Surprising Results

By Geoff Gloeckler

Surprising Results

When BusinessWeek surveyed more than 85,000 graduating business majors to rank the nation's top undergraduate business programs in February, we quizzed them on many aspects of their programs. Among them: how well their business schools teach a dozen academic specialties, everything from accounting to sustainability.

The results were surprising. Among the schools with a top 50 ranking overall, the clear winner was No. 12, University of Richmond's Robins School of Business, with nine top 10 rankings, including five No. 1 spots in strategy, financial management, macroeconomics, marketing, and quantitative methods. Nine No. 1 rankings went to schools that were in the top 50 overall, but three others—in operations management, ethics, and business law—went to No. 65 , No. 95 Loyola University Chicago, and No. 96 University of Nebraska, respectively.

Our No. 1 school in the overall ranking: the University of Virginia's McIntire School of Commerce. Despite its terrific performance in the overall results, it didn't have a single No. 1 specialty ranking, although it did have three top 10 wins in strategy (2), financial management (3), and quantitative methods (10).

Methodology: In our survey, business students ranked their program's performance in each specialty on a five-point scale. We tallied the average score for each school and ranked all schools in descending order. The school with the highest score in each specialty was ranked No. 1. The specialty ranking only includes the 101 programs that received an overall ranking in BusinessWeek's "Best Undergraduate Business School" of Feb. 26. Schools not on that list were not considered.

Business Exchange related topics:
Business School
Business of Higher Education
Business Surveys