The Wall Street Journal Guide to Business Schools

Book excerpt: Most people return to business school for an M.B.A. degree to increase their marketability in a highly competitive business environment. How well they achieve their goal depends in large measure on how the business world views the schools they attended. For the first time ever, The Wall Street Journal, the world's most respected business publication, along with Harris Interactive, the organization that created the well-known Harris poll, tells you what corporate recruiters from a wide variety of fields think about the M.B.A. programs they know so intimately. Nearly two years in the making, this is the only major survey that focuses exclusively on the opinions of recruiters -- the buyers of M.B.A. talent. Twenty-seven variables for each school were evaluated, variables that drive a recruiter to hire a particular graduate, such as their company's long-term success with a school's M.B.A. graduates and the students' communication and interpersonal skills, analytical and problem-solving abilities and leadership potential. This groundbreaking volume used the evaluations of more than sixteen hundred recruiters, appraising twenty-seven variables for more than two hundred schools in order to arrive at statistically valid ratings for fifty U.S. and international M.B.A. programs, as well as recruiters' observations on thirty-five more business schools and brief profiles on an additional seventy schools. In addition to the overall rankings, The Wall Street Journal Guide to Business Schools ranks the best public and private schools, the top schools by region, the top large and small schools, the top schools on top attributes, schools that are "hidden gems" and business schools by industry. Also evaluated are schools' academic excellence, the collegiality (and competitiveness) of each school and the most important school attributes. The corporate recruiters even list their personal favorites...and go on the record with extremely candid observations about both the business schools and their graduates. The first guide to business schools published exclusively as an e-book, The Wall Street Journal Guide to Business Schools will prove to be an invaluable resource for prospective students, school faculty and administrators -- and recruiters themselves.