The Best B-School Isn’t Necessarily the Best B-School for You
It pays to dig into the rankings to understand a program’s strengths and weaknesses.
Harvard Business School.
Photographer: Gren Hren for Harvard Business SchoolMost prospective MBAs will choose the best school they can get into. But a higher-ranking program isn’t always the right place for a particular candidate. Some top universities score surprisingly poorly in certain categories of Bloomberg Businessweek’s 2021-22 Best B-Schools survey, which asks respondents how strongly they agree or disagree with various statements about their studies. We spoke with experts in recruitment and B-school curricula for an explanation.
Harvard Business School (ranked 3rd overall by Businessweek), Chicago Booth (4th), NYU Stern (11th), and Yale (12th) all scored among the lowest 10 programs on this query. At many schools, says David Burkus, author of Leading From Anywhere: The Essential Guide to Managing Remote Teams, half of the final grade in some classes is based on participation. That incentivizes speaking up “even if it means challenging the ideas of others and fighting for your own,” Burkus says. So whatever some schools might say about collaboration in the curriculum, it isn’t necessarily being modeled in the classroom.