The best business schools: A market-based approach

This article introduces a market-based methodology for evaluating the performance of MBA programs. We seek to distinguish the quality of a program from the quality of its students. We judge a program's performance by its value added, measured by the graduates' salaries, after accounting for student characteristics and job attributes. While four of our top five programs have been highly ranked elsewhere, 10 of our top 20 programs are unranked elsewhere. We explore the determinants of value added and find that programs with high faculty salaries and those relying heavily on the case method have significantly higher value added.