The Tuck School of Business was ranked the seventh-best business school in America in the U.S. News and World Report's Best Graduate Schools 2009 issue, released Friday. Tuck's position did not change from last year, but it is now tied with the Haas School at the University of California, Berkeley.
"It's not surprising," Dean of the Tuck School Paul Danos said. "We've been ranked around that level for some time."
Forty percent of the ranking is based on quality assessments by peers and recruiters, 35 percent on graduate placement success, including mean starting salary, and 25 percent on student selectivity, assessed by mean GPA and GMAT scores and the school's acceptance rate. GMAT scores and starting salaries of Tuck students have risen dramatically relative to other schools in the past five years, according to Danos.
Danos is not preoccupied by fluctuations within the top 10, he said.
"People don't know that there are thousands of schools and to be in the top 50 is great," he said. "To be in the top 10 consistently is being the best."
Harvard University, Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania topped the magazine's list. According to Donas, certain factors that influence U.S. News and World Report ratings are more easily shown by schools with larger student bodies than Tuck's, Donas said.
"Some ranking systems, like the U.S. News and World Report use generalized corporate evaluations based on people who never came to Tuck or know little about it," he said. "There are disadvantages to not having the name recognition larger schools have, but we have recognition in circles that matter."
Tuck was ranked as the best business school in the country by The Wall Street Journal and Forbes and fourth internationally by The Economist.
"We can't complain," Danos said. "We've done extremely well on average among the top six rankings. Last year we were second on average."
Even though Danos said slight variations in ratings are not significant, he maintained that rankings can be useful to evaluate schools' standings and suggest possible areas of improvement.
