Northwestern Tops Harvard in Poll on MBA Programs

Northwestern University’s J. L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management has the country’s best MBA program, beating out such powerhouses as Harvard and Wharton, a Business Week magazine survey says.

The survey in the Nov. 28 issue also said that among other surprises, the graduate business schools of Cornell and Dartmouth made its top five, while Stanford and the University of Chicago, usually near the top of other rankings, finished lower.

Business Week said its survey was based on random polling of about 3,000 1988 graduates of 23 schools that often comprise conventional top-20 lists, which usually put Harvard and Wharton first. A poll of corporate recruiters also was factored in.

Northwestern’s Kellogg School, in Evanston, Ill., was the favorite of corporate recruiters and garnered some of the highest grades from graduates.

The top schools in the magazine list, with the names of the business schools in parentheses, are: 1. Northwestern, 2. Harvard, 3. Dartmouth, 4. Pennsylvania (Wharton), 5. Cornell, 6. Michigan, 7. Virginia, 8. North Carolina, 9. Stanford, 10. Duke, 11. Chicago, 12. Indiana, 13. Carnegie-Mellon, 14. Columbia, 15. MIT, 16. UCLA, 17. California (Berkeley), 18. NYU, 19. Yale, 20. Rochester.