Oct. 12 (Bloomberg) -- The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business is the best in the U.S., according to a Business Week magazine 2006 survey of the best business schools.

Chicago ranked second in Business Week's last survey, in 2004, and took first place because Dean Edward Snyder added ``weekly breakfasts with students'' and ``improved support services,'' the magazine said in a news release today.

``What's new is that we've been more clear in our discussion with students about getting the most out of the MBA experience -- taking tough courses and working with their peers to push for the best possible solutions to the challenges they encounter,'' Stacey Kole, deputy dean for Chicago's full-time MBA program, said in a phone interview today.

Chicago was followed by the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania; Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, which was ranked first in the 2004 poll; Harvard Business School and the University of Michigan's Stephen M. Ross School of Business.

Applications to business programs are increasing, according to the Graduate Management Admission Council, in McLean, Virginia, which administers the standardized test known as the GMAT that most business schools require for admission. As a result, rankings are increasingly influential in students' choices of schools.

The Princeton Review, in its rankings last week, rated Harvard University's MBA program the toughest to get into, the Wharton School as the best total experience and Stanford University as offering the best prospects of finding a good job after graduation.

Other Rankings

Among other rankings of business schools, U.S. News & World Report ranked Harvard No. 1; the Wall Street Journal/Harris Interactive survey put the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business in first place, and the Economist Intelligence Unit, a unit of the Economist Group, in London, called the IESE Business School at the University of Navarra, in Spain, the best in the world.

Founded in 1898, Chicago's graduate business school enrolls 1,100 full-time students and another 2,000 in Executive MBA program. It has been ranked in the top 10 of Business Week's survey since 1990.

Business Week has published its survey of best schools since 1988. The rankings are based on student assessment of their MBA programs in categories ranging from teaching to career services, the magazine said.

Student Questionnaire

This year, the magazine, a unit of McGraw Hill Inc. in New York, sent a 50-question survey to corporate recruiters and 16,565 Class of 2006 MBA graduates at 100 schools in North America, Europe and Asia. About 56 percent or 9,298 students, responded to the questionnaire, the same portion which answered the 2004 survey, the magazine said.

The MBA program at Stanford, near Palo Alto, California, was ranked sixth in the Business Week survey, followed by the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge; the Haas School at University of California, Berkeley; Duke University's Fuqua School of Business in Durham, North Carolina, and Columbia University in New York.

The survey, published on Business Week's Web site today, noted that Chicago's students like the ``option to tailor the curriculum to their interests'' and said that while the cost of living in Chicago is high, the ``facilities and faculty'' make it worth the expense.

Chicago charges $42,182 for tuition, the fifth highest among the top 25 schools after Harvard, Stanford, Yale and Carnegie Mellon's Tepper School of Business in Pittsburgh.

``Chicago has the most flexible MBA program,'' said Kole, who is also a clinical professor of economics at the school. ``Students get to choose the level of difficulty of the courses, the timing of the courses and the style of teaching that best suits their own preferences.''

The Business Week survey said 16 percent of Chicago's student body are minorities, the highest level among the top 10 and second to New York University's 17 percent.

To contact the reporter on this story: Patrick Cole in New York at pcole3@Bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: October 12, 2006 19:07 EDT