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Wisconsin MBA Ranked 29th by U.S. News

April 2, 2008

U.S. News & World Report for the second consecutive year has ranked
the full-time MBA program of the Wisconsin School of Business 29th among all business schools in the United States, maintaining its highest ranking in that publication on record.

Among public business schools, the latest ranking, released March 28, 2008, ranks the Wisconsin MBA 12th in the U.S., up from 14th last year—a tie for the program’s best showing ever.  In the Big Ten, Wisconsin ranks 6th – the highest since 1993, when the full-time program was ranked 5th.

The new ranking evaluates the program for the class of students entering in 2005 and graduating in 2007 –the second class of students to complete the new  career-specialization-based Wisconsin MBA.

U.S. News bases its rankings on data furnished by schools, recruiters, deans and MBA program directors across a broad range of indicators:

• Placement success for the class graduating in spring 2007. This is a composite of starting salary, employment rates at graduation and three months later.
• Student selectivity for the class entering in fall 2007. This is a composite of mean score on the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT), mean GPA and proportion of applicants accepted by the school.
• Survey of corporate recruiters.
• Survey of business school deans and MBA program directors.

Based on internal measurements, the school has remained steady on key fundamentals:

• Student quality as measured by average GMAT score was 656 for students who enrolled in 2007; it was 661 in 2006.
• Student satisfaction with the level of academic leadership rose to 80 percent for second-year students in the program in spring 2007-08 school year, compared to 76 percent among second-year students in spring 2006. 
• Career placement was at 96 percent for the class of 2007, up from 95 percent for 2006 graduates. The average salary for 2007 graduates was $82,000, compared to $82,917 for 2006 graduates.

“We appreciate the significance of the U.S. News ranking as a widely disseminated indicator of our relative quality on certain measurable criteria,” said Dean Michael Knetter. “We remain committed to improving the specialized MBA model we set into motion with the 2006 graduating class. With the opening of the Grainger Hall addition and the deployment of resources from the Wisconsin Naming Gift on the horizon, I am confident we will see fundamental improvements in the quality of all our programs.”