McIntire Remains No. 2 among Business Programs

For the seventh straight year, UVa’s McIntire School of Commerce earned one of two top positions in Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s annual rankings of undergraduate business programs. Overall, UVa came in second after Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business and was followed by Cornell’s Dyson School of Applied Economics & Management at number three.

"McIntire earned A-plus grades for teaching quality, facilities and services, and job placement and was rated the No. 1 MBA feeder school," said Carl Zeithaml, dean of the McIntire School.

To rank programs, BusinessWeek used nine measures, including surveys of senior business majors and corporate recruiters, median starting salaries, and the number of graduates each program sends to top MBA programs. Academic quality was rated by combining average SAT scores, student-faculty ratios, class size, the percent of students with internships, and student reports on hours devoted to class work.

This year, 142 undergraduate business programs participated in the ranking. Eighteen were eliminated because of insufficient response rates in the student survey, employer survey, or both.

Making the biggest jump was Quinnipiac University’s School of Business. Quinnipiac shot up 19 spots, to No. 72, because of a strong showing in the employer survey. Elon University’s Love School of Business, a favorite among local students, moved up 17 spots to No. 43.

Both Georgetown (14) and the University of Richmond (15) retained spots among Bloomberg’s top 20 undergraduate business schools.
Other highly ranked local schools included American University (58), College of William & Mary (25), George Washington University (66), James Madison University (32), Loyola University of Maryland (62), and the University of Maryland (38).

For the record, Bloomberg’s 2012 top 15 undergraduate business schools are:

1. Notre Dame (Mendoza)
   
2. University of Virginia (McIntire)
3. Cornell (Dyson)
4. University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)
5. Emory (Goizueta)
6. MIT (Sloan)
7. University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (Ross)
8. Washington University-St. Louis (Olin)
9. Boston College (Carroll)
10. University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill (Kenan Flagler)
11. UC Berkeley (Haas)
12. NYU (Stern)
13. Villanova
14. Georgetown (McDonough)
15. University of Richmond (Robins)

Keep in mind that like any other "ranking," this list represents one organization's opinions and should represent little more than “food for thought” or a starting place for a more thorough investigation of undergraduate business programs.