MBA RANKINGS
Pictured above. Two nerds fighting over MBA rankings
Comparing MBA rankings is a fool’s errand. Period. There are a million reasons for this, a lot of which involve the various methodologies that different publications use to rank MBA’s. However, that does not mean you can just ignore rankings. They offer important insights into a school and how it is doing. It’s also notable that the rankings do not change much year to year at the very top end.
One really important note, if you have a “top 10 or bust mentality, I highly encourage you to drop that attitude. Any school in the top 20 will give you excellent opportunities. Also, at the bottom of this article I will give you list of the most reputable rankings out there.
I get the following questions or permutations of these questions at least three times a week.
- “Does it really matter where I get my MBA?
- “If I just go to a top 50 MBA program will I be ok?”
- “Are top 10 programs that much better than top 25?”
- “What does M7 mean for school rankings?”
- “Do I really need to attend Wharton, Columbia etc to get into Investment Banking?”
So does it matter? Well like a lot of things on this website the answer is that it depends. You need to ask yourself a few questions.
Do I want to work for a very elite firm or hard to enter industry such as Investment Banking or Management Consulting?
Unfortunately MBA Rankings come into play greatly here. The higher ranked a school is, the more likely that you will have an opportunity to enter some of the most elite white collar jobs in America. Investment Banking and Consulting really are difficult to break into. I will illustrate an example using consulting.
Schools Ranked 1-10
HBS, Wharton, Stanford, Booth etc: You will have elite strategy firms such as McKinsey, Bain and BCG on campus frequently to wine and dine students. These elite firms like recruiting at these schools because the admission standards are so murderous. Almost everyone has a GMAT that meets their minimum criteria. Other firms like PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, EY will also be on campus. They will usually come as their “branded” strategy name. Such as S& for PwC.
It is important to note that the M7 (magnificent 7) fall into this ranking category. As stated in Poets and Quants - “It’s the informal super elite group of seven private business schools generally considered to have the world’s best MBA programs. If you’re in business, you know their names: Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Kellogg, Booth, Columbia, and MIT Sloan.”
Schools Ranked 11-25
Tepper, UNC, McCombs: Deloitte, PwC, KPMG, EY (Big 4) will be on campus looking to recruit for both implementation, management and strategy roles. You will have some interest from MBB firms but it will be sporadic and uneven from year to year. In order to even be considered for a job at a MBB firm you will need to have a 700 GMAT and network heavily.
Schools Ranked 25-50
You will have some sporadic interest from Big 4 firms and very little to no interest from MBB firms. Some smaller regional schools will have pipelines to local or regional consulting firms. Periodically someone will do something and magical and get recruited to MBB firms.
Do I want to work in a specific region of the country or do I not care?
This is a big consideration that you need to take into consideration. Top ranked schools (20 and above) are nationally (sometimes internationally) recognized schools. Companies from all across the United States and even some international firms come to these schools to recruit.
Lower ranked schools are often aligned to a regional area. This is not necessarily a bad thing. A school such as SMU Cox has really good placement in the Dallas area. I interviewed at a couple firms in Dallas and it was filled to the brim with SMU grads. Rice is practically a gateway drug to the oil industry. Washington Foster is a great school for tech on the West Coast. Indiana Kelley and Notre Dame Mendoza are both great schools for Big 4 firms in Chicago. Georgetown is practically a must for federal consulting.
The point I am trying to make is that rankings are not everything. You need to talk to students and alumni from the school and get an idea of what student success looks like.
Do I want to attend a public or private school?
The GI Bill comes into effect here due to the difference between what the GI Bill will pay for a state versus a private school. I have taken a portion from my article on how to pay for an MBA.
Public School - All Tuition and Fee Payments for an in-State Student
Private or Foreign School Up to $23,671.94 per academic year National Maximum
It’s really important to note that there are some really badass state MBA programs. University of Texas, University of Michigan and Virginia are the most prominent ones. You really get your money’s worth out of elite MBA programs at state schools. That GI bill is gonna pay the whole enchilada baby. And some of these programs are like 60 grand a year. So please take that into consideration
Private schools have a booster to the current pay rate above. The Yellow Ribbon program offers matching donations to the GI Bill. School’s have to opt-in, but almost all the good schools do. It’s a godsend for attending private MBA programs, the majority of which. My “ahem” elite MBA would have set me back $160. But thanks to the GI Bill, Yellow Ribbon and a small scholarship from my school I paid exactly zero. It was like just PCS to a way cooler army school and you didn’t have to go back
Would I attend a higher ranked school if they gave me no scholarship vs a lower ranked school that gave me a full ride?
A friend of mine from Tepper got into both Wharton, Columbia and Tepper. He got no money from either Wharton or Columbia and got a full ride to Tepper. It was a really tough decision or him. He was really into finance and stocks and wanted to go work at a hedge fund. He had done corporate development already and he had a prenatural disposition to understanding how companies generate cash.
He had to make the very difficult choice of going several hundred thousand dollars into debt for the possibility of getting picked up by a hedge fund or private equity firm. It would be much easier to go that route rather go to Tepper and try to break in.
