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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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We highly recommend that you view the full transcripts of these Q&As or listen to the audio files to get a complete picture of the admissions scene—you don’t want to be lacking info that’s already been shared with others!

Here’s an excerpt from the Michigan Ross Q&A (view or listen to the complete Q&A here):

Linda Abraham: When you are evaluating an application, what do you look at first and how do you go through the file?

Soojin Kwon Koh: I start with the resume and this gives me a snapshot of what this person brings to the table in terms of experience, education, interests; all those things that are perfectly standard on a resume. And I just want to make a point to encourage everybody to try and get your resume to one page, and to not include jargon or technical speech.

Linda Abraham: Thank you. Any other tips on the resume?

Soojin Kwon Koh: Sure. I would focus on the impact of each role and not what your responsibility was. I don’t want to know what your job description is; I want to know how you made a difference at the organization that you were employed with and what your impact was. And it should be understandable by your mother or by your brother; if you give someone your resume, it should mean something and be comprehensible. So if you are in some fields in which there is a lot of technical jargon, don’t include that. Try to make that fairly understandable to the lay person. And giving it to someone else to read as a test is a good way to gauge whether you’ve hit the mark. Also it’s perfectly fine to include extra-curriculars, hobbies, etc. I would not include summer internships from undergrad; we’re really primarily interested in your post-undergrad experience in terms of professional experience.

Linda Abraham: No high school grades, right?

Soojin Kwon Koh: No high school grades please. And even for college, we don’t want a whole laundry list of all of the activities and all of the courses you took; we are really looking for a snapshot. So given that you only have one page to get me familiar with who you are, make sure that you are not focusing on your undergrad days only; it should be driven by your work experience as well. After I look at the resume, then I will look at the recommendation letters, just to get another sense of how someone else sees you. It helps me get a gauge of whether I see a potential fit in terms of achievements, interests, work style, team work skills, and all those kinds of things that we ask your recommender. And a good way to understand what we are looking for is to look at the recommendation questions themselves. And on the ratings grid that we ask your recommenders to fill out, those are the things that we are looking for them to evaluate and those are the things we are watching to see in our students. A word of caution on the ratings grade: there is often a tendency for recommenders to put ‘top 1%’ for every category just to ensure that their candidate gets the highest chance of being admitted. We are very familiar with that approach, and it really doesn’t differentiate anybody given that everybody else is rating their candidates at the top 1%. So we’re looking less what the tier of the ranking is and more on how they rate you on the different dimensions, and how they differ one from another. Then after the recommendation letters, I read the essays to say okay, now why does this person want to get an MBA? What do they say about themselves and can I imagine this person fitting? After I bring all of that together, then I read the comments to see whether someone from the Ross community agrees with the picture that’s been established based on the written materials by way of the application, the recommendation letters, and the essays. And if there is a fit there and the academic quality is there, then they are a strong potential for an admit. If there is an inconsistent picture between the interview and what’s on paper, we will take an even deeper review of those candidates and have a discussion amongst the Admissions Committee. But in most cases, the interview lines up fairly well with the application materials, so it’s rare that we are so troubled by the inconsistency. Generally people are pretty good at representing themselves on paper as well as in person, once they get to that stage.

Here’s an excerpt from the Yale SOM Q&A (view or listen to the complete Yale SOM Q&A):

Linda Abraham: Ritcha asks, “Are there any specific criteria that Yale SOM looks at while reviewing an application from a career changer?” And Bruce, while you are thinking about how to answer that question, I want to ask the applicants how many of you are applying to the MBA program with the intention of changing careers? Okay. We have 48%, which would be right in line.

Bruce DelMonico: Obviously given the number of people who want to change careers through an MBA program, that is obviously a very important and relevant question. I would answer it on two different levels. The first is substantively in terms of the substance of what you want to do. We tend to be pretty agnostic; we are not valuing one type of career over another. So say you are in finance now and you want to go into marketing, or you’re in the public sector now and you want to get into finance, or you’re in the non-profit and you want to do healthcare, we are not making a judgment about which of those changes are better or worse. So we are indifferent and agnostic on that level. What we are looking for is to get a sense of how deeply held that switch is; how well thought out is, how much that switch is supported by evidence of commitment to that switch.

