Forbes 2009 B-School Rankings

What did MIT ever do to you, Mr. Forbes!

I hate rankings like this because it severely penalizes schools that send students to a hugely diverse set of careers (and not necessarily ones that are the highest paying - i.e. banking/consulting).

5 year ROI is not the only metric that you use to evaluate a business school education and its very simplistic to claim a rankings by that metric. That is not to say that ROI isn't a factor - but it totally depends on the individual and their goals (if I want to go from consulting to non-prof or banking to CPG marketing, I'm going to take a pay cut - but that's going to be very purposeful).

Agreed. This ranking is obviously heavily biased towards finance/banking sectors. And Tuck over HBS? I mean, seriously, come on!

The ordering that makes a bit more sense is compensation at the 5 year mark, as opposed to Forbes' ROI. At least there's a bit more of a resemblance to what people think.

1. Stanford - 225K
2. HBS - 215K
3. Chicago - 210K
4. Tuck - 205K
5. Wharton - 200K
6. MIT - 190K
7. Columbia - 182K
8. NYU - 170K
9. Cornell - 168K
10. Kellogg - 165K
11. Haas - 163K

This rankings is no worse or better than any other arbitrary ranking. It would be interesting, though, if they broke out different career fields (i.e. finance, consulting, marketing, etc.) as opposed to just lumped them together. If the career classes were broken out, I'd definitely pay close attention to the ranking. Regardless, for those who are looking for a slightly easier program to get into than the Ultra Elites, the data suggests that Cornell isn't a bad place to look.

I think it's good to have rankings like this.

1) Most people look at more than one set and then hopefully find out why they're different.
2) For some people this particular rating is important - for better or worse it's the reason they're going to B-school.

I think for some people it's also good to see, holy crap, this may not be a good investment monetarily speaking, it's kind of a wake up call. If your school isn't at the top of the list, who cares, hopefully you've researched it and it's best for you.

Tuck and Chicago above Wharton on this is hugely surprising to me. I know Chicago has a great finance program, but I always thought that Wharton was by far the pre-eminent finance school and thus would have higher average salaries.

Wharton also has a solid rep in other areas that don't pay nearly as well as the banking jobs. For example lots of folks head into things like marketing which pays substantially less. You would have to see the percentage of students going into all fields and then know what those paid. In reality this ranking means nothing, just because you go to one school doesnt mean that is really what your ROI will be. If you are going into banking at Yale you are going to make far more than a non-profit guy from Stanford. A ranking by function/industry would be better ranking for Forbes to do than by school.

As a McCombs 2nd year I feel it's my duty to post the 11-20 rankings as well

1. Stanford
2. Dartmouth (Tuck)
3. Harvard
4. Chicago (Booth)
5. U Penn (Wharton)
6. Columbia
7. Cornell (Johnson)
8. Northwestern (Kellogg)
9. UVA (Darden)
10. Yale
11. Texas-Austin (McCombs)
12. UC Berkeley (Haas)
13. Duke (Fuqua)
14. MIT (Sloan)
15. UNC (Kenan-Flagler)
16. Brigham Young (Marriott)
17. NYU (Stern)
18. Michigan (Ross)
19. UCLA (Anderson)
20. Iowa (Tippie)

MIT Sloan at #14? Now I know this ain't right.

I think it would be better to rank based on ROI by industry. i.e., how much does a finance guy from Wharton make compared to Chicago. Do Marketing guys from Kellogg make more than marketing guys ar Booth?

That would be a valuable ranking.

I think what you see in those figures is reflective of class composition.

See page 34 of this paper:

https://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/mariann ... 100108.pdf

You can see the way banking could really skew the figures.

great paper rhyme.....I am at page 11 so far and find much of the data interesting

Yea, its a must read .

IB's are wayyyy higher in the paper

The "by far" is a mistake. And I'm not saying that because I am at Chicago. Columbia, NYU, MIT, and LBS are at the same level in finance and economics with Wharton and Chicago. Actually in economics Wharton is even considered by some, "worse" than some of its peers.

Regarding the rankings, we should note that this takes into account "a golden age" in finance. I guess that the GAP will be much tighter when it takes into account the class of 2007-2010 for instance.

Students of three years may not be enough to change the statistics.......

And that's why I wrote "I guess" rather than "I'm sure"

Let me try to put differently: maybe because in the next few years finance jobs supposedly will pay smaller bonuses, the gap between Finance related jobs and GM ones may get tighter, and this may affect general ROI.

Rankings, rankings, they always bring controversy for the discussions, hehehe