Best MBA Schools

When you are going to spend $100,000 on a two-year MBA degree, it pays you to make sure that you get it from a top college. Almost everyone can name one or two most popular business schools - these include Harvard Business School, made famous in books such as "What they don't teach you at Harvard Business School", and Stanford Graduate School of Business. However, for an average student looking to get a business degree, it is hard to come up with the top ten MBA schools in US without looking it up somewhere. That is why we present to you this list of the seven best MBA schools in the US. All the following colleges have come up tops in the rankings of magazines such as Financial Times, The Economist and the Business Week.

Harvard Business School When someone talks about the best business school in the world, they are most likely talking about Harvard. The question of the best B-school is a tough one, with no objective criteria to make the judgment, but it is widely agreed that Harvard is definitely one of the best B-schools in the world. With alumni that includes such luminaries as George W. Bush, Jeffrey Immelt, Meg Whitman, Robert Kraft, Ratan Tata, Robert McNamara, the reputation is well-deserved.

Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania Popularly known just as Wharton, it is one of the worlds oldest business schools, established in 1881. Wharton offers B.S. and M.B.A; it also has an Ph.D. program, apart from other diploma programs. Though the student to faculty ratio of this school is pretty high at 17:1, the faculty here is notable for being the world's most cited and published among all business schools.

Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth University Ranked the top b-school in the world by the Economist magazine, Tuck school of Business is one of the six Ivy League business schools ( the other five are: Harvard, Wharton, Columbia Business School, Samuel Curtis Johnson School of Management at Cornell, and Yale School of Management).

Stanford University Graduate School of Business This school offers a MBA program, the ten-month long Sloan master's program, and a Ph.D. program along with other joint degrees in sciences etc with other schools at Stanford University.

Columbia Business School of the Columbia University Located in Manhattan, New York City, the school has the rare distinction of being associated with as many as thirteen Nobel Prize winners in Economics. Getting into Columbia School of Business can be a tough nut to crack with the school having an acceptance rate of only 15%.

University of Chicago, Booth School of Business Ranked second by Economist, it was known as University of Chicago Graduate School of Business before 2008, when it was renamed following the grant of an $300 million endowment by alumnus David G. Booth. The school has two additional campuses in Singapore and London, apart from two campuses in Chicago, USA.

Haas School of Management, University of California at Berkeley Apart from a full-time MBA program, the school also offers Evening/Weekend MBA program, a Ph.D. program, undergraduate courses, Master of Financial Engineering program and an Executive Education program.

Harvard Business School

Harvard Business School (HBS) is the graduate business school of Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. The school offers a large full time MBA program, doctoral programs, and many executive education programs.

HBS is consistently ranked among the foremost business school in the world, its rated #1 among the U.S. business schools by U.S. business schools by U.S. News & World Report, #1 by the QS Global 200 Business Schools Report, #2 by Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and #1 for Forbes.

According to the school, the new MBAs of 2012 are now enjoying median base salaries of $125,000, and three-quarters have also received signing bonuses of $20,000. A fifth of the class also benefits from what is graded referred to as “other guaranteed compensation” of more than $25,000. And some new graduates are doing substantially better. One joining a private equity firm, for example, had nailed a base starting salary of $200.000, and all this in a class where the average length of work experience was less than four years.

Wharton Business School

The Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania offers graduate programs in these departments and concentrations: accounting, actuarial science, e-commerce, entrepreneurship, finance, general management, health care administration, human resources management, insurance, international business, marketing, operations management, public policy, real estate, and quantitative analysis and operations research, Its tuition is full time: $57,026 per year. At graduation, 79.7 percent of graduates of the full time program are employed.

The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania was the U.S.’s first business school and now has the largest alumni network in the country.

Admission
The MBA program at University of Pennsylvania (Wharton) admits students who have an average GMAT score of 725, which is drastically higher than the average for all Graduate Business Schools.

