What’s the best undergraduate business program in the U.S.?

If you believe U.S. News & World Report‘s annual ranking, it’s Wharton, hands down. If you think Bloomberg BusinessWeek would have a better clue about what makes a great business program, you would probably be surprised that Wharton doesn’t even make its Top 5. BusinessWeek prefers Notre Dame University’s Mendoza College of Business.

We’ve come up with a new way to look at the best programs, combining the results of the two most closely watched rankings of the undergraduate experience and a new and important wrinkle in the analysis: a university’s overall national rank in the annual U.S. News list. After all, a student who majors in business at any of these schools will be taking far more courses outside the business school during the four years he or she is enrolled in an undergraduate program. So the school’s overall reputation should be as important as the quality of the business program.

WHARTON COMES OUT ON TOP FOLLOWED BY CORNELL AND NOTRE DAME IN A TIE FOR SECOND

Using this composite methodology, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School comes out on top, with a significant lead over two schools that are tied for second place: Cornell University’s Dyson School and Notre Dame. The University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Business comes in fourth, while Washington University’s Olin School rounds out the top five. Many of the first-tier programs are well known. The business schools at UC-Berkeley, the University Michigan, Emory Emory, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Carnegie Mellon University complete the top ten.

Four of the top ten undergraduate programs in business are at public universities. That’s largely because many of the best-known private schools that grant MBA degrees, such as Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Harvard Business School, Columbia University, Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, and Dartmouth Tuck to name a few, do not have undergraduate business programs.

Source: poetsandquantsforundergrads.com