Forbes "Return on Investment" Methodology
We compared the alumni earnings in their first five years out of business school to their opportunity cost (two years of forgone compensation, tuition and required fees). We measure total compensation, including salary, bonuses and exercised stock options. We assume that compensation would have risen half as fast as their post-MBA salary increases had these alumni not attended business school.
We rank the schools solely on their “5-year MBA gain.” It represents the net cumulative amount the typical alumni would have earned after five years by getting their MBA versus staying in their pre-MBA career.
#2 Stanford
#3 Northwestern (Kellogg)
#4 Harvard
#5 Pennsylvania (Wharton)
#6 Dartmouth (Tuck)
#7 Columbia
#7 MIT (Sloan)
#9 Cornell (Johnson)
#10 Michigan (Ross)
#11 UC Berkeley (Haas)
#11 Yale
#13 Virginia (Darden)
#14 Duke (Fuqua)
#15 UNC (Kenan-Flagler)
#16 UCLA (Anderson)
#17 Carnegie Mellon (Tepper)
#18 Texas-Austin (McCombs)
#19 Indiana (Kelley)
#20 NYU (Stern)
#21 USC (Marshall)
#22 Emory (Goizueta)
#23 Washington (Foster)
#24 Brigham Young (Marriott)
#25 Notre Dame (Mendoza)
#26 Rice (Jones)
#27 Michigan State (Broad)
#28 Georgia Tech (Scheller)
#29 Washington U-St. Louis (Olin)
#30 Vanderbilt (Owen)
#31 Georgetown (McDonough)
#32 Minnesota (Carlson)
#33 Texas A&M (Mays)
#34 Penn State (Smeal)
#35 Wisconsin-Madison
#36 Utah (Eccles)
#37 Pittsburgh (Katz)
#38 Arizona State (Carey)
#39 Boston (Questrom)
#40 Purdue (Krannert)
#41 Ohio State (Fisher)
#42 Rochester (Simon)
#43 UC Irvine (Merage)
#44 William & Mary (Mason)
#45 SMU (Cox)
#46 Texas-Dallas (Jindal)
#47 Maryland (Smith)
#48 Georgia (Terry)
#49 Buffalo
#50 Alabama (Manderson)
#51 Rollins (Crummer)
#52 Case Western (Weatherhead)
#53 Missouri (Trulaske)
#54 Tennessee (Haslam)
#55 Miami
#56 UC Davis
#57 Willamette (Atkinson)
#58 Fordham (Gabelli)
#59 Tulane (Freeman)
#60 Colorado (Leeds)
#61 Pepperdine (Graziadio)