BusinessWeek Ranks Chicago Booth MBA #1 In The World!

The Chicago Booth MBA beat Harvard, Stanford and Wharton to the top spot in the BusinessWeek business school rankings for the fourth consecutive time this year.

 

Chicago Booth has now held the top spot in the BusinessWeek rankings, which come out every two years, in 2006, 2008, 2010 and 2012. Harvard, Wharton, Stanford and Kellogg took the next four spots.

 

The school’s full-time MBA was also ranked first in the world by The Economist and 12th in the world by the Financial Times this year.

 

The 2012 BusinessWeek rankings were based on an opinion survey of 10,439 MBA respondents from around the world, who graduated this year.  BusinessWeek asked them to rate their programmes on teaching quality, career services, and other aspects of the b-school experience. The student responses were given a 45 per cent weighting in each business school’s final score: Chicago Booth’s recent grads are happy customers, it seems!

 

Another 45 per cent of the ranking was based on results of an employer survey. This year 206 corporate recruiters responded, and were asked to rate the top 20 schools from which they had actively recruited, based on perceived quality of grads and the firm’s overall experience with MBA hires from those schools

 

The final 10 per cent of weight was given to a calculation of each school’s intellectual capital, based on publication and reviews of professors’ work in prominent journals and newspapers.

 

Chicago Booth came out top in the Employer Survey, and also garnered A+ grades for careers services, teaching quality and critical thinking. You can see the full breakdown of how the business schools stacked up against each other on individual criteria here.

 

Well known for its strong links and reputation within the finance industry, as of September 2012 nearly 35 per cent of the graduating class had landed full-time jobs in investment banking, investment management or diversified financial services according to the school’s latest employment report. A further 30.3 per cent had gone into consulting.

 

However there’s a lot going on besides finance. Chicago Booth has produced some very successful entrepreneurs, including the founders of ZipCar and GrubHub, and runs a well-funded New Venture Challenge for student start-ups via the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship. The school also has active student clubs building business links across the world, including a very active Africa Business Group.

 

Total tuition fees for the Chicago Booth MBA are currently USD101,400: certainly not cheap, but in line with other top US schools (total tuition at Wharton is USD108,018 and at Kellogg it’s USD102,990.

 

In a recent interview, Chicago Booth’s Dean, Dr, Sunil Kumar, said that intellectual debate and in-depth analysis were “hallmarks” of the school and that students and faculty are expected to “question everything”.

 

“Our mission is two-fold – to create enduring knowledge through research and to educate future leaders,” he said.

 

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