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Wall St. Journal MBA Rankings Now Online

September 21, 2005 By

The WSJ rankings are now online. As I have written before,  it is much more realistic to talk about these rankings as surveys, because that’s what they are. The WSJ surveyed over 3000 recruiters and grouped the responses into National, International, and Regional rankings.

 The National Top Ten:

  1. Tuck
  2. Michigan
  3. Tepper
  4. Kellogg
  5. Yale
  6. Wharton
  7. Haas
  8. Columbia
  9. UNC
  10. USC

Top Ten International

  1. IMD
  2. ESADE
  3. Tepper
  4. IPADE
  5. London Business School
  6. Ivey
  7. Thunderbrid
  8. MIT Sloan
  9. INSEAD
  10. INCAE

REGIONAL

  1. Purdue
  2. Michigan State
  3. Ohio State
  4. Thunderbird
  5. IPADE
  6. BYU
  7. Wake Forest
  8. Univ of Denver
  9. Tecnologico de Monterrey
  10. University of Miami

The journal also surveyed recruiters about specific specialities.

Please don’t use these survey results blindly. Read the Journal‘s methodology first.  Understand that what pleases recruiters (an efficient placement center or great graduates for relatively little money) may not benefit you or reflect on educational quality.

This special MBA supplement has several articles that look interesting and online you can find an excellent podcast of an interview with Ron Alsop. I haven’t had time to read the articles, but I did just listen to the podcast, and it is thorough, most worthwhile exploration of the MBA scene (for a 15-minute interview) .  A few highlights from Ron Alsop:

  • Ron discusses the drop in applications, its impact on schools, and the improved hiring scene. 
  • Recruiters view the full-time MBA as the "crown jewel" of MBA programs and prefer it to part-time or EMBA programs. Almost 40% labeled online MBA programs as "not at all effective."
  • Recruiters still prefer MBAs with more experience. They are not pleased with the trend towards admitting younger applicants. Ron implies that recruiters see it as a  compromise in quality to maintain quantity or class size.
  • At the same time, recruiters are concerned that they will not have enough graduates if demand for MBA’s continues to grow because some programs, like Purdue and Rochester, have cut back class size to maintain class quality.

Sounds like a rock and a hard place. I strongly recommend this podcast.

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About Linda Abraham
  • Peter Marik

    I find it interesting that recruiters, who demonstrate more often than not a complete incompetent nature when trying to place someone, are so bold in saying that an online MBA is just "not effective". With so many professionals such as myself always on the move, traveling or working late into the evening, going to a ground campus is just not "effective" for us. Schools have seen this type of movement and understand that if they want to keep their numbers up, they need to find new ways of giving us the tools we need to be "effective" in the business we choose to be in. Recruiters, if you truly want to understand the MBA, try a class online and see how truly challenging it can be. I feel sorry for such ignorance. Employers look at the skills we bring out of these programs and if the school is accredited, then there is not issue for that hiring manager. 40%, eh?