Best Executive MBA Programs By Region: Northeast

It’s the home of the Ivy League, so why shouldn’t the nation’s top Executive MBA program be found in the Northeast?

Unsurprisingly, Ivy Exec’s top pick overall is the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Not only the best in the region, Wharton is also the best in the nation with some of the highest marks where it counts when it comes to executives pursuing higher education: career advancement and average salary increase post-degree.

EMBA program participants at Wharton can expect, on average, a 60-percent increase in salary after completing the program. While the total cost and tuition of attending Wharton is around $181,500, if you’re an executive earning $150,000 before attending Wharton, your post-grad salary boost of an average $90,000 will have your degree paying for itself in just over two years.

While career advancement might be the top priority, another option in the Northeast topped our charts for having the best curriculum, beating out even Wharton for that metric. The MIT Sloan School of Management came in at number five on our rankings. In addition to its impressive marks for curriculum, Sloan comes within a stone’s throw of Wharton for its ample return on investment. 57-percent of EMBA students at the Sloan School receive a promotion during their time in the program. With a cheaper price tag than Wharton at $153,000 and a shorter program duration of 20 months to Wharton’s 24, MIT’s program presents a compelling argument for its value. Also, compared to Wharton, MIT has a much greater diversity of learning experiences available to its students. While 100-percent of learning at Wharton is classroom-based, MIT’s program divides its modules in thirds: one-third in the classroom, one-third in a lecture hall and one-third in experiential situations.

Coming in right behind MIT at number six on our Ivy Exec rankings is the Yale School of Management in New Haven, Connecticut. Of the top three EMBA programs in the Northeast, Yale offers the best male-to-female cohort ratio with some 41-percent of the average class made up of women. Yale also offers the smallest class size of the top three Northeast EMBA programs with only 63 students per year—about half the size of the classes at MIT and Wharton.

Number seven on our Ivy Exec rankings is the Columbia Business School. With a shorter-than-average 20-month program and an average 58-percent salary boost after graduation, Columbia offers a strong return on investment for its $163,940 price tag. While it may be in one of the biggest cities in the world—a certain networking advantage for an EMBA student—it has one of the smallest class sizes among the top programs in the Northeast. With only 45 students per graduating class, there are always enough faculty resources to go around.

With a slightly smaller post-grad salary boost of 42-percent, the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York offers applicants the flexibility of rolling admissions deadlines. While Cornell has a medium average class size of around 75 students per year, the school has an impressively large and strong alumni network of some 13,500 executives around the world. With a cohort made up of business leaders with an average 13 years of experience, a Cornell EMBA student can more than adequately draw on the expertise and insight of his or her peers. However, despite landing at number 11 on our Ivy Exec rankings, Cornell retains the price tag of a top ten school with an average total tuition of $163,940.

A New York school with even higher tuition and a lower average return on investment than Cornell is the Stern School of Business at New York University. Number 12 on our overall EMBA program rankings, Stern costs an average of $170,200 but participants typically see only an average post-degree salary boost of 36-percent. However, with a campus right in the heart of New York City, the school is an easy commute for many business leaders and makes for many top-notch networking opportunities.

With a multitude of EMBA programs in the top tier of our IvyExec rankings, Northeast-based executives seeking higher education—particularly those based in the New York and Philadelphia area—have a wide variety of schools to choose from without sacrificing on name recognition or prestige.