April showers bring May flowers and the U.S. News Best Graduate Programs Rankings. That’s right, the 2025 Best Business School list is live.
Once again, The Wharton School claims the top spot. Stanford GSB slipped from sharing the #1 spot last year to tying for second with Northwestern Kellogg. Chicago Booth now ranks fourth while MIT Sloan holds fifth place again.
Clear Admit Community Manager Alex Brown notes, “Congratulations to Wharton for topping the U.S. News rankings, and for Stanford and Kellogg for tying for second. These three programs were also the top three from last season (in a different order), which illustrates only small movements this season in the overall rankings across the top 30. With that said, any ranking of U.S. programs that places HBS in sixth, the same position it achieved last year, has to be called into question.”
Harvard Business School remains in sixth place, joined by Dartmouth Tuck and NYU Stern this year. Columbia Business School, which moved up three spots to #9, and Yale SOM round out the top-10.
The top 27 schools in this year’s edition (with prior years‘ rankings included for reference) are as follows:
| School | 2025 Rank | 2024 Rank | 2023-24 Rank | 2023 Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) | 1 | 1 (tie) | 3 | 1 (tie) |
| Stanford University | 2 (tie) | 1 (tie) | 6 | 3 (tie) |
| Northwestern University (Kellogg) | 2 (tie) | 3 (tie) | 2 | 3 (tie) |
| University of Chicago (Booth) | 4 | 3 (tie) | 1 (tie) | 3 (tie) |
| Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan) | 5 | 5 | 4 | 5 (tie) |
| Harvard University | 6 (tie) | 6 | 5 | 5 (tie) |
| New York University (Stern) | 6 (tie) | 7 (tie) | 10 | 12 (tie) |
| Dartmouth College (Tuck) | 6 (tie) | 10 (tie) | 6 | 11 |
| Columbia University | 9 | 12 (tie) | 11 (tie) | 8 (tie) |
| Yale University | 10 | 7 (tie) | 8 | 7 |
| University of California–Berkeley (Haas) | 11 (tie) | 7 (tie) | 11 (tie) | 8 (tie) |
| University of Virginia (Darden) | 11 (tie) | 10 (tie) | 14 | 14 |
| University of Michigan–Ann Arbor (Ross) | 13 (tie) | 12 (tie) | 8 | 10 |
| Duke University (Fuqua) | 13 (tie) | 12 (tie) | 11 (tie) | 12 (tie) |
| Cornell University (Johnson) | 15 | 15 | 15 | 15 |
| University of Texas–Austin (McCombs) | 16 | 16 (tie) | 20 | 18 |
| Emory University (Goizueta) | 17 | 18 (tie) | 17 | 21 |
| Carnegie Mellon University (Tepper) | 18 (tie) | 16 (tie) | 18 | 16 |
| Vanderbilt University (Owen) | 18 (tie) | 20 (tie) | 27 (tie) | 25 (tie) |
| University of California–Los Angeles (Anderson) | 18 (tie) | 20 (tie) | 19 | 17 |
| Georgia Institute of Technology (Scheller) | 21 | 25 | 26 | 28 |
| Indiana University (Kelley) | 22 (tie) | 20 (tie) | 22 | 22 (tie) |
| University of Washington (Foster) | 22 (tie) | 27 (tie) | 20 (tie) | 22 (tie) |
| University of Southern California (Marshall) | 24 (tie) | 18 (tie) | 15 | 19 (tie) |
| Georgetown University (McDonough) | 24 (tie) | 24 | 24 | 22 (tie) |
| Ohio State University (Fisher) | 24 (tie) | 30 (tie) | 39 | 39 |
| Washington University in St. Louis (Olin) | 24 (tie) | 26 | 37 (tie) | 29 (tie) |
U.S. News notably does not weigh graduates who are “not seeking” employment. This is by all means understandable, given that many business school students pursue entrepreneurship. However, given some recent employment trends, we wanted to take a closer look at the factors of graduates accepting employment and seeking employment.
Clear Admit Co-Founder Eliot Ingram says, “While U.S. News incorporates employment rates into its rankings, the employment stats published by business schools do not appear to be correlated with the rankings. For example, below is a chart showing the decline in MBA graduates accepting jobs as a percentage of those seeking employment for the Class of 2024 vs. the Class of 2023.”
Regarding this next chart, Ingram notes, “There is also limited to no correlation between the Class of 2024 graduates accepting jobs as a percentage of those seeking employment.”
“In addition,” Ingram says, “when we include the MBA graduates seeking employment as a percentage of total class size, the schools with higher rank have a lower percentage seeking employment. Meaning, the ‘seeking employment’ data is less representative of the employment outcomes for graduates of the top-ranked schools.”
As always, those of us here at Clear Admit encourage prospective applicants to use rankings as just one of many data points when determining which MBA program or programs might best meet your individual needs and goals, especially as those ranking the schools themselves still seem to have some tinkering to do.
Methodology for US News Best Business Schools Ranking 2025
To determine their annual rankings, U.S. News uses a combination of career placement success, student excellence and qualitative assessments by experts. Fifty percent of the evaluation is based on placement success of students seeking employment. U.S. News newly calculated both employment indicators as two-year weighted averages; meaning if the 2024 graduating class had twice as many students as the 2023 class, then its data would count twice as much. The factors break down to: employment rates at graduation (7%), employment rates three months after graduation (13%), mean starting salary and bonus (20%), and salary by profession (10%). Twenty-five percent is based on quality assessment, split evenly across peer assessment and recruiter assessment. The remaining 25% is taken from student selectivity, as seen in median GMAT and GRE scores, median undergraduate GPA, and acceptance rate.
For the 2025 rankings, U.S. News collected data in fall 2024 and early 2025, surveying 508 institutions with master’s-level business programs in the U.S. accredited by AACSB International. A total of 337 statistical survey recipients responded and U.S. News ranked 133 business schools.
