USNWR Graduate Finance Rankings-their meaning, if any?

So I subscribed to USNWR's education compass, which is rather interesting. It has the rankings of business, med, law, education, engineering, and then ranks subspecialities within each of the schools. I looked at finance (naturally, this is WSO afterall), and here is what I saw:

1. University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)
2. UChicago (Booth)
3. NYU (Stern)
4. Columbia
5. MIT (Sloan)
6. Stanford
7. Harvard
8. UC ​Berkeley (Haas)
9. Northwestern (Kellogg)
10. UCLA (Anderson)
11. UMichigan—​Ann Arbor (Ross)
12. Carnegie Mellon (Tepper)
13. Duke (Fuqua)
14. University of Rochester (Simon)
15. Boston College (Carroll)
15. Loyola Maryland (Sellinger)
15. University of Texas ​Austin (McCombs)
18. St. Joseph's University (Haub)
18. UNC Chapel Hill (Kenan-​Flagler)
20. Yale
21. Washington University in St. Louis (Olin)
22. Creighton University
22. Fordham
22. University of Illinois at ​Urbana-​Champaign
25. Fairfield
25. Ohio State

These rankings are for "MBA in finance." But what, if anything, do these rankings mean for employers? Might they take this to mean "Stanford's finance specific classes are better than Duke's" or what? Obviously, we all know no one from St. Joseph is getting IBD over a Yalie, so this isn't exactly the 10 commandments, but still. What if someone is doing an MSF in one of these programs?

4 Comments
 

Thanks for posting this!! Its amazing what a racket USNWR has become but their business model works, and a lot better than the NYT (n for them all u gotta do is open windows in incognito or clear the cache/temp internet files to see anything).

Yea, I would say this list is probably good at the margins for highly specialized disciplines, tho for MSF your guess is as good as mine.

 

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