Bloomberg Businessweek’s biennial MBA program ranking for 2014 was released Tuesday. And while Wharton triumphed over its usual competitors, it still took home second place.
For the first time since Businessweek began publishing MBA rankings in 1988, Duke’s Fuqua School of Business was given the top spot. Harvard Business School fell to eighth place, leaving it out of the top five for the first time.
That leaves Wharton as the only school to have been consistently ranked in the top five, including a first place ranking from 1994 to 2000. Wharton jumped from third to second — the school’s highest ranking since 2006. The University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, which has held the number one spot since 2006, fell to number three.
Businessweek’s methodology included student and employer surveys, which each comprised 45 percent of schools’ scores. The remaining 10 percent was calculated based on each school’s intellectual capital, which was measured by counting the articles published by faculty in 20 top business journals over the past five years and dividing that by the number of full-time faculty members. Wharton took first place in the employer survey, which significantly boosted the school’s score.
Wharton’s performance varies across business school rankings. Some rankings consider post-MBA salaries, while others survey deans and MBA directors.
Wharton has had a strong showing in many MBA rankings this year, including a tie for first in U.S. News and World Report’s list and a fourth-place ranking from Forbes. Internationally, the Financial Times ranked Wharton in fourth place, while The Economist gave the school 11th place. Wharton Dean Geoffrey Garrett is satisfied with Wharton’s showing in the many rankings this year.
“It doesn’t matter which rankings you choose — and they all use very different methodologies — Wharton is always at or very near the top,” Garrett said via email. “We must be doing a lot of things right.”
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