In addition to graduate business degrees, students can pursue joint degrees, including an accelerated M.B.A/J.D. degree in three years in conjunction with the Penn Law School; an M.B.A. /M.A. degree in areas like Management and International Studies, Social Change, and Environmental Studies; and joint degree programs through the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Students can also earn a Ph.D. at Wharton, typically in four to five years, in nine areas including Ethics & Legal Studies, Statistics, and Applied Economics.

Tuck School of Business

Tuck School of Business, part of the prestigious Dartmouth College, is the oldest graduate school of business in the world (founded in 1900). It offers only one degree programme, the full-time MBA, and claims this gives it added focus. The school is noted for general management, teamwork, close student–faculty relations and the Tuck experience of a small residential programme in a beautiful, if slightly remote, semi-rural setting. Almost all work is done in assigned teams and the ability to succeed in collaborative working is essential.

Admission
The MBA program at Dartmouth College (Tuck) (NH) admits students who have an average GMAT score of 719, which is drastically higher than the average for all Graduate Business Schools, and an average incoming GPA of 3.5, which is far higher than the average for all Graduate Business Schools.

Student Body
The total enrollment at Dartmouth College (Tuck) (NH) is 280, which is slightly more than the average for all Graduate Business Schools. The average work experience of a Dartmouth College (Tuck) (NH) MBA student is 5 years.

Stanford University

Stanford University is a private institution that was founded in 1885. It has a total undergraduate enrollment of 7,063, its setting is suburban, and the campus size is 8,180 acres. It utilizes a quarter based academic calendar. Stanford University’s ranking in the 2014 edition of Best Colleges is National Universities, 5. Its tuition and fees are $43,245 (2013-14).

Stanford University’s pristine campus is located in California’s Bay Area, about 30 miles from San Francisco. Stanford offers a wide range of student organizations, including the Stanford Pre-Business Association and Stanford Solar Car Project, which designs, builds, and races a solar car every two years. The Stanford Cardinals are well known for the traditional “Big Game” against Cal, an annual football competition that awards the Stanford Axe- a sought after trophy- to the victor. Stanford also has successful programs in tennis and golf. Only freshman are required to live on campus, but students are guaranteed housing for all four years and most choose to remain on campus. Greek life at Stanford represents approximately 10 percent of the student body.

Columbia Business School

The Business School at Columbia University offers graduate programs in these departments and concentrations: accounting, consulting, economics, entrepreneurship, finance, general management, health care administration, human resources management, international business leadership, marketing, production/operations management, portfolio management, real estate, and quantitative analysis/statistics and operations research. Its tuition is full-time: $58,384 per year and executive: $2,688 per credit. At graduation, 77.0 percent of graduates of the full-time program are employed.

At Columbia Business School, graduate students can pursue a full-time M.B.A., executive M.B.A., Ph.D., and Master of Science in Marketing or Financial Economics. Regardless of their degree focus, students can take courses offered across Columbia University’s academic divisions as electives, which make up more than half the M.B.A. curriculum. For students who prefer a broader education, dual degrees are offered at 10 other schools at Columbia University, varying from a master’s in urban planning to a dental degree.

In the core M.B.A. classes, groups of about 60 students take all first-year classes together – an attempt by the school to foster a sense of community. Students can check out about 100 graduate organizations, catch frequent presentations by business leaders, and research in more than 20 centers on campus, like the Center for Decision Sciences and the Center on Japanese Economy and Business. Graduates students may live in university housing but are not guaranteed a spot.

University of Chicago

The University of Chicago Booth School of Business is ranked second by Economist. It was known as The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business before 2008, when it was renamed following the grant of an $300 million endowment by alumnus David G. Booth. The school has two additional campuses in Singapore and London, apart from two campuses in Chicago, USA.

Students in the Full-time MBA, Executive MBA, and Part-time MBA programs can concentrate in one or more areas, although some concentrations’ required coursework may necessitate schedule modifications for students enrolled in the part-time program. The areas are:

-          Accounting
-          Economics
-          Finance
-          General Management
-          Human resource management
-          International business
-          Marketing management
-          Operations management
-          Strategic management