US News 2024 Full Time MBA Rankings Winners Losers and Problems

The 2024 rankings reflect drastic methodology changes with with big shifts in the Top 10:

• Booth is #1 and Kellogg is #2 (what’s in Chicago’s water?)
• HBS is #5
• Tuck is #6, tied with Stanford
• Ross is #8, tied with Yale
• Columbia is #11, Stern is #10 - this is a first!
• In the Full-Time MBA Rankings, for the second year in a row, Booth School of Business stood first, followed by the Kellogg School of Management in second (up from 3rd last year) and Wharton in third (down from 1st last year). Source: US News

Thanks to the changes in methodology this year, we saw heavy movement in rankings all across the board including the top 10. Tuck and Ross now stand at sixth place and eighth place respectively, pushing Columbia and Haas down to 11th place. Harvard and Stanford GSB stood at 5th and 6th respectively. NYU Stern closed out the top 10 this year.

I had low expectations. I even thought they would skip a year because US News took a lot of heat over the last 12 months about its college and law school rankings. Their reaction seems to be a natural overcorrection with drastic changes to methodology. Every category and line item have been touched and updated. Some it seems, for no reason at all. Basically, this year US News shifted weights around without addressing decade-old reporting problems.

More Links:

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It is important to understand the methodology behind every study and every ranking. You need to do it to understand its strengths and also limitations. This year, there is a HUGE push to elevate employment and compensation data by muting US News’ unique side - dean peer assessment. 15% of total weight was moved from Peer Assessment to Employment Outcomes. The idea is good in concept but it has some flaws that provide a wide degree of leeway for “bad behavior” in the rankings (more on that later).

I find it interesting that US News is selling its soul with these changes. Perhaps it is time but the peer assessment was a pretty unique and communal aspect of the rankings. Each Dean would rank the other 100+ MBA programs. I guess it may have proven to be nefarious where you would ding your competitor… not sure but this has gotten the biggest cut. Similarly, the COMP data is getting the biggest bump. I would agree that jobs are the key element of the MBA program value proposition and an easy way to measure them but not the only ones. Look at HBS and Stanford - only 61-79% are employed at graduation being subjugated by the giants such as Marshall with a commanding 90.5% employment at graduation rate. If you ever wondered if a GSB student has regrets, now you know but something tells me the rankings are not measuring the right things as it is still a lot harder to get into Harvard than Tuck and GSB than Marshal and this is a clear indication of a failure of the rankings to correctly identify or measure the proper data points and allowing use of incomplete or funny data. You can find a copy of the methodology PDF here


Changes to the Methodology:

• Peer and Recruiter assessment (25%) reduced from 40% to 25% in weight - BIGGEST change
  
  
  • Peer assessment by BSchool Deans (reduced from 25% to 12.5%) - Interesting choice to reduce.
    
  • Recruiter assessment (reduced from 15% to 12.5%)
• Selectivity (25%)
  
  
  • GMAT/GRE - 13% (down from 16%)
    
  • GPA - 10% (up from 7.5%)
    
  • Acceptance rate - 2% (up from 1.25%)
  
  
• Employment (50%)
  
  
  • Employment at graduation - 10% (up from 7%)
    
  • Employment 3 months out - 20% (up from 14%)
    
  • Mean starting salary and bonus - 20% (up from 14%)

The only other surprising change is the GPA weight has gone up by 2.5% (30% increase) and the test score weights have gone down. This means applicants who many years ago did not turn in a research paper will be paying for it now, years after it was due and getting a higher GMAT score is not going to be as helpful apparently. Of course the part that nobody ever talks about is all the international applicants with GPA on a 5, 7, 8, and 10-poing scales. Did you guys know that international GPA’s are not converted and not reported in US News?



Methodology Flaws & Possible Manipulation:

The biggest problems and issues the US news rankings had over the last 20 years and still have today is data integrity. The rankings naively assume that partial data is as good as complete data. For example, if a school reports that 98% of their students applied with GMAT or GRE scores and another program reports that only 30% of their students applied with a GMAT/GRE score, those schools are equal in the US News eyes. Thus an enterprising AdCom can provide score waivers left and right, admit only 25% of the class with super high GMAT/GRE scores (that’s a threshold) and get excellent marks in the rankings. This could be your magic wand if your class average GMAT is lagging behind.

As mentioned, International GPA is never figured in the US News rankings. So if you have gone to a community college with a 4.0 or an international school with a 2.2 you may be welcomed more than someone from a competitive school with a 3.0

Finally, the flaw of every employment report - the report will assume that people who have not filled it out, are not looking for employment. Imagine you are a graduate who receives one of these surveys to fill out in May or June but you have not found a job yet. Chances are, if you have not found a job, you don’t want to fill out the survey because A) it is painful and B) it hurts your school’s reputation and that C) hurts your chances of finding that job. As the result, students and schools under-report unemployment because struggling students self-select out of the surveys if they can’t find a job. This could be another reason Stanford has 62% employment while other Top-20 schools sport 90% employment figures. This is 90% of reporting figures, not 90% of the class. However, the rankings DON’T say that explicitly and I feel they should provide the caveats.



