造福CDers:Poets&Quants’Top 100 U.S. MBA Programs of 2012

三昧

在CD获益良多。本人在北美，也正在申请中。时差党比较方便查到一些国外论坛的资料，现在分享上来造福更多同学。以下文章和排名表来自Poets&Quants网站，一个专业MBA排名和辅导的网站。这份排名综合参考了五个最权威的MBA排名机构的评分，比较有借鉴。
排名表的密码如下：不好意思设置了回复可见是不想帖子沉了。

密码是：800

同时我也将搬运文章后面的一些评论供大家参考。
For the third consecutive year, Harvard Business Schoolremained at the top of Poets&Quants’ 2012 composite ranking of the business schools with the best full-time MBA programs. Harvard was followed by the No. 2 Stanford Graduate School of Business, No. 3 the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, and No. 4 the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.
It was the exact same lineup of top four business schools that made our 2011 list of the best 100 MBA programs in the U.S.
Among the top 25 business schools, the biggest news is that Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management is beginning to show improvement under Dean Sally Blount who took over the school in July of 2010. Her new leadership team has turned the business school upside down, rethinking every aspect of the MBA program and the entire institution. Kellogg rose two places to finish fifth this year, jumping over MIT Sloan and Columbia.
COLUMBIA BUSINESS SCHOOL WAS THE ONLY SCHOOL IN THE TOP 25 TO DROP TWO PLACES IN RANK
No. 7 Columbia, meantime, was the only school in the top 25 to fall two places. The school’s weaker position is largely due to lower levels of graduate satisfaction with the MBA program. MBA graduates complained about the uneven quality of teaching in the first-year core curriculum, the university resources devoted to the business school, the outreach by career services to companies other than consulting and banking, and the acceptance of ‘connected’ applicants. “Too many students are ‘sons of,’” claimed one MBA graduate. “They are plain dumb but got in because dad or mom wrote a big check to the school. This is not acceptable.”
Those issues have been compounded by the decline of Wall Street, a steep 19% fall in MBA applications during the 2011-2012 academic year, and criticism of Dean R. Glenn Hubbard’s leadership of the school. Some students believe that Hubbard, whose credibility was questioned during a confrontational interview in the Academy Award-winning documentary Inside Job, has been a largely absent dean due to his involvement as an economic adviser to Mitt Romney during the Presidential election.
Unlike other rankings, the Poets&Quants composite list combines the latest five most influential business school rankings in the world: Bloomberg BusinessWeek, The Economist, The Financial Times, Forbes, and U.S. News & World Report. Instead of merely averaging the five, each ranking is separately weighted to account for our view of their authority and credibility. (The BusinessWeek, Forbes and U.S. News lists are given a weight of 25% each, while the FT is given a 15% weight and The Economist is given a 10% weight).
Combining the five most influential rankings doesn’t eliminate the flaws in each system, but it does significantly diminish them. When an anomaly pops on one list due to either faulty survey technique or biased methodology, bringing all the data together tends to suppress it. So 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. Our list of the top 50 non-U.S. MBA programs for 2012 is published separately.
A COMPOSITE INDEX THAT IS NOT UNLIKE NATE SILVER’S APPROACH TO ANALYSIS
This is not unlike the prescient analysis that Nate Silver, the New York Times blogger, brought to the recent Presidential election. By smartly analyzing each political poll and averaging the results across all of them, Silver came to a greater truth than could be revealed by any single poll. When the election was done, he was pretty much the only outside observer who had accurately predicted the popular vote and the electoral vote outcome.
The index numbers accompanying the rank of each school allows you to assess how far above or behind one school is versus another. This is especially helpful because in some cases there is no meaningful difference between the schools. Yet, some of these rankings, including The Financial Times, still fail to provide the underlying index numbers that lead to a numerical rank.
Consider Southern Methodist University’s Cox School, ranked 47th this year with an index score of 43.9, versus UC-Irvine’s Merage, ranked right behind it at 48th, with an index score of 43.6. The difference between those two schools, separated by all of .3 on our index, can not be truly captured by a ranking. In terms of their market reputations, they are equal–based on this rankings result.
THERE’S ALWAYS A NEED TO LOOK BEYOND THE RANKINGS TO DECIDE IF A SCHOOL IS RIGHT FOR YOU
If you intend to make your professional career in Dallas, SMU is obviously the better bet. The degree not only would carry more prestige in the Texas area, the school’s alumni network would be better connected there as well. And if you intend to work in Southern California, UC-Irvine would likely be the better choice. To choose either of these two schools on the basis of their ranking would be foolhardy.
