October 23, 2003

Kellogg tops ranking of MBA programs

The Kellogg School of Management provides the world’s best MBA, according to a ranking by the Economist Intelligence Unit of the 100 best full-time MBA programs.

This is the second straight year Kellogg has earned the top ranking, based on a school’s ability to deliver the most important elements (as identified by students themselves) that students look for when taking an MBA.

U.S. schools retained their dominance of the ranking despite many of their graduates suffering from the effects of a tough job market and settling for lower graduating salaries than last year. Other schools ranked were the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth (2nd), Stanford (3rd), Fuqua at Duke (4th), Chicago (5th), Columbia (6th), Yale (7th) and Michigan (10th).

Through its annual publication Which MBA?, the Economist Intelligence Unit has surveyed the views of MBA students for 15 years, making its assessment the most student-centric of the major rankings. In addition to data supplied by the schools themselves, more than 23,000 MBA students and alumni were surveyed to give qualitative assessments of MBA programs.

Two schools, Harvard and Wharton, declined to forward the Economist Intelligence Unit questionnaire to students and alumni and thus were not included for lack of data.

The Economist Intelligence Unit ranks full-time MBA programs on their ability to deliver the following elements to students, weighting each according to the average importance given to it by students surveyed over the past five years:

• to open new career opportunities and/or further current career

• personal development and educational experience

• to increase salary

• the potential to network