Rank top feeder schools?

Some are givens but I'm curious how everyone ranks these schools (no particular order):

Stern, Booth, Wharton, Columbia, LBS, Kellogg, Stanford, Harvard, Tuck, UCLA

51 Comments
 

Feeders into which industry? Stanford, because of its ties to Silicon Valley, is the top feeder into VC firms, but probably not the top for banking or consulting. Wharton and Stern are renowned for their finance programs, Kellogg for marketing/brand management, HBS for general management, etc. It really depends on what career you want to enter, although all the schools you listed are pretty strong across the board.

 

Rankings for similar business schools are really only useful to the person ranking them. I've evaluated most of the schools on that list, and my personal ranking is below. That said, I likely have different experiences, background, and goals that I want to achieve in business school, and therefore weight different aspects of these programs more heavily than others. So, if I was accepted to all of those schools, I'd attend in the following order:

Harvard Stanford Wharton (Lauder program) LBS Booth Kellogg Tuck Columbia UCLA Stern

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Best Response

It is really interesting to pull the job reports and look at percentages vs. numbers. I pulled them all and built myself a spreadsheet. It can be tough because not all of the schools report full numbers, some just list the firms who took grads and then seperatly list the firms that took more than three grads. But, but doing some math, you can extrapilate some pretty close estimates based on the percentage that go to each industry and the number of firms listed.

If you pull the jobs reports for people going into BB IBD the two top feeders and Chicago and Wharton, followed by Columbia. HBS sends a lot of folks to private equity as does Wharton, and Stanford sends a lot of folks tech and to start-ups.

Tuck by percentage sends the most consultants, but that is a missleading figure because the class is so small. MIT also sends a hight precentage to consulting, but has a small class. And Northwestern sends a ton to consulting, but a lot of them are to lesser firms, but they still post large classes at BCG and McK. So while HBS might send 40 people to BCG and McK, those jobs might be harder to get than one of the 30 coming from Tuck or MIT. Hard to say really. It is sort of like guess work.

I am not implying that it is a science, but it strikes me that if what you want right out of school is a banking job, go to Wharton or Chicago, if you want a consulting job go to Northwestern or Tuck, if you want to run a Fortune 500 go to HBS and if you want to run a start up go to Stanford.

 

Dan, I hate to bash your alma mater, but Yale b-school is not the #9 MBA program in the nation.

As far as the OP: Pretty good list, the important thing is that you realize most published MBA rankings are a fucking joke.

It looks like you got the top 10 right, and I'm not gonna quarrel what order any of them should be in (HWS, though, are always in the top 3). Other decent/okay b-schools are Haas, UCLA, Darden, Cornell.

 

Like Zala said "rankings are a fucking joke."

I could find you schools that are not even well ranked (by USNEWS) like Washington U, Georgetown U, Vanderbilt U, Emory U, and Notre Dame that put a lot of people into the IB/Consulting stage.

 

HBS & Stanford GSB will present you with opportunites that no other school can. That being said, Wharton is a popular third. You can't go wrong with any of those other top few, but after that, you're wasting your time. You're kidding yourself if you believe a Wash U or Georgetown MBA is going to stack up to the others in terms of the opportunities.

 
zala rulessea_ennui: this is exactly what i was talking about. most published MBA rankings, especially the WSJ's, are shit.
Which ranking do you think is the most accurate? Most people seem to think US News.
 
sea_ennui Which ranking do you think is the most accurate? Most people seem to think US News.

I don't want to quibble over who belongs exactly in which spot, but it looks like they got the top 3 right and they diddn't put anyone in the top 10 that doesn't belong there. THat's more than a lot of the other dumbass magazines can say.

 

sea_ennui didn't even post the latest rankings. They aren't much different but,

2006 Rank 2005 Rank Business School 1 2 University of Michigan (Ross) 2 1 Dartmouth College (Tuck) 3 3 Carnegie Mellon University (Tepper) 4 8 Columbia University 5 7 University of California, Berkeley (Haas) 6 4 Northwestern University (Kellogg) 7 6 University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) 8 9 University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (Kenan-Flagler) 9 5 Yale University 10 12 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan) 11 13 University of Chicago 12 17 Duke University (Fuqua) 13 11 University of Virginia (Darden) 14 14 Harvard University 15 10 University of Southern California (Marshall) 16 18 Cornell University (S.C. Johnson) 17 16 New York University (Stern) 18 15 Stanford University 19 19 University of California, Los Angeles

 

How do recruiters see Canadian schools like Rotman (Toronto), Ivy (Western), Schulich (York), Queens, UBC and McGill?

 

Just to weigh in on cdn schools, the major difference between u.s. and canada is that business undergrad programs are wildly popular in canada and these schools focus a lot of their attention on their undergrad programs.

The only school that gets BB U.S. firms recruiting for jobs on wall street is Ivey (Western). And that is mainly for the undergrad program - not the mba program.

Consulting is a different story but for IB, they're only good if you want to work in canada.

 

I went to Stanford as an undergrad. The GSB absolutely was flooded with all top firms. I don't see how a recruiter survey could rank it out of the top 10, they are all there.

 

Fit is most important, I think. Go where you feel you can enjoy your location, the other B-school students, and other aspects of your next two years of study. Rankings are not the only think to consider.

 

That being said, if you want to do banking, I would not go to those schools first. They recruit there to a degree, but not like they do the Northeast Corridor.

There's a probably a few others, that some banks go to, but I would not recommend this as the primary option.

 

can anyone go indepth in a review of CMU's Tepper School of Business? it seems like it's ranked very hilgy in some rankings and much much lower in others. I know some of our programs are ranked very highly (several in the top 10) can any recruiters give me some insight on Tepper?

 

You can't label one school as being the route to sucess. If you go to any of the top 20 schools, work hard and make morally correct decisions I am pretty sure you'll be able to retire comfortably well before 98% of the people who shape the person you are now, considering this is a group in their early to late 20's at best for the majority.

Oh and if you associate success soley with net worth, I pity you... I'm not going to preach but good looks and money don't alone bring self-worth or personal satisfaction. Your youth, will forever have an impact on your life as much as you might want to seperate youself from it or not.

 

picking the right bschool is just like picking the right college, cept there's a smaller selection...but in the end, you still want to make sure the school you choose suits your interests and personality...there may be certain schools to attend if you want the best statistical chances of getting into a specific field, but everyone has their own path, so don't get too caught up in the rankings....the other problem is the rankings jump around quite a bit year to year anyways, since a school is only as good as their most recent publications and class of graduates...

that said, the best ranking to go by is probably some combo of all the publications' rankings, w/ the exception of the WSJ cuz i think that's absolute bs...i won't say other publications' methodologies are any better, and i'm sure each publication sees the most merit in their particular method, but i have never heard of tepper and kenan-flagler mentioned in the same breath as the top tier bschools until i saw the WSJ rankings...

if u want a quick rundown of how the different publications rank the schools you're interested in, just check out wikipedia...they list the businessweek, economist, FT, forbes, USA today, US news and WSJ rankings...

 

WSJ rankings are often done without school particpation, making them less valuable than, say, BW or FT rankings. A shame, given the stellar newspaper they are released from.

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helpneededits all harvard/stanford then penn then columbia/chicago/nw IMHO but its really harvard/stanford or bust

this is one of the most retarded things I've seen on this board and that's saying quite a bit.

 

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