April 27 (Bloomberg) — The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, the U.S.’s oldest business college, has the best undergraduate business program in the nation, a new poll says.
Business Week magazine’s first poll of business programs offering bachelor’s degrees ranked University of Virginia’s program second, followed by University of Notre Dame in Indiana, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Emory University in Atlanta.
University of Michigan’s undergraduate business program was ranked sixth, followed by New York University; Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah; University of Texas at Austin and Indiana University in Bloomington, according to the survey.
The poll marks the second time Wharton’s undergraduate program has been ranked the top business school in a national survey. U.S. News & World Report magazine selected Wharton, in Philadelphia, as the best undergraduate business program among U.S. colleges last year.
“They do just about everything right,” said Louis Lavelle, 45, Business Week’s associate editor in charge of the magazine’s business-school coverage. He spoke in a telephone interview today about Wharton. “The academic quality is off the charts.”
Two calls to Wharton spokeswoman Tracy Liebman seeking comment about Wharton’s top ranking in the survey weren’t immediately returned.
Top Degree Helps
Business Week, published by McGraw-Hill Cos., has ranked graduate schools of business since 1988, he said. A degree from a top-ranked school can help students in the job market, Lavelle said.
“Business schools aren’t giving up on the MBA, but they’re shifting their attention to the undergraduates,” Lavelle said. “One reason is that they’re cheaper, and undergraduates can be molded.”
Founded in 1881 as the first collegiate school of business in the U.S., Wharton has about 2,400 undergraduate students and 280 faculty, according to its Web site.
Among Wharton’s key strengths are its researchers and professors, a median annual starting salary of $55,000 last year for graduating seniors, and an 8.8-to-1 student/faculty ratio, Lavelle said.
Wharton ranked third in Business Week’s 2004 survey of best MBA programs behind top-ranked Northwestern University and University of Chicago.
`Doing it Right’
“You’ve got a lot of synergy — when you do it right as Wharton has — with a good doctoral program that attracts great faculty,” said David Wilson, president of the Graduate Management Admission Council which administers the GMAT test, in a telephone interview today. “That feeds into the master’s program, and bachelor’s-degree students benefit from that.”
The magazine conducted an online survey of students and schools beginning in November 2005, looking at a number of features including course work, students’ starting salaries, student-to-faculty ratio and job placement, Lavelle said.
Business Week asked about 100 business school programs in the U.S. to participate in the survey and 84 agreed to do so, Lavelle said. The magazine asked 100,000 business majors to rate their programs on features ranging from curriculum to grading policies, he said. About 22 percent of the students contacted responded to the poll, Lavelle said.
To contact the reporter on this story:
Patrick Cole in New York at? pcole3@bloomberg.net.(Source:bloomberg.com)