Linda Abraham: In other words, if somebody says that they want to save the whales but they’ve never been to the beach, that’s a problem.

Bruce DelMonico: Exactly. And because we have a reputation for being strong in the non-profit sector, we have a number of candidates every year who will throw in there that they want to go into non-profit. They’re not doing that right now, and they’ve got no evidence or indication anywhere that they’ve volunteered or have done anything to show an interest in this area. So it’s that exactly; save the whales, but I’ve never been to the beach. I like that example. One thing that goes along with that is that we are not judging the switch you want to make or what you want to go into, but we also want to get a sense that it is somewhat realistic, that you have a sense of what it takes to make that switch. I’ll give another example. Private equity has been very popular and every year we do have a number of students who go directly into private equity, but it’s very difficult to do if you are not coming from finance or you don’t have some background. And every year we get candidates who are doing something completely unrelated. They may have done good work, and it may be very interesting work, and it may be very valuable work, but they say that directly after the MBA program they want to go into private equity. Well, you need to have a better sense of what the trajectory of someone is to get into private equity, and what the steps you need are to make that switch. It’s not something you can just jump right into; there is a lot of work that goes into it. And so you need to have a sense of the steps that it takes; that you may need to get some more general experience in diversified financials, and then maybe do some investment banking, and then work your way into PE. That would show that you are a much more serious candidate, and you are being much more thoughtful about the process rather than just saying I’m going to go from retail to private equity and there is nothing in-between those two.

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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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Related Accepted.com Resources:

• Navigate the MBA Maze, a free email course
• 5 Fatal Flaws, a free email course

Accepted.com ~ Helping You Write Your Best

Related Accepted.com Resources:

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

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According to Robert Zimmer, University of Chicago president, “[Kumar] brings the right blend of vision, entrepreneurial energy and academic leadership that will build on the contributions of Chicago Booth at a time of tremendous momentum and achievement.”

Kumar, who has been on the Stanford faculty since 1996, will be replacing Edward A. Snyder who had been leading Booth since 2001. Snyder has been appointed the new dean of Yale SOM and will begin his post in 2011.

Booth professor Harry L. Davis will resume the position of interim dean until Kumar takes office in January 2011.

(Source: Businessweek, “Sunil Kumar Named Dean at Chicago Booth“)

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• When the Financial Times began their global MBA rankings in 1999, 20 out of the 25 top business schools on the list were from the U.S. The remaining five were European b-schools. In 2010, of the 25 top international business schools, 11 are from the U.S., 11 are European, and three are Asian business schools.
• The return on investment for b-schools in the U.S. has dropped in the last few years. Between the years 2000 and 2003, rankings revealed that alumni from 20 of the top 25 b-schools received, on average, at least a 150% salary increase over a five-year period. Today, U.S. b-school alumni cannot report a salary increase of more than 131%, and on Yale SOM alumni can even claim that much. One reason for this is that average salaries upon entering business school have risen, but salaries reported three years after graduation have either remained stable, or declined.
• With an increase in school fees (and subsequent debt) in the U.S., further affecting the return on investment. This offers yet another reason why top U.S. MBA programs are slipping in the FT rankings.
• U.S. schools, once the forerunners in the international research and education community, have done little in recent years to pierce the growing European and Asian research communities, which have now surpassed American b-schools when it comes to providing an international experience. Only a very few b-schools in the U.S. report having more than 50% of their students from outside the U.S. (Thunderbird School of Global Management) or more than 50% of faculty from the international community (Columbia).

(Source: “US schools see their power begin to wane,” from FT.com)

Does an international MBA pique your interest? Find out more about the international MBA scene when you download Internationalizing the MBA, a new Accepted.com special report.

Related Accepted.com Resources:

• The Rankings
• Financial Times Global 2010 MBA Rankings

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