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The Economist Posts Which MBA? 2011 Rankings

October 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

As we already know, not all schools are created equal.  So The Economist has put out its 9th “Which MBA?” rankings, ranking the top thirty international MBA programs in the world.

The Economist explains that it formulates its rankings after first asking students what led them to pursue an MBA, and then publishing the responses in its “Which MBA?” guide.  The magazine then mixes the information gathered from the guide with salary and faculty qualifications, along with other subjective measures, to formulate its rankings.

However, the methodology of the rankings has been questioned. Poets and Quants looks at some of the surprises in the top 100 rankings and expresses skepticism at their validity in light of some unexplained, dramatic swings in ranking from year to year.  While it is uneventful that Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business took the number one spot, and Chicago School of Business moved down to the number two spot this year.  It is surprising that Harvard only took fifth place, Wharton fell seven spots and was ranked in the fifteenth place, and Britain’s Cranfield School of Management fell eight places to the twenty-third spot.

What worries Poets and Quants is the inconsistency of the rankings. How could Australia’s University of Queensland jump 35 spots in a single year? And how could Henley Business School plummet 40?  It just doesn’t make sense.

However more troubling than the rankings gyrations is a little poll conducted by The Economist titled “Should a school’s ranking be a serious consideration when choosing an MBA programme?” At the time of the writing of the 1007 responses, 66% said “yes.” While online polls are not scientific, these results are disappointing. Rankings should NOT be a serious consideration when choosing where to apply or even where to attend.  And rankings with this lack of consistency deserve much more than a grain of salt.

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2012 US News Rankings Released

September 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

The moment we’ve all been waiting for…the 2012 US News & World Report’s list of the best national universities is finally here!  Although the rankings remain pretty similar to last year’s, there is a surprising number of ties this year:

Top 10 Universities

1. Harvard University (tied)
1. Princeton University (tied)
3. Yale University
4. Columbia University
5. California Institute of Technology (tied)
5. Massachusetts institute of Technology (tied)
5. Stanford University (tied)
5. University of Chicago (tied)
5. University of Pennsylvania (tied)
10. Duke University (tied)

Here are some of the other new rankings, offering a bit more variety:

Top 10 Colleges with the Lowest Acceptance Rates

1. Curtis Institute of Music (4%)
2. Alice Lloyd College (7%)
3. Harvard University (7%)
4. Stanford University (7%)
5. Cooper Union (8%)
6. United States Naval Academy (8%)
7. Yale University (8%)
8. Brown University (9%)
9. Princeton University (9%)
10. College of the Ozarks (10%)

Top 10 Colleges that Offer the Best Value

1. Harvard University (61.4% receive aid; average discount is 73%)
2. Yale University (56.6% receive aid; average discount is 73%)
3. Princeton University (59.4% receive aid; average discount is 68%)
4. Stanford University (51.2% receive aid, average discount is 70%)
5. MIT (62.6% receive aid; average discount is 66%)
6. Columbia University (50.3% receive aid; average discount is 68%)
7. Dartmouth College (52.4% receive aid; average discount is 65%)
8. California Institute of Technology (53.1% receive aid; average discount is 59%)
9. Duke University (43.2% receive aid; average discount is 64%)
10. Cornell University (47.8% receive aid; average discount is 64%)

Other rankings include: A+ options for B students, the campuses with the most ethnic diversity, and the schools with the highest graduation rates.

You may also want to check out the article, “Ensuring the Accuracy of the Best Colleges Rankings and Data,” which explains how US News calculates rankings. Don’t forget that rankings aren’t everything, and it is more important to think about what you want in a college than what some rankings say are important. Remember:, the data in the rankings is more valuable than the rankings themselves.

