Chicago Booth and Wharton (University of Pennsylvania) share the #1 spotlight in U.S. News’ Best Business Schools of 2023 rankings, released March 29.
The metrics for the rankings are based on career placement success, student excellence and qualitative assessments by experts. MBA rankings are studied voraciously by applicants, students, and alumni but remain controversial.
Notable changes this year
- Chicago Booth’s rise reflected improvements on several metrics: a class GMAT score up by six points to 730; an acceptance that fell by five points to 22.6%; a higher score by corporate recruiters that now matches Harvard and Wharton; and a spike in average salary and sign-on bonus for last year’s MBA grads of $7,300 to a record $180,144–the second-highest of any business school. (NYU Stern had the highest of all schools at $181,803.) Placement for the Class of 2021 jumped five points three months after graduation, at 96.4%.
- Wharton’s acceptance rate dropped by 4.9 percentage points to 18.2% and their average GMAT score rose by one point. Wharton MBAs enjoyed a jump in average salary and signing bonuses by $6,600 to $179,692, the second-highest of all schools behind only Booth. Job placement three months after commencement moved up by 3.3 percentage points to 96.8%.
- Top-ranked schools continued to jostle for position, with some flagship programs rising and others falling. Stanford’s GSB dropped by three notches, tying with Kellogg (Northwestern) for #3. Harvard and MIT Sloan remain tied at #5–no change from last year. Yale University’s SOM notched its highest ranking ever at #7, with Columbia and Haas (UC Berkeley) nipping at its heels, sharing the #8 ranking. Yale’s rise stemmed from a six-point rise in its average GMAT score to 726; a drop of six percentage points on its acceptance rate to 23.6%; and a dramatic 8.8 percentage improvement on its placement rate three months after graduation to 94.1%.
- Harvard Business School’s fifth-place showing reflects a surprisingly low employment at graduation of 69.0%, lower than any other Top 10 school. Its placement rate three months after graduation was 92.3%, the second-lowest for a Top 10 program. And the average salary and bonus for Harvard’s MBAs last year was $172,774, lower than seven other U.S. business schools. Harvard lost out on other metrics as well, including a higher admit rate of 12.5%, up from 9.2% last year, and average GMAT and undergrad GPAs that were lower than many other competitors.
- Ross (University of Michigan) ascended into the Top 10 from #13, while Tuck (Dartmouth College) dropped to #11. Stern (NYU) and Fuqua (Duke University) share the #12 spot. Many other programs in the top 25 leaped forward, including Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, rising five places to #21 and Mendoza College of Business (Notre Dame) gaining 11 places to rank 25th.
- Outside the Top 25, Washington University’s Olin Business School in St. Louis rose seven spots to #29 and the University of South Carolina’s Moore School of Business rose eight positions to place #47.
While U.S. News had dropped standardized test scores from its online MBA ranking earlier this year, it kept the average class GMAT and GRE scores in its formula for the full-time program rankings.
The rankings were based on a survey of all 493 institutions with master’s-level business programs in the U.S. accredited by AACSB International. A total of 363 survey recipients responded; the final rankings are based on 134 business schools that provided enough data on their full-time MBA programs and had large enough 2021 graduating classes seeking employment for valid comparisons. The rankings also include some programs conferring degrees such as Master of Science in Management and Master of Science in Industrial Administration.
U.S. News 2023 Top 10 Full-Time MBA Programs
| Rank 2023 | Rank 2022 | School | Location |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3 | University of Chicago (Booth) | Chicago, IL |
| 1 | 2 | University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) | Philadelphia, PA |
| 3 | 4 | Northwestern University (Kellogg) | Evanston, IL |
| 3 | 1 | Stanford University | Stanford, CA |
| 5 | 5 | Harvard University | Allston, MA |
| 5 | 5 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan) | Cambridge, MA |
| 7 | 9 | Yale University | New Haven, CT |
| 8 | 7 | Columbia University | New York, NY |
| 8 | 7 | University of California, Berkeley (Haas) | Berkeley, CA |
| 10 | 13 | University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (Ross) | Ann Arbor, MI |
U.S. News 2023 Top 10 Part-Time MBA Programs
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By Judy Gruen, former Accepted admissions consultant. Judy holds a Master’s in Journalism from Northwestern University. She is the co-author of Accepted’s first full-length book, MBA Admission for Smarties: The No-Nonsense Guide to Acceptance at Top Business Schools. Want an admissions expert help you get accepted? Click here to get in touch!
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