b-school rankings

these are the business school rankings i have been able to come up using the most sophisticated and accurate of methods: visiting internet message boards. most of this has been culled from one posting (from engineer slacker turned MBA) with a little tweaking from myself.

tier 1: harvard / stanford
tier 1b: wharton (upenn)
tier 2: chicago / columbia / sloan (mit) / kellogg (northwestern)
tier 2b: tuck (dartmouth) / haas (uc berkeley)
tier 3: ross (michigan) / stern (nyu) / fuqua (duke) / darden (virginia) / yale / anderson (ucla)
tier 3b: tepper (carnegie mellon) / kenan-flagler (north carolina) / mccombs (ut austin) / johnson (cornell)

each tier is a group of schools that are roughly equivilent in prestige with the tier b schools being almost as good, but just off of the group of schools above it. my ranking methodology is based purely on the business schools' reputation among recruiters as evidenced by the pedigree of the companies that go there to recruit. what about academic rigor and all that jazz? this is business school. let's not fool ourselves into the idea of education being the end goal; the end goal of an MBA is to obtain a job that you otherwise would not be able to secure without the degree. anyone who thinks otherwise is going to business school for the wrong reasons.

in tier one, we have harvard and stanford with wharton slightly behind the leading two in prestige. chicago, columbia, sloan, and kellogg round out the rest of the magnificent seven (m7) schools. non m7 schools are still good schools that have varying degrees of national reputation--obviously more so for tier 2b and 3 schools than for tier 3b schools. business schools that were not listed are schools that probably more know as a regional school than a nationally known business program.

what does this mean and how does one use this information? stay tuned...