lawyer

When searching for an MBA program, applicants must consider a wide range of factors, including location, cost and program concentration. In an effort to make this process quicker, we have provided our own MBA rankings to help applicants decide which program might be best for them.

There are currently more than eight major MBA rankings available to prospective students, not counting rankings for military MBA programs or rankings of schools by country. While these tools can help individuals better understand factors such as post-graduate salary and projected employment outcomes, they do not provide insight into other important aspects of business school, such as student-to-professor ratios or specialty programs, like human resources management or entrepreneurship.

We have written before about how program rankings can be manipulated, faulty or decided with little or no information on the part of ranking officials. Many a b-school has criticized the rankings process, calling it a beauty contest, a self-fulfilling prophecy, and a serious time and resource drain for participating schools. In general, such rankings should not be the sole deciding factor in choosing an MBA program or even used as a tool of school selection. Factors such as class flexibility, tuition, alumni base, and program offerings should matter more to prospective students than an institution's ranking.

To help make sense of these rankings, and balance them with other aspects of what business schools have to offer, we interviewed MBA professors, deans and admissions directors for their opinions on what value MBA rankings can have, and the additional factors MBA applicants should consider when applying. In addition, we combined the most popular MBA program rankings to give as close to a comprehensive ranking as possible. Hopefully, this will arm students with the information they need to narrow their search and eventually choose the program that best aligns with their academic and professional goals.

While our comprehensive MBA rankings evaluate only full-time programs at this time, prospective students can find which schools have been ranked highest for specific MBA programs, such as finance, part-time, marketing, online, international business, and the executive MBA, elsewhere on our site. Browse the individual rankings on our resource pages for more information.