Such rankings allow schools that don’t always make it to the top 10 for overall marks to finally see what it feels like to be on top regarding specific impressive elements of their program.

Top 10 U.S. MBA Programs – Accounting

1. Chicago Booth

1. Texas-Austin McCombs

3. Rochester Simon

3. Boston College Carroll

5. U. of Washington Foster

5. Vanderbilt Owen

5. Babson Olin

5. Arizona State Carey

9. Harvard Business School

10. Wharton

Top 10 U.S. MBA Programs – Finance

1. Wharton

2. Chicago Booth

3. Columbia

4. Northeastern

5. Boston College Carroll

5. Case Western Weatherhead

7. Harvard Business School

8. Minnesota Carlson

8. Wisconsin-Madison

8. George Washington

Top 10 U.S. MBA Programs – Most Innovative Curriculums

1. Stanford

2. Chicago Booth

3. Indiana Kelley

4. Yale

4. USC Marshall

4. Texas A&M Mays

4. Tulane Freeman

8. Boston University

8. Rochester Simon

8. George Washington

Top 10 U.S. MBA Programs – Most Improved

1. Georgia Tech

1. Boston University

1. Northeastern

4. Indiana Kelley

5. Wake Forest

5. Arizona State Carey

7. Dartmouth Tuck

7. Brigham Young Marriott

7. Texas A&M Mays

7. Pittsburgh Katz

For rankings based on global competition, general management, communication skills, teamwork, or operations, as well as for an analysis on how the rankings were determined, please see the BW article. There is also a section there on global MBA programs ranked by specialty.

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Maryellen Reilly Lamb, senior associate director of MBA career management of Wharton, explains, “Two years ago, I couldn’t get a bank to take our calls, last year they were taking them and this year, they’re calling us. That speaks a lot to the cautious optimism of Wall Street at the moment.”

In 2008, about 59% of companies in all industries hired MBAs. In 2009 that number dropped to 50%, and this year, that number is likely to bounce back up to 55%.

Also trending back up are signing deals and salaries, which increased 3.2% this year to $89,200.

More recent statistics:

• Wharton saw a 20% increase this year over last in the number of students offered summer banking internships.
• NYU Stern hosted 10% more recruiting events this fall for full-time and summer banking positions.
• Columbia Business School recorded a 45% increase in full-time job postings.
• Harvard Business School, which as of last week had not published their totals, expects “a flurry of offer letters for MBA candidates approaching graduation.”
• JPMorgan and Credit Suisse plan to visit more schools and increase their hiring this year. Credit Suisse has already hired about 10% more people than it did last year.

How have the hiring changes affected MBA students and graduates? For one, explains the Fins article, candidates are showing more devotion to their chosen industry; fewer students are undecided in their career paths by the time they graduate. They are also not taking for granted what few job opportunities come their way.

Top 30 U.S. Business Schools of 2010 (2008 rankings are parenthetical.)

1. Chicago Booth (1)
2. Harvard Business School (2)
3. Wharton (4)
4. Northwestern Kellogg (3)
5. Stanford GSB (6)
6. Duke Fuqua (8)
7. Michigan Ross (5)
8. UC Berkeley Haas (10)
9. Columbia (7)
10. MIT Sloan (9)
11. UVA Darden (16)
12. Southern Methodist Cox (18)
13. Cornell Johnson (11)
14. Dartmouth Tuck (12)
15. CMU Tepper (19)
16. UNC Kenan-Flagler (17)
17. UCLA Anderson (14)
18. NYU Stern (13)
19. Indiana Kelley (15)
20. Michigan State Broad (2T)
21. Yale SOM (24)
22. Emory Goizueta (23)
23. Georgia Tech (29)
24. Notre Dame Mendoza (20)
25. Texas-Austin McCombs (21)
26. USC Marshall (25)
27. Brigham Young Marriott (22)
28. Minnesota Carlson (2T)
29. Rice Jones (NR)
30. Texas A&M Mays (NR)

Top International Business Schools

1. INSEAD (3)
2. Queen’s (1)
3. IE Business School (2)
4. ESADE (6)
5. London Business School (5)
6. Western Ontario Ivey (4)
7. IMD (7)
8. Toronto Rotman (8)
9. York Schulich (2T)
10. Cambridge Judge (2T)
11. McGill Desautels (2T)
12. IESE (9)
13. Cranfield (NR)
14. HEC Paris (2T)
15. HEC Montreal (HR)
16. Oxford Said (10)
17. Manchester (2T)
18. SDA Bocconi (NR)

BW bases its rankings on employer and student surveys, as well as what they call “intellectual capital,” or school research output. For more information on how the rankings are determined, read BW‘s “How We Rank Business Schools.”

