U.S. News Releases 2017 Best Business Schools

U.S. News & World Report has released its 2017 ranking of business schools, and there are some big winners and losers this year.

Harvard Business School has taken control of the number one spot, with Stanford Graduate School of Business dropping into a second-place tie with Chicago Booth School of Business. The top ten schools are:

1. Harvard School of Business

2. Stanford Graduate School of Business

3. Booth School of Business

4. Wharton School

5. MIT Sloan School of Management

6. Kellogg School of Management

7. Haas School of Business

8. Tuck School of Business

9. Yale School of Management

10. Columbia Business School

One of the biggest winners is Yale School of Management, which rose from 13 last year to 8 this year. Over the last few years, Yale has expanded its program in several areas, including by opening a new building. These changes led Poets and Quants to name Ted Snyder their 2015 Dean of the Year.

By contrast, New York University Stern School of Business had a rough year, falling from 11 to 20. However, this decline appears to have more to do with the process of how the rankings are calculated than with any changes at the school itself.

Specifically, Stern was late reporting information about its test scores to U.S. News. Unsurprisingly, Stern and U.S. News have different takes on how the situation should have been handled.

Of course, any ranking of business schools should be taken with a healthy serving of salt since different schools have different strengths and weaknesses and putting schools in order necessarily involves some simplifying.

U.S. News achieves this simplifying by looking at several factors aimed to measure how prestigious schools are, like acceptance rate, test scores of incoming students and so on.

All of the top ten business schools are very prominent programs, and different schools score higher on different factors.

For example, among the top ten schools, Stanford scores the highest on GMAT (733) but the lowest on the percentage of graduating students who have jobs (71.7%). Harvard scores highest on alum pay ($149,784). Booth scores highest on grads with jobs (86.5%).

Overall, most top schools stayed in about the same place they were last year. Seven of the top ten schools either moved by one place or didn’t move at all. Two of the top ten schools moved by two places, with Columbia falling and Booth on the up-and-up.

In the end, though, the dramatic shifts that did happen tell us a little about what’s going on at some of these schools.

For example, we know that things appear to be trending upward at Yale. And we know that the folks at Stern are probably going to be extra careful about making sure they’ve submitted all their data on time next year.