Tuesday 10 March 2009

Wharton loses top spot in undergrad survey


McIntire School rated to have best undergrad business programme in US

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Guanyu said...

Wharton loses top spot in undergrad survey

McIntire School rated to have best undergrad business programme in US

By LEE U-WEN
10 March 2009

After three straight years in pole position, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania is no longer home to the best undergraduate business programme in the US.

That distinction - according to BusinessWeek magazine - goes to the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce, which finally made first place after being a distant second in 2006 and 2007.

BusinessWeek last week released its much-anticipated list of the top undergraduate business programmes in the US, which saw Wharton fall two notches to third place. Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, moved up from third spot to second.

What is interesting is that the McIntire programme costs US$9,490 a year - just a quarter of the tuition fees that Wharton charges (US$37,526).

Notre Dame has some of the highest tuition charges among the top 10 - US$36,847 a year.

Both McIntire and Mendoza scored well in the student survey portion of the rankings, which account for 30 per cent of the final score.

At McIntire, almost three out of four students in their senior year have job offers, thanks largely to the school’s efforts to build strong student-recruiter relationships. Over at Mendoza, administrators actively tap the school’s well-connected alumni networks to find suitable jobs and offer employment advice to graduates.

But Wharton - which still holds top position in the Financial Times Top 100 Global Master of Business Administration (MBA) rankings - outdid many schools in some areas, such as significantly higher SAT scores among business majors and much smaller class sizes in core subjects.

Wharton also fared far better on the recruiter survey than Virginia, and had a higher median starting annual salary for graduates - US$61,000, versus Virginia’s US$58,000. The tricky part, of course, given the current global downturn, is whether graduates can lock down a job in the first place.

The BusinessWeek survey found that as of January, 54 per cent of seniors who responded had not yet received a job offer, up sharply from 44 per cent last year.

To rank the programmes, BusinessWeek used nine measures, including surveys of 85,000 senior business majors and about 600 corporate recruiters, median starting salaries for graduates and the number of graduates each programme sends to top MBA programmes.

An ‘academic quality’ rating is also calculated for each business programme by combining SAT scores, student-faculty ratios, class size, percentage of students with internships and the number of hours students devote to class work.

According to BusinessWeek, student satisfaction was down overall, and institutions that succeeded in helping students navigate the job market improved their standings the most.

The complete rankings, with slide shows, videos, tables and profiles of each of the 101 ranked undergraduate programmes, can be found at www.businessweek.com/bschools.