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Law School News Roundup

September 14, 2011 By Leave a Comment

  • Student Loan Burden Soars. Above the Law believes that the student loan market is going to crash and suggests law school applicants begin thinking about whether their education is worth what they are paying for it.  While a good education can give you a boost, in these economic times with student debt climbing 25% since 2008, “it’s just not enough of a boost to cancel out the high cost of education.”
  • And Another Ranking Takes it on the Chin. If you thought the critiques of law school rankings had finally ended, Above The Law takes a jab at the National Jurist’s fifth annual list of the 60 ‘Best Value’ law schools. While the National Jurist has changed its ranking methodology to include “fairness,” this additional category has put schools ranked 121 in US News high up on the National Jurist’s list.
  • Milken Donation to UCLA Law. The National Law Journal reports on the much debated $10 million donated to UCLA Law School by Lowell Milken to fund the Lowell Milken Institute for Business Law and Policy. Law professor Lynn Stout has sparked a lot of controversy by arguing that accepting the gift may “tarnish” the school, due to Milken’s history with securities regulators. However, Dean Rachel Moran responded: “We do not believe that decades-old, unproven allegations should serve as a basis for rejecting a gift from a person who has made enormous contributions to the betterment of others and now wishes to do even more.”
  • Paying Back Student Loans. Although there has been much written about the difficulty law school graduates are having finding employment, The Connecticut Law Tribune does a good job of summarizing the issues many new lawyers deal with when having to pay back their loans. The ABA is doing a lot to tackle the issue, but student loans are still one of the biggest concerns—if not the biggest concern—for graduating law students.
  • Stats Sink. The Washington Post reports that law school applications are down 10% nationwide, because of the difficulties law graduates have faced in the job market. At University of Missouri enrollment is down 11%, at UCLA it is down 16%, University of Michigan had a decrease in enrollment of 14%, and Washington University has also had a 12% decrease in enrollment. An even scarier statistic is that only slightly more than two-thirds of spring 2010 graduates had jobs requiring law licenses nine months later—and only 87.4 percent of the class of 2010 had any sort of job nine months after graduation.

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Law School News Roundup

September 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

  

  • The Council of the American Bar Association (ABA) announced that the ABA’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions plans on beginning to collect job placement data from law schools, and more importantly, will start making “schools accountable for the completeness and accuracy of that data.” Starting in September the annual law school questionnaire will include questions on the nature of graduates’ employment, or unemployment.
  • University of Virginia School of Law’s newspaper revealed that the school has had a hard time finding jobs for graduates this year.  Despite the fact that UVA was number nine in the last US News rankings, the Virginia Law Weekly claims that approximately 100 students from this year’s graduating class of 372 have yet to find permanent employment.
  • The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the legal sector has added 4,000 jobs this past July. While that does not necessarily mean that law firms are recovering from the recession, it may hint that times are getting better.
  • Drexel University Earle Mack School of Law has received full accreditation from the American Bar Association.  The Earle Mack School of Law has a one-of-a-kind co-op model, which arranges semester-long placements for students who want to work part-time or full-time.  The school has been opened since 2006 and has already graduated 404 students.
  • UCLA School of Law has announced that it received a $10 million gift from Lowell Milken to create the Lowell Milken Institute for Business and Law. This donation is the largest in UCLA School of Law’s history.
  • Above the Law takes a look at a research paper revealing which law schools produce the most law firm partners. Examining this list can give prospective or current law students an idea of what kind alumni network is or could be available to them. The top 10 schools, with the number of post-1986 partners in parenthesis, are: Harvard (946), Georgetown (729), NYU (543), Virginia (527), Columbia (516), G. Washington (447), Michigan (444), Chicago (426), Texas (384), and Northwestern (365).
  • Above the Law looks at how the blog, “Confessions of an Aspiring Yale Transfer Student,” started by Wake Forest University School of Law 1L, Tammy Hsu, infuriated many law students. Tammy Hsu’s blog was all about her plans to transfer into Yale Law School, but it was harshly criticized in threads on Top Law Schools and AutoAdmit. Tsu’s experience can serve as a warning to all current and future law school students: be carefully what you put on the internet, because anyone can find it and you might regret it.

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Current Full-Time Cornell Johnson Student Interview

August 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment

  

Accepted.com is continuing a blog series featuring interviews with current MBA students, offering readers a behind-the-scenes look at selected MBA programs. We hope to offer you a candid picture of student life, and what you should consider as you prepare your MBA application.

Cornell JohnsonHere’s a talk with a student who came to Cornell Johnson with a life sciences/criminology background, then transitioned into an international career in finance.

We hear Ithaca is “gorges” but what about those winters?

I’m a native of Hong Kong and grew up in Toronto, so the winters weren’t a big deal.  Cornell’s proximity to Wall Street was a major advantage during my job hunt.

What did you want out of an MBA program? Did your career goals change once you arrived?

I did want an Ivy League school — maybe it’s Asia — but people are way more aware of names than rankings, and that helps with the job search. I was deciding between Brand Management and Finance, but realized all the good brand management jobs were restricted to Americans. So I dedicated my search to finance, since I don’t have a green card and was not going to add an additional challenge to an already tough process.

What strategies helped you find a job?

Face to face time is so important.  I basically commuted to New York City a lot, made countless phone calls, even flew out to Hong Kong to meet people.  But the effort paid off.