He choose Tepper, and because he was good he still ended up at a hedge fund. The point that I am trying to make is that ONLY YOU can make the decision on what your personal handicap is. Are you so good it doesn’t matter where you go? Or do you need every “bump” you can get? Think about it hard.
Do you want to enter a specific industry?
Some schools simply place better in certain industries than others. For example, Wharton’s MBA program is practically a trade school for Investment Banking. Darden is the #1 school to enter consulting. Kellogg is known as a marketing program. Stanford and Carnegie Mellon are tech schools. Check out this great blog from clear admit on the consulting field and why school choice matters.
The only ranking that actually matters
If you take one thing from this page, take this. The only ranking worth real weight is cross-admit data, meaning what applicants do when a school says yes and another school also says yes.
Very, very few people actually choose Kellogg or Wharton over Stanford or HBS, whatever US News says in a given year. The market reveals the truth. Published rankings are a methodology argument. Cross-admit data is thousands of people voting with the single most consequential decision of their professional lives.
That is also why the top of the list barely moves year to year, and why you should not get excited or depressed about a school sliding three spots.
The veteran adjustment nobody makes for you
Here is the part that generic MBA advice gets wrong for our community. The gap between schools is smaller for veterans than it is for the general population.
Think about who actually loses out by not attending Harvard, Stanford or Wharton. It is the mega-fund private equity roles that recruit exclusively from those three. Those roles almost never take veterans anyway. They also do not take civilians who lack bulge bracket or boutique banking experience before the MBA. That door is mostly closed regardless of which of the three you attend, so weighting your school decision heavily on it is a mistake.
Now look at where veterans actually land. MBB offices and top banks contain grads from across the top 20 or so programs, not just the top 10. Read that alongside the section above rather than instead of it: on-campus recruiting really does get thinner and less predictable once you leave the top 10, and that is a genuine disadvantage. The point is that thinner is not the same as closed.
One of our team recruited into a firm that only actively visited the M7 plus a handful of schools like Tuck, Darden and Ross. That firm still hired someone out of Owen who simply reached out directly. We know veterans from schools like Scheller and Leeds who are doing extremely well. Where on-campus recruiting is sporadic, direct outreach is how people get in, and it works often enough to be a strategy rather than a long shot.
So the honest version is this. Yes, the higher you go, the deeper and better connected the student body and alumni network get. The opportunities students get at somewhere like Stanford GSB are genuinely remarkable, partly because of an extraordinary alumni network and partly because the school sits down the street from Sand Hill Road. A mean HBS grad is more successful than a mean Fuqua grad, and the wealth numbers and CEO lists are out there for anyone to check. That is all real. It is just a much weaker argument for veterans than it is for the applicant pool at large.
Drop the "or bust" thinking
The Harvard, Stanford or Wharton or bust mentality is as stupid as the MBB or bust mentality, and they come from the same place.
I went to Carnegie Mellon, ranked around 15, and I have had every opportunity I wanted. I am not unusual. My classmates five years out are doing phenomenally well across every industry you can name. I have had HSW grads call me to ask how to get a job at my company, and I have called HSW grads when they were in a role I was interested in. It runs both directions. What matters is your experience and how you advocate for yourself.
The same applies one level down, to the firm you join afterward. The MBB versus Big 4 versus boutique argument is self-perpetuated by MBAs who believe a brand name is everything. Big 4 firms recruit hard at schools in the 11 to 25 band, as noted above, and that is not a consolation prize. Among the Big 4 alumni we know, essentially everyone who left went to a strong exit: venture capital, private equity, corporate development, tech. Companies hire the best person they can get for the job. Very few postings say "MBB preferred." They say strategy or management consulting required. Your ability to articulate what you actually did at your firm matters far more than the logo on it.
Remember the half-life
Tim Cook went to Fuqua, not HBS, and outperformed and outearned 99 percent of HBS graduates.
That is the whole thing in one sentence. The school gets your foot in the door for the first opportunity or two. After that, performance is the only input. Your MBA has a genuinely short half-life, and ten years out it is one of the least important lines on your resume.
Worth noting alongside that: several years out, a lot of veterans find their military network has been more useful than their MBA network. The MBA network has a shorter half-life than people expect. But the MBA is what opens the first serious civilian job and accelerates everything after it. Both of those are true at once, and neither is a reason to skip the degree or to obsess over its ranking.
Rankings Sources
You need to understand what reputable rankings out there and which ones to take seriously. There are a bunch of weird smaller rankings that no one cares about or ever cites. You will want to look at the FULL TIME ranking of the school as the number you want to evaluate. That’s it, no other weird rankings on how much employers or recruiters like a school. No one gives a shit. What is the overall ranking number. If it comes from the following publications I would trust it.
I have included a sample of the poets and quants ranking below. Notice a couple things. It includes GMAT, GPA, Accept Rate, Post MBA Pay, jobs at graduation and jobs at 3 months. These are the stats I would be really concerned about. They are the metrics that schools are really evaluated on.
Source: Poets and Quants 2019 MBA Ranking
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