The Economist Ranks Booth Number One

by kfaircloth Sep 24, 2010

It’s officially fall, and you know what that means: falling leaves, Halloween candy, and business school rankings are all on their way. Just this week, the Economist released their ninth-annual business school rankings. How did your target schools fare?

The University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business took the number one spot, following by Dartmouth’s Tuck, Berkeley’s Haas, Harvard Business School, and IESE Business School. Rounding out the top 10 were IMD, Stanford, Wharton, the HEC School of Management in Paris, and York University’s Schulich School of Business.

Several factors pushed Booth to the top of the list. First of all, their career services were ranked the highest of any program globally, and they placed grads in all sectors examined by the Economist. That’s a powerful pitch in a still-tough job market. The school also has a good bit of cash on hand, thanks to a $300 million donation made in 2008 by alum David Booth. Students are also positive about their overall experience, the writers report.

So how did the Economist arrive at these rankings? Here’s how the magazine describes its methodology: The Economist ranks full-time programmes on their ability to provide students with the things that they themselves cite as most important. It weights each element according to the average importance given to it by students surveyed over the past five years. That means 4 factors typically dominate the selection process:

• – opening of new career opportunities and/or furthering of current career
• – personal development and educational experience
• – increase in salary
• – potential to network

The Economist reports most students want to see more opportunities to network with alumni. In sorting through 19,000 questionnaires’ worth of comments, they found students repeatedly calling for more opportunities to network with alumni.

Finally, a caveat: The Economist based these rankings on information about the class of 2009. It’ll be interesting to see the Bloomberg Businessweek findings in November, which draw on data from the class of 2010.