What are you doing now?

I’m working in finance with the cash sales trading group in Citigroup in Hong Kong.

How did you sell yourself to them, without having a finance background?

Honestly, I think my life sciences familiarity gave me a different perspective and helped me sell myself as a special candidate. With life sciences, I’ll have a strength when selling equities in bio tech, pharmaceuticals.

What was your best day on campus at Cornell?

My best day was when I got my internship and full time offer! From then on, I could focus on my classes and social life. I was just cruising by then.

What was your worst day?

There were a few — mostly during the initial job search, when i was looking for an internship. The process was competitive, and first semester is always intense. It was very difficult to balance the academics and the job search.

Who were your favorite professors and why?

My Chinese professor was fantastic, because she really, really took the time out to make sure I learnt my Chinese well in preparation for class. I also really liked my accounting professors Margaret Shackell Dowell and Mark Nelson. Accounting wasn’t my forte, but they let me take my time to make sure I really understood the concepts.

Can you recommend any cozy places to warm up, and fill up?

Plumtrum, Sangam and State Street Diner.

And finally why do you think you got the job you want?  Any tips for incoming students on the job hunt?

Yes, network early! Get your resume ready early, be confident in yourself, be realistic, and also have backup plans.

Michelle StockmanInterview conducted by Michelle Stockman, who worked in the Columbia Business School admissions office, has a Masters in Journalism from Columbia, and has assisted Accepted.com clients applying to top business schools since 2007.  She is happy to help you with your application.

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Another US News Top Ten!

August 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment

US News is at it again!  The magazine’s newest top ten list is the top 10 Business Schools That Receive the Most Full-Time Applications. Not surprisingly, almost all the top 10 programs listed in US News’s rankings of the best business schools were also on the list of the top 10 business schools that received the most applications for full-time admissions in the 2010-2011 academic year (Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business was the only exception).

A total of 261 business schools provided US News with application data. On average, programs received 525 applications for admission.  But Harvard Business School surpassed them all with 9,524 applications, 32% more than the Stanford Graduate School of Business, which received the second highest number of applications.

However, the US News data does not reveal the number of students accepted into the class, making application numbers misleading. For example, Stanford has a class of fewer than 400, whereas Harvard’s class size is approximately 930. These statistics are also just a close approximation of the upcoming US News’ top 10.

Other schools that made the list of “the 10 business schools that received the most applications for full-time admission in 2010” were: University of Pennsylvania (Wharton),  Columbia University, Northwestern University (Kellogg), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan), New York University (Stern), University of Chicago (Booth), University of California—Berkeley (Haas), and Duke University (Fuqua).

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Filed Under: Chicago, Columbia, Duke Fuqua, Harvard HBS, MBA Admissions, MIT Sloan, Northwestern Kellogg, NYU Stern, Stanford GSB, UC Berkeley Haas, Wharton Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Forbes Announces Top Ten Business Schools

August 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

  

Forbes has just released its list of the top business schools in America. The Forbes’ ranking methodology is based on the return on investment achieved by the class of 2006. They surveyed 16,000 alumni at over 100 schools and received feedback from 30% of those grads. They then compared the earnings of the respondents from 2006-2011 to the cost of business school.

While Forbes lists 74 top schools, the top ten are:

  1. Harvard
  2. Stanford
  3. Chicago (Booth)
  4. Pennsylvania (Wharton)
  5. Columbia
  6. Dartmouth (Tuck)
  7. Northwestern (Kellogg)
  8. Cornell (Johnson)
  9. Virginia (Darden)
  10. MIT (Sloan)

Poets and Quants analyzes the Forbes’ data in terms of winners and losers, those who went up in the Forbes’ rankings and those who went down; it provides a useful table comparing the salary data by school to previous years’ salary data.

Of greater interest to me is the overall profitable MBA picture presented by the Forbes data: every single program in the top 74 has positive ROI, admittedly less in more expensive locales and a few in single digits, but the overwhelming majority showed a greater than 20% gain after five years. And that’s despite the recession.

So for those of you who have professional goals that require an MBA, it looks like a solid investment.   

