Duke’s Fuqua School of Business Tops Rankings

If the goal of getting an MBA is to land a great job, then your goal might be to get into Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

The Durham, North Carolina school rose to the top of Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s annual rankings for the first time, partly on the strength of its reputation among employers. Fuqua knocked the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business out of first place.

And Harvard? HBS fell out of the top five—to sixth— for the first time in the history of the rankings (though it held on to the top spot for executive education).

The MBA rankings are based on three factors: how recruiters rate MBA hires (45 percent of the score), how graduating MBAs rate their program (45 percent) and how much the faculty publishes in leading journals (10 percent). Bloomberg BusinessWeek tweaked the formula this time, which accounts for some of the surprises in the results.

“We changed our employer survey from the last ranking cycle to better reflect the breadth of the recruiting landscape and to collect more data on how well MBAs do in the workplace. Some 1,300 recruiters were surveyed, up from 206 in 2012, and they were asked to rate schools on how well their graduates performed in the areas most important to employers.”

Recruiters gave Fuqua students high scores, and the magazine noted that they were particularly praised for being “exceptionally good at working collaboratively.”

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Harvard’s fall was also attributable to a drop in its standing among its own students—falling from No. 12 in the last student survey to No. 25, due in part to the perception the school caters to elites while neglecting women and minorities.

Among the other schools that jumped up in this year’s rankings were the Yale School of Management, up to No. 6 from No. 21, and Columbia Business School, which moved from No. 13 to No. 5.