Harvard Business School has topped the list for the third straight year in Bloomberg Businessweek’s annual ranking of graduate business schools.
The claim for the USA’s best MBA program sees a shake-up in the top five rankings with The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the MIT Sloan School of Management jumping into the second and third spots displacing Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth from the top five programs.
MIT (Sloan), Chicago (Booth) and Stanford round out the top five.
Each school’s ranking is based on surveys of recruiters, alumni, and students, as well as recent graduates’ success at landing jobs and securing high starting wages.
In other findings, California’s Stanford Graduate School of Business students leads the list in terms of having the highest pay rates immediately after graduation.
Columbia Business School produces the largest share of MBAs that immediately get to work in the financial services industry and Brigham Young University Marriott School of Business MBA graduates tend to go into tech in Silicon Valley more than the expected Stanford or the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley.
Two out of every five graduates from The Rady School of Management at the University of California at San Diego end up taking a job in Asia.
Related reading: Which University Produces The World’s Highest Paid MBA Graduates?
Bloomberg Businessweek has ranked full-time MBA programs in the US since 1988.
The Top 10 MBA Schools are as follows:
| Rank | School | Employer Rank (35%) | Alumni Survey Rank (30%) | Student Survey Rank (15%) | Salary Rank (10%) | Job Placement Rank (10%) | Ranking Index Score | |
| – | 1 | Harvard | 1 | 3 | 18 | 2 | 35 | 100.0 |
| ↑ | 2 | Pennsylvania (Wharton) | 4 | 11 | 17 | 3 | 6 | 91.2 |
| ↑ | 3 | MIT (Sloan) | 2 | 20 | 22 | 6 | 20 | 90.0 |
| – | 4 | Chicago (Booth) | 3 | 35 | 10 | 4 | 8 | 90.0 |
| ↓ | 5 | Stanford | 20 | 1 | 16 | 1 | 62 | 89.8 |
| ↓ | 6 | Duke (Fuqua) | 6 | 10 | 11 | 11 | 29 | 89.4 |
| ↓ | 7 | Dartmouth (Tuck) | 8 | 7 | 35 | 9 | 4 | 89.2 |
| ↑ | 8 | Northwestern (Kellogg) | 7 | 18 | 14 | 5 | 10 | 87.9 |
| ↑ | 9 | Columbia | 5 | 26 | 15 | 8 | 22 | 87.1 |
| ↓ | 10 | Rice (Jones) | 14 | 4 | 12 | 18 | 58 | 85.8 |
