(Poets & Quants) — What is the best undergraduate business program in the US?
If you believe US News & World Reportof the annual ranking, is Wharton, down. If you think Bloomberg BusinessWeek you would have a better idea of what makes a great business program, you'd probably be surprised that Wharton doesn't even make their top five. Working week prefers the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame.
We came up with a new way to look at the best programs by combining the results of the two most careful rankings of the undergraduate experience with a new and important aspect of the analysis: a university's overall national ranking in the annual US news list. After all, a student majoring in business at any of these schools will take far more courses outside of the business school during the four years they are enrolled in an undergraduate program. Thus, the overall reputation of the school should be just as important as the quality of the business program.
Using this complex methodology, the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School comes out on top, with a significant lead over the two schools tied for second: Cornell University's Dyson School and Notre Dame. The University of Virginia's McIntire School of Business is in fourth place, while the University of Washington's Olin School rounds out the top five. Many of the first tier programs are well known. Business schools at UC-Berkeley, University of Michigan, Emory University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Carnegie Mellon University round out the top 10.
Four of the top 10 undergraduate business programs are at public universities. This is largely because many of the best-known private MBA-granting schools, such as Stanford's Graduate School of Business, Harvard Business School, Columbia University, Northwestern University, University of Chicago, and Dartmouth Tuck to name a few some, do not have undergraduate business programs.
Wharton's clean win is not surprising. The school boasts one of the most respected and selective undergraduate business programs in the country. The University of Pennsylvania has an acceptance rate of 12% and does not break down its statistics by school – although rumor has it that Wharton is harder to get into than Penn. A veritable Who's Who of America's corporate elite has made hefty job offers to the roughly 650 students in the Class of 2014, making fresh Whartonites among the world's highest-paying business undergraduates.
As more applicants seek a place in business programs across the US, it also becomes much more difficult to get into a top undergraduate program. Average SAT scores at many of the highly ranked schools have risen steadily in recent years. At the Wharton School, average SAT scores have increased by 22 points to 1466 in the last three years alone (we use the older scoring method in which 1600 is a perfect score, not the current 2400). This is much higher than the overall average of 1050 for SAT test takers.
“Demand is really growing at a higher rate at this point,” says Lori Rosenkopf, associate dean and director of Wharton's undergraduate business program. “Certainly, if you look at our own net application trends over the last decade, we've seen an almost continuous rise, with the exception of the financial crisis of 2008. For the current application cycle right now, they've had a 13% increase in applications. I think it represents this notion more generally that business translates into many areas.”
The Poets & Quants system tends to reduce anomalies in any ranking, a common problem with statistical analysis. These strange results lead to quite divergent results between them US news and Bloomberg BusinessWeek rankings. While Wake Forest University's business school is ranked No. 11 by Working weekfor example, US news puts it at No. 34. And while US news gives UC-Berkeley's business school a highly impressive No. 2 ranking, BusinessWeek ranks the same school at No. 15.
There are even more dramatic differences between other schools. Consider Northeastern University's D'Amore-McKim School of Business. US news He has it at No. 72; Working week gave him 19th place. That's a difference of 53 places. Then there is MIT's famous Sloan School of Management. US news has it in a three-way tie for second place, behind only Wharton. Shockingly, however, the school failed to make it this year Working week ranking at all. Last year, MIT fell from the top 10 to 19th place largely because Sloan has fewer than 125 undergraduate majors, about 2% of its undergraduate student body. Other schools have thousands of students studying business. “For a potential employer specifically looking to hire a large number of business specialists, this is not enough for students to make a campus visit worthwhile,” the publication explains.
Why are such dramatic differences between the two ranking systems so common? Inconsistencies can be addressed in significantly different ranking methodologies. US News» The results are based entirely on the magazine's survey of business school deans and senior faculty, many of whom vote based on a program's reputation rather than its actual quality. They are asked to rate the quality of all the programs they were aware of on a scale of 1 (marginal) to 5 (excellent).
The Working week the methodology is much more complex and comprehensive. It is based on surveys of students, employers and schools. The student portion of the survey alone includes 44 questions about teaching quality, access to faculty, school facilities, career services and more. The corporate recruitment survey was completed by 301 of the 922 employers surveyed, 32.6% response rate. An attempt to calculate a school's academic quality, using factors such as average SAT scores for the last entering class and faculty-to-student ratio, is also used based on data provided by both the school and students.
Both systems have their flaws. US news has been accused of running a popularity contest with its ranking because it is simply based on the opinions of a few hundred people. By surveying students who know their answers will be used to rank their schools, Working week risks getting little more than cheerleader responses.
Poets&Quants weighed three rankings equally—the Working week catalog, n US news ranking of undergraduate business programs, and h US news list of nationally ranked universities, combining those lists with a grading system that resulted in an underlying index number for each school. Below are the top 10 programs.
1. University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)
Total Entries: 2506
Average SAT: 1466
Acceptance rate: 12%
Annual tuition & fees: $47,668
Average salary: $67,986
2. Cornell University (Dyson) – TIE
Total Entries: 737
Average SAT: 1414
Acceptance rate: 16%
Annual tuition and fees: $47,286 (non-residents)
Average salary: $61,637
2. University of Notre Dame (Mendoza) – TIE
Total Enrollment: 1968
Average SAT: 1419
Acceptance rate: 22%
Annual tuition and fees: $46,237
Average salary: $58,386
4. University of Virginia (McIntire)
Total Entries: 679
Average SAT: 1390
Acceptance rate: 30%
Annual tuition and fees: $46,395
Average salary: $64,666
5. Washington University in St. Louis (Olin)
Total Entries: 902
Average SAT: 1480
Acceptance rate: 16%
Annual tuition and fees: $46,467
Average salary: $62,500
6. UC-Berkeley (Haas)
Total Entries: 717
Average SAT: 1394
Acceptance rate: 21%
Annual tuition and fees: $35,742 (non-residents)
Average salary: $62,719
7. University of Michigan (Ross) – TIE
Total Entries: 1421
Average SAT: 1381
Acceptance rate: 32%
Annual tuition and fees: $45,978 (non-residents)
Average salary: $63,129
7. Emory University (Goizueta) – TIE
Total Entries: 742
Average SAT: 1360
Acceptance rate: 27%
Annual tuition and fees: $44,008 (non-residents)
Average salary: $60,357
9. University of North Carolina (Kenan-Flagler)
Total Entries: 676
Average SAT: 1356
Acceptance rate: 27 %
Annual tuition and fees: $55,546 (non-residents)
Average salary: $58,537
10. Carnegie Mellon University (Tepper)
Total Entries: 397
Average SAT: 1435
Acceptance rate: 26%
Annual tuition and fees: $47,642
Average salary: $66,050
