In the Oct. 15 issue of Forbes magazine, The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth will be ranked fourth in a survey of national and regional MBA programs.
The aim of this survey was "to show which business schools deliver the best payback or value for one's investment," according to Forbes' Kurt Badenhausen from Forbes. To attain these results, 20,000 graduates who received M.B.A.s in 1996 were surveyed. These graduates came from 104 schools within and outside the U.S.
The salaries of graduates before matriculation, after graduation, and four and a half years later were compared with the theoretical salaries for those same students without M.B.A.s, assuming that salary growth would only have been half as much. These figures were then compared against the cost of tuition to determine the return on graduates' investment.
"This is a far cry from the usual business-school ratings you see, which compare schools based on salary offers of recent graduates but take no account of ... how much their students were making before they enrolled, as well as five years out of school," Badenhausen said.
The results show that Tuck was fourth, following Harvard, University of Pennsylvania's Wharton and Columbia.
"When Forbes ranks Tuck among the top five business schools, it confirms that the markets place a high value on the Tuck experience," Tuck Dean Paul Danos said.
The same survey that was conducted on the Class of 1994 ranked Tuck second after Harvard. Stanford, UC Berkeley and UCLA were also in the top five. This small slide downwards did not seem to worry Dean Danos.
"The specific ranking is not as important as being close to the top. If a school is going to be close to the top 10, given that there are 1,000 business schools, I'd say that Tuck is doing very well," he stated confidently.
"We have a good combination of highly effective teaching with up-to-date theories and techniques, but we also have a community of people who learn to live and work with each other. This is a result of focusing in the student body size and it seems to really work in helping people have successful careers."