Surprises

Is the Windy City the place to be? Booth (1) and Kellogg (2) top the charts ahead of Wharton (3), Harvard (5) and Stanford (6). Both schools showcased strong job outcomes and increased their average salary by 14K and 18K respectively. They were both part of an elite group of schools who received a 4.5 rating or higher from their peers. It’s clear that these Chicago schools are on fire and Kellogg comes in at its highest ranking ever (#2). But both schools admitted over 30% of their applicants - among the highest in top 10 where the acceptance rate averaged 24%. However, it's worth noting that acceptance rate only influences the overall ranking by 2% compared to 10% for the GPA and 13% for the GMAT / GRE.

Harvard is 5th and Stanford is 6th? Real talk - most candidates would choose these schools over those ranked ahead of them. They have the lowest acceptance rates (14.4% and 8.6%), very high average salary (198K and 196K) and among the highest average GMAT and GPA. Is it just because fewer than 90% were employed 3 months after graduation? Is anyone really worried that these grads won’t find a job?

Dartmouth Tuck and Michigan Ross move up in the top 10; Columbia and Berkeley Haas drop out: Dartmouth Tuck (6) and Michigan Ross (8) move up in the top 10 with among the highest percentage of grads employed at graduation. Meanwhile, Columbia and Berkeley Haas drop out of the top 10 tied for 11. Both had a lower employment rate at graduation (77%) which could explain some of the drop in alignment with the new methodology which puts more weight on job placement, but both rebounded to 90%+ rates at three months after graduation and most other measures are strong, although their peer assessment ratings dropped slightly. It’s worth noting that the overall scores between #5 Harvard (95 points) and #11 tie between Columbia, Berkeley and Duke (91 points) are very slight, reinforcing just how thin the margins can be between schools.

Are there new “tiers” of schools? M7, Top 15 - has anything changed? At the end of the day, not really. Sure, Stanford dropped a few spots and Columbia and Berkeley Haas dropped out of the top 10 - but let’s be honest - these programs are still among the best in the world. Before we go redrawing lines we need to see how the new US News methodology plays out over the next few years - are these changes really reflective of the new normal? Is recruiting placement success worthy of its 50% weighting (up from 30%) in the methodology? If anything, maybe this pushes schools to push even harder on the recruiting resource front in support of student career placement success. Keep an eye on how supportive or innovative a career office is - that may differentiate schools more than a ranking number.

USC (15) and Emory (17) each jump four spots: USC and Emory are now ahead of Tepper, UCLA, UT Austin and UNC Keenan-Flagler, coming in at 15 and 17 respectively.. USC made a huge jump in their stats with a whopping 740 GMAT (no school on the list has a higher average GMAT Score - is that possible?) up from 716 and 3.58 GPA for the Class of 2024. As for Emory, they had a notable improvement in their acceptance rate, from 53% last year to 37% this year. They also improved their average GMAT score by 8 points.

Shout out to other top 50 programs with big moves: Rochester Simon, University of Georgia Terry, SMU Cox, UC Irvine and University of Wisconsin all moved up at least 6 places.



What does this year’s ranking mean to a future MBA applicant?

With big changes in 2024 rankings, we are reminded once again that rankings are not everything. If you are changing your methodology drastically, clearly you feel it was faulty before, and what is a guarantee that it is any better? With Tuck and HBS sharing the same spot, we don’t need a fancy system to help us choose between these 2 schools. Yet many will quote the rankings over the next year to argue that Ross is better than Haas. Every ranking has limitations and it is important you recognize them and ask yourself - Can any rankings that do not rate HBS or Stanford as #1 be trusted? Why are the schools with the lowest acceptance rates and most applicants not top schools in your rankings?

Q: Is a big swing in Rankings a sign of a problem or success in a program?
Not really, MBA programs are competitive, large bodies that move at glacial speeds. Any drastic changes are usually results of methodology updates.

Q: Is Haas Ranked #8 or 11? Is Tuck #11 or #6?

That depends which school you go to. Tuck will say they are #6 based on this year’s rankings and Haas will say they are #8 based on last year’s rankings 😂. I think this year along does not matter. We will have to see what happens in the long term and in the long term, there will be corrections. Columbia will get back into the Top 10 and someone else will have to play the musical chairs. Remember - Rankings are about long term. You don’t get Alums in top recruiting companies in a year or even 2, so keep an eye out for Historic long-term rankings. We have a nice Tabeau chart of the Top 50 rankings for the past 15 years.

Q: Is US News useless?
US News rankings is just a system of arranging data points. While the result may be odd, this product has a huge value in terms of the data it collects. I recommend that you get the US News Grad COMPASS to get access to all the data points for each of the schools (e.g. how many people reported salary and employment and how competitive was it?) The US News system is far from perfect but is closer to what applicants care about than its competitors such as FT or Economist rankings.

Q: So how do I use the US News Rankings again?
Use the long-term rankings (5+ years to average out some of these spikes and oddities). Over the long term, MBA programs naturally try to optimize their strategy to improve their rank and standing. Many have specific goals to increase (e.g. acceptance rate or average GMAT). We will see things rebalance over the next few years as schools jockey for positions. We have a nice Tabeau chart of the Top 50 rankings for the past 15 years. (it does not yet have the latest rankings integrated/polluted into it)