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by John A. Byrne Poets Quants Author on September 21,

For eight years now, the Princeton Review and Entrepreneur magazine have been publishing rankings of the top business schools for entrepreneurship. Today, for the third year in a row, Babson College’s MBA program is at the top of the list. The rest of the top five? Chicago’s Booth School of Business, Michigan’s Ross School, Brigham Young’s Marriott School, and the University of Arizona’s Eller School of Management.

If you’re wondering where Harvard, MIT, Berkeley and Wharton are, they didn’t make the top 25. There’s the Acton School of Business in Texas which is ranked 11 th by Princeton Review and Entrepreneur. And there’s the University of Southern Florida’s Business School which is ranked 25 th. But no Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, or Wharton.

WHERE IN THE WORLD IS HARVARD?

Harvard has an entire building filled with faculty and students devoted to entrepreneurship called the Arthur Rock Center, named after the HBS alum who invested in both Apple and Intel. Harvard boasts 35 faculty members who teach entrepreneurship, the second largest faculty group at the school. All first-year MBAs at Harvard have a required course in entrepreneurship and can choose from nearly two dozen second-year electives on the topic, one of the richest elective offerings in entrepreneurship in the world. Though only 3% to 4% of Harvard grads launch companies right out of school, about half of Harvard MBAs end up as entrepreneurs 15 years out. Even more surprisingly, Harvard alums compose nearly 25% of the entire venture capital industry. But Harvard fails to make the Princeton Review list. A Princeton Review spokesman says it is because Harvard refused to participate in its surveys.

If you’re curious as to where Stanford’s Graduate School of Business is ranked, it is several places behind schools in Tucson, Arizona, Provo, Utah, and Houston, Texas. That’s right, the school that is in the middle of Silicon Valley, the world’s entrepreneurial hotbed that every emerging nation is trying to duplicate, is merely number eight. That’s despite the fact that 10% of Stanford MBAs launch companies at graduation. Number eight behind the University of Arizona and Brigham Young.

In fact, only half the schools in Princeton Review’s top ten even make the top ten list of best entrepreneurial programs put out by U.S. News World Report, which bases its ranking on a survey of deans and MBA directors.

Improbable, right? Indeed. The most important thing to understand about any ranking is that the methodology determines the result. It’s not about which program is best or which program is right for you and your career needs. It’s about the quality and the integrity of the methodology and whether you even agree it makes any sense.

THE BIG DIFFERENCE BETWEEN U.S. NEWS AND PRINCETON REVIEW.

It’s interesting to examine the differences between the U.S. News list and the Princeton Review list. The most fascinating difference? U.S. News can’t even cleanly rank the top 25 schools in entrepreneurships because the results are so close. In fact, the magazine has five schools tied for the rank of 16 th. three MBA programs tied for 21th, and two-way ties for 7 th. 12 th. 14 th. and 24 th. To its credit, what U.S. News is conceding is that there is no meaningful statistical difference among these schools so it would be unfair to rank them separately. Princeton Review and Entrepreneur have no qualms about this. Each of its 25 schools have a single rank. Is it because their results have statistical relevance? We doubt it. But, of course, you won’t know because Princeton Review doesn’t disclose overall index numbers or much else.

U.S. News Ranking School