Top 10 MBA Schools

Are you wondering which schools are considered the top 10 MBA schools?

Usually, Business Week (BW) and US News (USN) are the two rankings to watch to find the top U.S. MBA schools.

When BW or USN rank top MBA schools, they actually rank their respective full-time MBA programs.

However, this top ranking of "programs" has the effect of also designating top "schools".

Therefore, the term "top MBA schools" is often used instead of "top full-time MBA programs".

We dediced to make our own top 10 MBA list based on existing rankings. The methodology used for this list includes compliling historical rankings from both BW and USN since the year 2000 (comprising of 15 rankings total). We found the average ranking score and then prioritized the schools from lowest to highest.

This methodology favors the USN rankings because of its yearly ranking (compared to the BW ranking done every two years). Therefore, we have also listed the average BW and USN rankings in parenthesis.

See the list below for the top 10 mba programs...

• 1. Harvard University (BW #4, USN #1)
• 2. University of Pennsylvania (BW #2, USN #3)
• 3. Stanford University (BW #6, USN #2)
• 4. Northwestern University (BW #1, USN #5)
• 5. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (BW #7, USN #4)
• 6. University of Chicago (BW #3, USN #6)
• 7. Columbia University (BW #8, USN #7)
• 8. University of Michigan (BW #5, USN #11)
• 9. Duke University (BW #9, USN #10)
• 10. University of California-Berkeley (BW #13, USN #8)

Note: Dartmouth College (BW #11, USN #9) was #11 on the list, but had an actual ranking average under 10. So Dartmouth could definitely be considered a "top ten mba".

We should also note that five more schools where ranked in the top 10 by either BW or USN at least once since 2000...Universtity of California-Los Angeles, University of Virginia, New York University, Cornell University, and Yale University. Therefore, these schools could be said to have a top 10 mba program.

A "definitive" top 10 ranking is hard to pin down because a school can be considered a "top 10 mba school" regardless of its ranking history. Sometimes, it has more to do with status than with rankings.