Stanford Tops Businessweek’s B-School Ranking for Fifth Year in a Row

The Stanford Graduate School of Business, for the fifth straight year, has claimed the top spot in Bloomberg Businessweek’s annual ranking of the best business schools. The assessment of 110 full-time graduate MBA programs around the globe is based on data provided by participating schools as well as responses to survey questions by students, alumni and employers (participation thresholds for each category must be met to qualify). The surveys gauge the participants’ level of satisfaction with learning, networking, career opportunities, skills development and more.

Stanford’s connections to the technology startups, venture capital firms and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley have boosted the school’s desirability. There are five indexes at the heart of this ranking—Compensation, Learning, Networking, Entrepreneurship and Diversity—and the school ranked first in Entrepreneurship. Stanford offers several programs and specializations for those students who are serious about starting their own businesses. Earlier this year it launched what it calls an “ecopreneurship” program, a joint effort between the B-school and the university’s Doerr School of Sustainability. “Student interest in the problems of climate change and sustainability has risen significantly in the past several years,” Amelia Hansen, director of communications and media relations, said in an email.

Sustainability and climate change have taken on greater urgency at almost all business schools—among students, faculty and administrators. Schools are addressing this challenge through interdisciplinary programs and new courses, and with a greater emphasis on areas of research that weren’t as prominent in business school 10 or more years ago. “We are bringing more sciences into the classroom,” says Joan Rodon, dean of ESADE Business School in Barcelona. “Whether hard science, or more engineering, we have people coming from these domains into the business school.”

Such shifts—introducing more science, adding interdisciplinary programs to enhance the curriculum in, say, health care or emerging areas of technology—also signal the types of jobs and roles that more MBAs will take on in the years ahead, according to deans and business school leaders. “We are going more in depth into disciplines that are not ‘management’ disciplines per se,” Rodon says, as a way to provide students with what he calls “a more holistic perspective of the world.”

No question, technology sector layoffs that started in late 2022 have put at least a temporary damper on job prospects for some MBAs, especially in the US. (In India more than one-third of graduates from both Indian School of Business and Indian Institute of Management Bangalore went into jobs in technology; the former had the highest number of graduates of all the schools in our ranking join the tech sector.) Cutbacks and deferred starting dates by the largest consulting firms, as well as layoffs in the financial sector, further complicated the jobs picture in 2023. But, B-school leaders say, new areas of expertise will continue to emerge, new jobs are being created at a very fast pace, and the profile of today’s business leader is evolving just as rapidly.