Dartmouth's Amos Tuck School of Business has been ranked number one by The Wall Street Journal's first annual survey of M.B.A. programs around the world. The study, based solely on the input of corporate recruiters -- "the buyers of M.B.A. talent," -- ranked the Tuck school first among 50 top business schools, beating out prestigious and more widely known institutions such as Harvard, Stanford and Wharton.
"This number one ranking is a tribute to our great community," Tuck Dean Paul Danos said.
Joining Tuck on the list of top 10 business schools were, in order of decreasing rank: Carnegie Mellon University, Yale University, the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, Purdue University, the University of Chicago, Harvard University, Southern Methodist University, and the University of Texas at Austin.
To the surprise of many, the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business was placed at number 18, and Stanford University received the lackluster ranking of 45.
1,600 corporate recruiters from around the world contributed their opinions to the survey.
"We believe that recruiters' insights are crucial because of recruiters' in-depth knowledge of the schools and their graduates," Paul Steiger, Managing Editor of The Wall Street Journal said in a press release. "Our survey should benefit students, employers and MBA programs alike by providing detailed information about the attributes that companies value most."
The recruiters ranked five attributes as most influential in their decisions as to which schools to recruit from and which applicants to hire: communication and interpersonal skills, past success with the quality of graduates, the ability to work well within a team, analytical and problem-solving skills, and the ability to drive results.
The Tuck school surpassed all other schools in all but one of these categories -- failing to garner the most citations for the quality of its graduates' analytical and problem-solving skills.
Tuck also received special recognition for "Social/Environmental Responsibility" and ranked first in the category of "Collegial Environment."
Harvard Business School took the top spot in the category of "Competitive Environment."
The results of the survey were published in yesterday's edition of The Wall Street Journal and are also included The Wall Street Journal Guide to Business Schools, an e-book featuring information on over 150 M.B.A. programs.
