Poets&Quants 2022-2023 MBA Ranking: A Surprising Change At The Top

Wharton, which claimed the top prize in 2017 and in 2018 when the school’s MBA program tied with Harvard Business School, narrowly edged out the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. Stanford slipped to third place, while Northwestern Kellogg and Harvard rounded out the top five MBA programs in the U.S. HBS, which has ranked first seven out of a dozen Poets&Quants MBA rankings, more than any other school, continued to languish in fifth place, exactly where it was last year.

In fact, all of the Top Ten schools last year returned to the latest Top Ten in Poets&Quants 2022-2022 MBA ranking. Two of the schools improved their positions by two places: Wharton came from third place last year, while Yale School of Management rose to place eighth, up from tenth a year ago (see below chart). No. 6 was MIT’s Sloan School of Management, followed by Columbia Business School in seventh place. After No. 8 Yale is Dartmouth Tuck and UC-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business.

WASH U’S OLIN BUSINESS SCHOOL CRACKS THE TOP 25 IN THE 2022-2023 MBA RANKING

The most surprising moves up and down the list occurred outside this elite group. After a major overhaul of its MBA curriculum, Washington University’s Olin Business School cracked the Top 25 schools for the first time, placing 23rd, up six spots from last year. Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business slipped eight places to 24th from 16th after failing to be ranked by The Economist in its very last ranking.

The full-time MBA programs at two schools slipped out of the Top 25. Vanderbilt University’s and Rice University’s MBA programs tumbled just outside, falling to 27th and 29th, respectively. They were replaced by Washington University and Emory University’s Goizueta School of Business, a perennial Top 25 MBA program, that came back into the top list to rank 21st.

Also making strong gains this year are Rutgers Business School, which shot up nine places to rank 48th from 57th; the University of Rochester’s Simon Business School, which advanced seven spots to rank 30th from 37th; the University of Florida’s Hough Graduate School of Business which moved up six places to rank 42nd from 48th, and Boston University’s Questrom School of Business which gained four positions to rank 37th from 41st.

Poets&Quants 2022-2023 Top Ten MBA Programs

*Last year’s compensation reported because the school has yet to report 2022 data

POETS&QUANTS 2022-2023 MBA RANKING TRACKS THE FIVE MOST INFLUENTIAL LISTS

Led by Dean Erika James, Wharton claimed the number one spot in a year when school rankings have come under increasing fire for their inherent flaws and methodology blunders. The Poets&Quants MBA ranking is a composite of the five most influential lists of MBA programs: U.S. News, the Financial Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Economist, and Forbes. This year The Economist published. Forbes has not released a new ranking for the past three years. Businessweek‘s annual list has come under withering academic criticism over its methodology.

In truth, none of them capture the true essence of the academic experience delivered in an MBA program. But as proxies for quality, they are obsessively consumed and watched by applicants, students, alumni, and business school officials. The 2022-2023 Poets&Quants MBA ranking is a reflection of those imperfect results. Yet by combining all five of the top rankings and weighing each for its credibility and authority, the composite MBA ranking provides a more complete sense of where a school’s MBA program ultimately stands in the hotly competitive business education market.

Mashing together the five major rankings tends to significantly diminish odd results in any one ranking. When an anomaly pops up on one list due to either a faulty survey technique or flawed methodology, bringing all the data together works to suppress peculiar results in a single ranking. The composite index tones down the noise in each of these five surveys to get more directly at the real signal that is being sent. The upshot: the Poets&Quants MBA ranking remains more stable–and more reliable than most rankings published elsewhere. In fact, only one Top 50 school experienced a double-digit change in its ranking: Michigan State University’s Broad College of Business which fell 12 positions to rank 45th from 33rd last year.