list is geography. Place will play a crucial role in your ability to network. Thus, we often encourage students who know they want to end up in a certain location to consider the top MBA programs in that city, or within the geographic region. Similarly, if your goals are related to a certain industry, it can be invaluable to attend a school near one of the industry’s hubs.

3.       Career Placement. The last, but perhaps most critical component, is to develop a thorough understanding of which companies are recruiting and hiring employees from the MBA programs you are interested in. We suggest prospective students gain a thorough knowledge of the information contained in each school’s career placement report and engage with the school’s counselors in the career center to learn more. It can also be helpful to look for student clubs or associations within a business school relevant to your goals (e.g., Finance Club, Luxury Goods Club, Marketing Club), as they will often host events connecting potential employers with interested students, as well as providing other resources.

Enjoy The MBA Tour!  If you’ve thought through your goals and school selection priorities, it will likely be a memorable experience.

MBA School Selection: Important Considerations When Building Your School List

According to the 2017 AIGAC MBA Applicants Survey, 39 percent of MBA Applicants reported that their admissions consultant advised them to apply to a school they would have otherwise never considered.

At Apply Point, we work closely with our clients to create a school list that is both compatible with their interests and goals and also sound in terms of acceptance likelihood. We know we’ve succeeded when an applicant has the luxury of choice between multiple programs at the end of the admissions cycle. While there are numerous factors to consider when finalizing school selection, we believe the following three criteria are the most important.

Rankings/Prestige

While we discourage clients from judging schools on rankings alone, US News & World Report’s list of Best Business Schools, for example, is still important to consider when gaining an in-depth understanding of how potential employers will view your investment. Many rankings are also based on algorithms that incorporate various factors of interest to students such as quality assessments, placement success, and student selectivity.

Geography/Network

The second, and perhaps somewhat surprising aspect to consider when putting together a school list is geography. Place will play a crucial role in your ability to network. Thus, we often encourage students who know they want to end up in a certain location to consider the top MBA programs in that city, or within the geographic region. Similarly, if your goals are related to a certain industry, it can be invaluable to attend a school near one of the industry’s hubs.

Career Placement

The last, but perhaps most critical component, is to develop a thorough understanding of which companies are recruiting and hiring employees from the MBA programs you are interested in. We suggest prospective students gain a thorough knowledge of the information contained in each school’s career placement report and also engage with the school’s counselors in the career center to learn more. It can also be helpful to look for student clubs or associations within a business school relevant to your goals (e.g., Finance Club, Luxury Goods Club, Marketing Club), as they will often host events connecting potential employers with interested students, as well as providing other resources.

During the school selection period of the application process, we encourage prospective students to keep an open mind and fully explore the many options that exist. Speaking with professors, career placement professionals, current students, alumni, and admissions directors at different programs is a wonderful way to start.  Your personal MBA rankings may not look exactly like those in US News and World Report or Financial Times. And that is just fine.