Students’ Favorite MBA Programs

Obviously, students don’t come to MBA programs to stay. The sole purpose of business education is to propel your career forward by learning crucial skills and obtaining a much larger salary. So how do we know when a business school program is the best? By its students saying “I’d like to come back there”.

Satisfaction Surveys

To learn what schools students want to return to most often, the so-called satisfaction surveys are conducted, for instance, by such notable media as The Economist. The schools are assessed on a scale built from one to five. This year it turned out that the students’ most beloved program is University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business MBA (its average is 4.76). A close second place belongs to the Chicago Booth School of Business (4.74), and the third is divided up between the NYU Stern and IESE business schools (4.71).

Actually, the difference is infinitely small – the highest and the lowest points are separated only by 0.49 of a point. Most schools were evaluated higher than they were the previous year, according to Poets&Quants. Some, however, performed lower than before, like, for instance, UCLA’s Anderson School of Management and MIT Sloan School of Management.

How Kellogg Does It

Still, surveys show us numbers, nothing more. How did these programs manage to achieve such high praise from their students? To learn that, Poets&Quants interviewed Matthew Merrick, the Associate Dean at Kellogg School of Management, as well as NYU Stern’s Vice Dean, Raghu Sundaram. Kellogg got a 4.63, which is pretty high on the list. Both universities are located in large cities, which alone makes them attractive to students. Nevertheless, these schools do everything possible to make student satisfaction even greater.

If Kellogg alumni were asked to describe the time spent at the university with one word, it would likely be the word ‘teamwork’. For their two years on this full-time program, students are divided into teams, creating an environment similar to a prosperous modern company. The students have to learn how to communicate with each other to work towards a goal, how to make their egos collaborate and still move towards progress. While every self-respecting MBA program has students prepare team projects, Kellogg is doing much more than that – the whole education process is a team project.

The school’s principles didn’t develop by themselves: it was rather a conscious choice. Making such a productive program happen meant teaching the students to be perfect team workers. A team doesn’t exist if someone is trying to hide from work or take all the reward for themselves.

If asked what the very best thing at Kellogg’s is, students say that’s the friendly relationships they create during their stay. Such friendships may hold for long years, and they often develop into strong partnerships even after ten or more years have passed.

Join MBA25 Event in Warsaw and learn more about students’ Favorite MBA Programs.