Other articles in the report that may interest you include:

• “The Best U.S. Business Schools 2010” – This article highlights ways that business schools are dealing with the sour job market—putting a new emphasis on job placement, reaching out to alumni for job leads, using technology to connect with recruiters, and bolstering career services departments.
• “Top Global Business Schools” – Read about how the Great Recession has affected the international MBA scene, why new schools have popped up on the top 10, why students are being drawn to emerging markets, and more.

Related Accepted.com Resources:

• The Rankings, a free special report on how you should interpret the rankings in your own b-school quest.
• Internationalizing the MBA, a free special report that will help you determine whether an international MBA program is right for you.

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• Harvard Business School has expanded overseas to China, India, and Europe, with the most rapid growth in China and the slowest in India, reports a recent Wall Street Journal article. According to David Yoffie, senior associate dean of executive education at Harvard, “The demand for executive education in China is insatiable….India is different. Companies already have their own extensive internal training programs. There’s a lot more scepticism of the value of outside education beyond a certain price point.”

• HBSers aren’t the only ones moving east; according to a recent Daily Pennsylvanian article, Whartonites are also heading to Asia, seeking finance and investment opportunities in East Asian countries, particularly in China. According to Barbara Hewitt, senior associate director of Career Services at Wharton, “In the past students tended to think that New York might be more of a financial capital and a place to start a career, and certainly I still see some of that, but I think that Hong Kong is absolutely a huge financial market, and people are seeing a lot of benefit to having that international experience and knowledge of the Asian market.”

• Nyenrode Business Unviersiteit announced more free flights for prospective MBA students. The school is offering prospective students flights to the Netherlands campus to attend “immersion weekends” on November 19-21 or February 18-20. These trips were planned after the success of the first immersion weekend the b-school hosted in June. “The programme is focused strongly on personal development and the enhancement of leadership skills,” explains Desiree Van Gorp, the international MBA’s director, “and that’s exactly what participants can expect from these weekends, albeit in miniature.” For more information on the free flights project, visit the school’s website.

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HBS Dean Nitin Nohria further explains: “Our goal is to drive innovation by connecting entrepreneurial teams, not only across the Charles River, but nationally and internationally, in an interdisciplinary approach to creating viable business ventures and social initiatives.”

The lab will be located in the Boston neighborhood of Allston, just across the river from Harvard’s main campus in Cambridge. The center will impact the Harvard community, as well as the larger Boston community and the entire nation on a social, economic, and technological plane. The lab will host student teams from a number of different projects—those working independently, those involved in coursework, contestants from the annual HBS Business Plan Contest, and the HBS Entrepreneurs-in-Residence, among others.

The center may also provide rent-free space for students who are working with local entrepreneurs and businesses, and will work to match teams with “the right people and resources to overcome hurdles and foster their success.”

Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) will also be on board in cultivating the new innovation-focused community at Harvard.



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Of course, each school will attribute its recent drop in selectivity to different causes. Michigan Ross, for example, opened a new building which allows for a larger class, thus allowing the adcoms to accept more students this year than in the past.

University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business, the school that reported the greatest selectivity decrease among the top 30, attributes its drop to “better marketing.” The school also increased its class size by 22% this year.

Randall Sawyer, assistant dean of admissions, financial aid, and inclusion at Cornell’s Johnson School, states that the program’s decrease in selectivity is due to the increase in the quality of applicants. “Candidates are getting smarter about where they apply,” he says, “giving admissions committees fewer but better choices.”

Some programs, on the other hand, are bucking the drop-in-selectivity trend. While some schools are expanding their class size, some are decreasing it. Georgia Institute of Technology’s College of Management is one such example of a program that decreased its class size; 38% of applicants were admitted in 2005, but only 20% in 2010.

