Published: September 24, 2019
Chicago Booth Lands Top Honors on Forbes Best U.S. Business School Ranking
For the first time in Forbes’ history of ranking U.S. business schools, the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business took the number one spot.
Booth’s meteoric rise followed the same path as Wharton did in the last ranking—both jumped from 7th to 1st in their respective rankings, and Wharton was also new to the leading position. Forbes’ biennial ranking focuses primarily on return on investment for MBA graduates. The organization surveyed more than 100 schools and 17,500 alumni from the Class of 2014 regarding their pre- and post-MBA compensation, career choice, and location. Responses received from 25 percent of those alumni determined schools’ ranks in terms of five-year MBA gain, which Forbes defines as “the net cumulative amount the typical alumni would have earned after five years by getting their M.B.A. versus staying in their pre-M.B.A. career.” They did exclude programs if their response rate was under 15%, or if graduates actually lost money after five years. (In 2017, there were 100 schools in the ranking; this year, there are only 61.)
Booth landed top honors with a $94,400 five-year MBA gain, coming in $3,600 above the next highest school, Stanford GSB. While Stanford GSB’s Class of 2014 grads reported the highest total compensation of any other school—$250,000 five years post-MBA—the high cost of living in the Bay Area affected their net gains. Meanwhile, Chicago Booth’s Class of 2014 reported reaching an annual salary of $245,000. Two thirds of the Booth class had entered the lucrative fields of finance or consulting, with McKinsey, Bain, BCG, Accenture and Amazon scooping up most graduates.
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