Linda AbrahamBy , President and Founder of Accepted.com

 

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Filed Under: Chicago, Columbia University, Cornell Johnson, Dartmouth Tuck, Harvard HBS, MBA Admissions, MIT Sloan, Northwestern Kellogg, Stanford GSB, UVA Darden, Wharton Tagged With: ,

4 Ways You Should NOT Use the MBA Rankings

August 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment

  

You’ll find loads of articles online enumerating the ways in which you can use the MBA rankings to your benefit. Most of these articles are found on the ranking websites. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t trust what you read on BusinessWeek, The Financial Times, or U.S. News – after all, the rankings do offer data comparing top MBA programs – but I do believe these sites are not offering you a complete picture.

So now I’d like to present you with the other side of the story – the rankings’ limitations. Blinding yourself to the rankings’ flaws could lead to an expensive, time-consuming mistake: choosing the wrong MBA program for you.

  1. They don’t measure your priorities.
  2. General rankings hide strengths (and weaknesses) in specific areas. There are numerous “gem” programs that thrive outside the top ten or top twenty. Many MBA students have a great chance of gaining acceptance PLUS receiving financial aid at these gem schools.
  3. Averages are exactly that. Average. They aren’t a cut-off and don’t reflect extenuating circumstances or the interplay between myriad factors in an admissions decision. At every school there will always be applicants who are accepted with below-average stats and who are rejected with above-average stats.
  4. Surveys, especially surveys of students and alumni, can be gamed. Students and alumni know that higher rankings increase the value of their degrees and have an incentive to think kindly of their schools.

In short, don’t give the rankings too much importance. Don’t replace school research and self-reflection with rankings to determine where you should apply or attend.

For more tips on how you should and should not use school rankings please see Accepted’s free, instantly downloadable special report, MBA Rankings: What You Need to Know.

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The New GRE Point Scale

July 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

  

The new GRE scale may seem pretty arbitrary. After all, who has ever been graded on a test from 130 – 170? Not that the 200 – 800 scale was standard, but, still, there was a certain panache when someone could say they got an 800 (getting 170 sounds like you actually didn’t do too well). And, just to clarify, both these scales apply to the verbal section and math section, so, technically, the new GRE is out of 340.

So, why the strange range (pardon the rhyme)? Well, according to ETS, it wanted to stick to three-digits, so the colleges wouldn’t have to overhaul all the textbox entries that call for three digits. Fair enough. And to avoid confusion with the current scoring system, ETS made sure the two score ranges didn’t overlap (had they made the new GRE out of 200, then a person who’d gotten that score on the current GRE would suddenly look a lot smarter if they were to say a few years from now, Hey, I got a 200 on the GRE verbal section).

On the surface, the new GRE scoring range appears to be more limited than the current system. After all, 200 – 800, based on 10-point intervals, allows for only a 61-point spread, compared to the new GRE’s 41-point spread, based on one point intervals. The new GRE makes up for this more limited range by giving more significance to the extreme ends of the scale. For example, on the current GRE, there really isn’t much difference between 730 and 800 on the verbal—they are both at the 99 percentile range. On the new GRE, the difference between 168 and 170 will actually be between 99 percentile and 96 percentile (I’m kind of estimating these numbers, but you get the point).

At the end of the day, you are not going to be tested on these statistical nuances. The important thing to remember is that many colleges base their rankings on a percentile score. Anyway, exactly what is considered “good” on the new GRE has yet to be determined. Coming in November, after enough students have taken a test, there will be a conversion scale between the old GRE and the new GRE. And, if you’ve just finished taking the current GRE, and have absolutely no desire to study for the new GRE, don’t despair—your score will be good up until 5 years from the date that you took the actual exam.

This blog post comes from our friends at Magoosh.com and was originally posted here. 

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Law School News Roundup

June 30, 2011 By Leave a Comment

  

  • The New York Law Journal  released the NYLJ 100, a list containing the number of attorneys employed in New York’s 100 largest private law offices as of December 2010. There are about 400 fewer attorneys employed than expected, but the numbers have not changed substantially in comparison with last year’s list.
  • The National Law Journal announced that Duke Law School will be launching a master of laws program in judicial studies in the summer of 2012, tailored specifically for judges. The university will also be opening a new Center for Judicial Studies, supporting research on the judiciary. 
  • Above the Law looks at which law firms are ranked as being the most diverse, according to the 2011 edition of the American Lawyer’s Diversity Scorecard. American Lawyer defines the “diversity score” for each firm by the “minority percentage of all U.S. attorneys + minority percentage of all U.S. partners.” Check out the rankings to see what firms you might be interested in.
  • Blueprint Prep’s blog has a humorous post on “The Five Stages of June LSAT Grief.” While they only jokingly look at the five stages of this post-LSAT syndrome—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—the good news is that at least the stages end with acceptance!

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