Other schools that have reported higher selectivity or no changes include Chicago Booth, Harvard Business School, Notre Dame Mendoza, and Northwestern Kellogg.

And of course this article reflects last year’s application stats. This year both Cornell and Ross happily report that their first round application volume has headed north in comparison to last year’s round 1.

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• The demand for business school graduates has increased 32% in the Asia-Pacific region. This is compared to a 9% increase in North America and a 3% increase in Europe.
• The highest paying industry for MBA graduates post-financial crisis is in the field of pharmaceuticals. Recent recruits into pharmaceutical companies earned about $92,274 per year. The average salary of someone in financial services, the second highest paying industry, is $90,926.
• Across all industries, the average salary for an MBA graduate is $87,500.
• Most of the highest paid graduates hailed from European b-schools, with the exception of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Duke’s Fuqua School of Business which also made it into the top 10 schools with the highest salaries. The reason why these schools churn out higher paid MBAs than graduates from, say, HBS (an otherwise high ranked program) is because these programs accept students with more substantial pre-MBA work experience. When they graduate, they not only have an MBA from a top-ranked program, but have the work experience that will help move them into more senior, higher paid positions.
• Employer demand was up 24% in MBA hiring in 2010. In 2009 there was a 5% decline in MBA job opportunities.
• The QS report ranked top business schools based on the preferences of 2,145 employers. The following schools were chosen based on the value attributed to the graduates, regardless of total salary amount: Harvard Business School, Wharton, INSEAD (Fontainebleau), London Business School, INSEAD (Singapore), and Melbourne Business School.

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One advantage of such a move, at least according to Wes Swank, a 29-year-old who completed his MBA at age 24, is that “going directly from college to business school [can help one] avoid jarring transitions.” The benefit of not yet having a job means that you don’t need to leave a job and put your life on hold for two years, he says.

The WSJ article cites the Graduate Management Admissions Council (GMAC) as stating that the under-24 contingency is the fastest growing group among people who take the GMAT. In fact, in 2010, about 40% of full-time MBA applicants had less than three years of work experience.

Some business schools, like the Loyola University’s Sellinger School of Business and Management, are even going so far as to create special MBA programs for these young students. Sellinger’s part-time program offers part-time learning with part-time working, so students get the classroom and hands-on work experiences simultaneously. Karyl Leggio, Sellinger’s dean, explains, “We provide real-world experience to help accelerate their careers….It’s sort of internships on steroids.”

Harvard Business School‘s 2+2 program is another option for younger applicants. This program offers accepted college juniors a spot in a future HBS class, just so long as they first graduate college and then work for two years.

Similarly, Stanford GSB offers a deferment program where students can apply to the business school while seniors in college, and then defer for one to three years after graduation.

According to Dipak Jain, former dean of Northwestern Kellogg, “younger MBA graduates in many cases may be more appealing to employers, and younger students could help diversify business schools’ student bodies.” Young women, Jain continues, are also more likely to attend business school before they have families.

While this trend does seem to be on the rise, many are skeptical, especially in today’s economy, that top companies will be willing to hire less experienced MBAs.

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Related Accepted.com Resources:

• The Rankings: A Free Accepted.com Special Report
• Essays that Stick Webinar

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828 college juniors applied to the 2+2 Program (down slightly from last year’s 844 students). Last year, 14% of applicants (115 students) were accepted. This year, only 100 students received the acceptance email notifying them of their admission to the program.

The 2+2 Program accepts college juniors with diverse, not necessarily business-related, backgrounds. After graduation, students work for two years, and then enter HBS, at which point they’ll be mainstreamed into the regular business school program.

Of this year’s admitted students, 60% are majoring in hard sciences, engineering, or another technical-related field; 6% are undergraduate business majors; and 34% have backgrounds in the humanities or social sciences.

Are you a college junior interested in applying to HBS’s 2+2 Program? Do you need help constructing an effecting application that will prove your potential, enthusiasm, and passion for the world of business, despite your non-business background? If so, our editors can help you put your best face forward in an application that will dazzle the Harvard adcom, making it nearly impossible for them to turn you down! Check out Accepted’s HBS 2+2 Essay Package today!



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