On the other hand, we believe the index numbers tend to undervalue differences in the status of many of these schools. Though Harvard leads Stanford by a substantial 1.1 score on the index, some observers may be tempted to believe this is so close as to be a tie. It isn’t. With its vastly greater resources in star faculty, its more impressive alumni network, and outrageously well-endowed campus, we believe Harvard is not merely number one: It has a commanding lead over any other school on the list. There may be plenty of reasons why you wouldn’t want to attend Harvard (ranging from the large size of the school and the core classes to the more outwardly ambitious nature of the students), but status and prestige isn’t one of them.
Among the top 50 business schools, the big winners were Washington University’s Olin School in St. Louis, up 11 places to finish 29th from 41st last year, the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School and the University of Washington’s Foster School, both up seven places to rank 27th and 33rd, respectively.
THE BIG WINNER AMONG THE TOP 50: WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY’S OLIN SCHOOL
The Olin School’s rise in our composite ranking is largely the result of significantly improved graduate satisfaction scores in BusinessWeek’s latest ranking as well as its inclusion on the 2012 Financial Times list. The school’s graduate satisfaction rank jumped to 15 this year from 31st in 2010, pushing its overall BusinessWeek rank up nine places to 31st from 40. And after not making The Financial Times’ 2011 ranking, Olin reappeared on its global top 100 list at a U.S. rank of 30th earlier this year.
Schools with more significant movement on this year’s list tend to be those that weren’t ranked by all five players and then won that distinction this year. Both Carlson and Foster fall into that category, making The Financial Times 2012 list after not being on the year-earlier ranking. Carlson and Foster also improved their standing on The Economist’s ranking.
The top 50 school that suffered the biggest fall? Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business, which slid 18 places to rank 47th this year from 29th in 2011. It was the largest single decline of any school in our top 100 this year. The reason: A change in methodology by BusinessWeek largely prompted by the school’s surprising surge in that magazine’s ranking to 12th in 2010. The change in how the magazine calculates its recruiter scores led to a fall to 29th this year.
AFTER A STEEP DROP IN THE RANKINGS, ‘WE CONTINUE TO MOVE FORWARD’
Cox took the fall with grace. “We continue to move forward, our employers are still ‘wildly enthusiastic’ about the graduates they hire…and our graduating students are still very satisfied with the education and experience they have received at SMU Cox,” says Marci Armstrong, associate dean of graduate programs at Cox. “In short, the only thing that’s changed is the methodology.”
Cox, however, also fell two places in both The Financial Times and The Economist rankings this year to 50th and 42nd, respectively, among U.S. schools. But it did gain three spots in the U.S. News ranking, moving up to 54th from 57th.
Indeed, that is often the case. Each of the five most influential rankings use different metrics which result in different results. It’s common that a school will rise in one ranking that might track starting salaries and GMAT scores and fall in another that measures graduate and corporate recruiter sentiment. And the biggest changes always tend to occur as you move farther down the list of the top 100. That’s because the differences among those schools can be slight and many of them are not ranked by all five major sources.
BIGGEST CHANGES OCCUR NEAR THE BOTTOM OF THE LIST OF THE TOP 100
Generally, the most dramatic changes this year occurred to schools that were ranked outside the top 50. Texas Christian University’s Neeley School of Business in Fort Worth, Texas, had the largest single rise, up 35 places to finish 59th from 94th in 2011. That’s because last year only U.S. News ranked the school, putting it at 70th in the U.S. This year, however, Neeley found its way on both the BusinessWeek and The Economist lists, coming in at a respectable 46th on the BW ranking and 39th among U.S. schools on The Economist ranking. The school also improved its U.S. News ranking by three places.
One thing that is worth pointing out is that although we are naming the top 100 schools here, you’ll notice that toward the bottom of the list many of the schools have received a ranking from only one source. That means four of the most influential rankings failed to mention the school. We consider this valuable information for an applicant because obviously a school that only gains recognition from one of the five most influential sources of information on the best full-time MBA programs isn’t going to have as good a reputation than the schools that make at least three or more of the five rankings. So keep that in mind as you use the list to narrow your search for the best programs.

