College Admissions Counseling Blog

Business Week has published their opinions of the best undergraduate business programs. As regular readers know I am not a big fan of rankings of colleges because such attempts ignore the issue of fit. It is also difficult to quantify "best" when dealing with colleges since the criteria of what makes a college the best will differ from student to student. However, the rankings of Business Week, like the annual rankings from US News, do provide some basic information about the colleges ranked and that information can be helpful to the prospective student. The rankings are broken down further and provides links to the data underlying the rankings.

In looking at some of these numbers, however, it is obvious that some data checking was not done. I took a quick look at the University of Minnesota school of business. The tuition listed for that school is $3,975 when the actual tuition according the the University of Minnesota website is $9,885. Moreover, the Business Week ranking lists the total college enrollment as 840,572. The University of Minnesota is one of the biggest campuses in the country but the actual enrollment numbers for all 4 campuses is 65,753. In other words, if you find a campus that you have an interest in, check with the college directly to verify some of this basic information.

ADDENDUM: There is a recent post on the NACAC listserve from a DePaul University Vice President regarding these ratings. At first I thought it was just someone complaining that their college didn't rate as highly as they expected. However, when DePaul contacted Business Week about not being rated the reply was:

"To be ranked you have to nominate yourself, be deemed eligible, give us student email addresses for our survey, and supply additional information used in the ranking. No one ever nominated your school."

If the sole basis for deciding whether to rank a college was whether they had nominated themselves, what little credibility this rating might have had is lost in my mind. Combined with the inaccuracies pointed out in this original post, I would strongly suggest that people completely ignore this ranking.