三昧

一下是对这个排名网友的一些评论，大部分应该都是国外的。有些评论很有意思很有借鉴价值，搬运过来供大家参考。希望此贴不要沉了，更多人看到。祝大家都收到自己心仪的offer! 加油！

Sali （楼主注：一发言网友的网名，以下同此）
Yale SOM has money, new great dean, brand, and location, and yet it goes down by all rankings. Frankly, I am not surprised at all, as I visited the school, my impression wasn't that good. in opposite, you will notice the improvement and passion among cornell johnson team and students, the only new thing they got is an outsider new dean, yes he is a famous and comes from super school, but to be honest he is not like Mr Sydner of Yale, thus, cornell is going up year after year. I assume that cornell will be the ivy's replacement of columbia.
anderson
I think that Duke is going to usurp Columbia's spot. It's doing remarkably well (in spite of being underrated by the economist), but more importantly, every Fuqua grad that I have ever encountered has great things to say about the school and the Duke brand in general. As for SOM, give it some more time, it's still a relatively young school (although surprisingly enough it's not too much younger than Fuqua). Prospects seem to be bleak for Columbia though!

Sali
undoubtedly, Duke Fuqua! I visited Yale, Cornell, MIT Sloan, Haas at Berkeley, and Duke. I talked to students and did sit on classes. all of them are great, but it is about comparing the impression and the previous perception I have. Yale was the best on my imagination before the visit. I met many Yale Law grad, they are super smart, thus I got the impression that everyone and every program at Yale should be on the same level. But to be honest, the school of management needs a lot to be comparable to the law school in all aspects. I heard that the mother university (Yale) aren't really passionate about having a (business school), and therefore the school didn't really got the needed attention, though they have a good portion of the endowment But again, this is just my impression, if you know what I mean, Yale as a name is head to head to Harvard, and as a sequence of this thought, I guess many people (mistakenly) got the idea of comparing SOM to HBS. when you come to ground and see students, lectures, campus, the attitude in general, it is really behind many top school. you get to feel the business school and mba students at lower ranked school. as I said, all the schools I visited I found good people and environment BUT at Duke I felt ALIVE! down to earth students, global, you see many type of faces, the attitude in general is very high and optimistic. students in MIT are so humble and smart, but I didn't get the chimestry there. Haas is strange, I don't know why but, I left early!. if I could rank my preference based on my visit: Duke, Cornell, MIT, Haas, and Yale, respectively.

please note: every personality is different, thus what I like is not necessary what you should like, you have to visit the campus to get your own feeling, what I am writing here is my own impression. (note: I am an international student from eastern europe )

SpringboksJon86 （楼主注：他的comment很有意思）
If it might be helpful to some, the following is my subjective MBA application experience in no particular order (South African citizen but US educated, Green card holder, FL resident).

1. Kellogg: Visited and subsequently interviewed (waiting for R1 decision) - School has a lot of energy and the student body is very engaged. There are a LOT of students here and the 1 YR MBA seems to be attracting a lot of interest. I wasn't too impressed with the facilities though and a majority of the students i spoke to were focused on a career in consulting. The students I met were extremely friendly and engaging. Great rugby club on campus as well and quite a few Afrikaners (white South Africans) as well.

2. Ross: Visited but decided not to apply. The facilities are pretty decent and I met some interesting people there. Somehow felt the students weren't too enthusiastic about the school. In fact, one asked me what schools I was considering, and mentioned that he himself would have gone to XYZ if admitted. I admire his honesty, but it also left me feeling that even the students themselves may not consider it a top school.

3. Darden: I visited the school on a beautiful spring morning. It's a terrific place and a great school steeped in rich history and tradition; a proper university setting. The students were very outgoing and friendly. But in speaking to them, it was clear that the workload was quite stressful and demanding. It's definitely a bootcamp, eh! I decided not to apply, but left with the feeling that it was an awesome place to spend two years.

4. Cornell: Visited, interviewed and waiting for the R1 decision. Cornell easily exceeded my expectations and was a wonderful place. I visited in late spring, but am well aware that it's a different beast in winter. The students were enthusiastic about the school, and I found the facilities to be excellent. Unlike some others who posted here, I did not sense that unbridled excitement from the student body.

5. Yale: Unlike my experience at Cornell, I left underwhelmed by my experience here. Perhaps, I had extremely high expectations. The students liked the integrated curriculum and the opportunity to take more electives. But many said the recruiters still did not understand / appreciate the integrated curriculum etc. I left with the feeling that somehow the students felt slightly mislead about the value of the integrated curriculum. I did not feel the energy here and decided not to apply.

6. Fuqua: Great lesson in never judge a book by its cover! I wasn't very enthusiastic about this school, but decided to visit anyway because I needed a another top school to apply to after eliminating Yale from my list. I visited in early fall and completely fell in love with the school. When I told one of the students i was a big rugby fan, he immediately put me in-touch with some other rugby players / fans mostly from Europe and Latin America. We immediately hit if off, and SA had just beaten England in the cricket test series, so there was some great banter back and forth as well. It was like I knew these guys forever. The facilities were also excellent and above all it was the human connections. I did not expect to like Fuqua because I imagined the place very differently. It's definitely a very diverse and vibrant atmosphere. Applied, interviewed and waiting for R1 decisions.

To be honest, I know Kellogg is ranked higher and a better brand than Fuqua. But I'm sure it will not be such a straightforward decision if I can convert both. Having lived in FL, the NC weather is not so bad and opportunity to golf almost round the year. I'd be happy to attend Cornell as well, but just not as much as the other two.

I recommend you visit the schools and make up your own minds about it. If I just went with my gut feeling, then I might have missed out on a great opportunity. Also, don't be afraid of taking a position and trusting your gut instincts. If you don't feel like you fit somewhere or are going to be happy there, they don't make the mistake of applying simply because of the rankings. Not many back in South Africa have heard of Cornell or Fuqua or even Kellogg (to a lesser extent), but everyone knows Harvard and Oxford and Cambridge. But that doesn't influence my view and how I look at things. I got to do what's in my best interests. Sharp-Sharp!

chasexix

谢谢分享！！！！

wentaow2008

thanks for sharing

sozy

Thanks..

janelee1998

Thank you!

gtym7

呵呵~帖子顶了C和D~~踩了Y。。。

daisyliuliu

多谢分享！

alpabeta

Xiexie

狼来也

谢谢分享