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◼ SOLUTIONS Bloomberg Businessweek November 11, 2019(No. 7 onBloomberg Businessweek’s 2019 Best
B-schoolsranking)offersa sustainabilitycertificate.
Duke’sFuquaSchoolofBusiness(No. 20 in theranking),
Michigan’sRossSchoolofBusiness(No.17),andYale’s
SchoolofManagement(No.14),offerdual-degreepro-
gramsthatcoversustainability.Andmoreprogramsare
addingelectivecoursesonthetopic.
Evenso,saysNancyLandrum,a businessmanage-
mentprofessoratLoyolaUniversityChicago’sQuinlan
SchoolofBusiness,thecoursesaren’tfullypreparingstu-
dentsfortheseverityoftheclimatecrisis.Landrum,who
co-authored a 2017 study of 51 colleges and universities
in the U.S. that offer sustainable business courses, says
most business schools haven’t aligned with the scientific
community about the radical measures needed to address
climate change. “Academia is lagging behind in educating
future business leaders,” she says. (Quinlan offers a minor
in sustainability management that Landrum helped create.)
There’s a big difference between offering sustainabil-
ity electives vs. baking the principles into every required
class, according to Bard’s Goodstein. Some B-schools
have started “saddlebag” centers that champion sustain-
ability, but the schools’ core ideology of profit maximi-
zation remains intact, says Stu Hart, co-founder of the
Sustainable Innovation MBA at the University of Vermont’s
Grossman School of Business. “The problem is, you can
always take the saddle off the horse, and it’s the same old
horse,” he says.
Top-tier schools are unlikely to overhaul their MBA pro-
grams because they’re so successful, says Jason Jay, a
senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan school who helped develop
its sustainability certificate. “We have a lot to learn from
these green MBA programs,” he says, noting there’s room
for multiple approaches that can respond to the kind of
training and community that students want.
John McKinley, executive director of the Center forBusiness, Government & Society at Dartmouth’s Tuck
School of Business (No. 2 in the ranking), suggests stu-
dents shouldn’t get hung up on whether the title of their
degree includes sustainability. “It’s the skill set and the
credibility of someone who fundamentally understands
these issues that’s most attractive from an employ-
er’s perspective vs. what the credential itself is called,”
says McKinley, a founding member of asset manager
BlackRock’s sustainable investment team.Top30 U.S. B-Schools
1 – Stanford 1
2 △ 17 Dartmouth(Tuck) 5
3 — Harvard 3
4 △ 1 Chicago(Booth) 6
5 △ 4 Virginia(Darden) 12
6 ▽ 4 Pennsylvania(Wharton) 1
7 ▽ 3 MIT(Sloan) 4
8 ▽ 2 UCBerkeley(Haas) 10
9 ▽ 2 Columbia 6
10 ▽ 2 Northwestern(Kellogg) 8
11 ▽ 1 Cornell(Johnson) 15
12 △ 5 UCLA(Anderson) 17
13 — NYU(Stern) 9
14 ▽ 3 Yale 11
15 ▽ 3 CarnegieMellon(Tepper) 19
16 — Washington(Foster) 21
17 △ 1 Michigan(Ross) 14
18 △ 5 NorthCarolina(Kenan-Flagler) 22
19 △ 1 Georgetown(McDonough) 20
20 ▽ 5 Duke(Fuqua) 13
21 △ 1 TexasatAustin(McCombs) 23
22 ▽ 9 USC(Marshall) 16
23 △ 1 Emory(Goizueta) 18
24 △ 3 GeorgiaTech(Scheller) 30
25 △ 3 Indiana(Kelley) 27
26 △ 9 Maryland(Smith) 32
27 ▽ 2 BrighamYoung(Marriott) 24
28 △ 3 NotreDame(Mendoza) 28
29 △ 16 Rochester(Simon) 31
30 ▽ 9 Vanderbilt (Owen) 26Schools are ranked on four indexes:
compensation, networking, learning,
and entrepreneurship. Rather than
assign weightings ourselves, we
surveyed students, alumni, and
recruiters to learn what was most
important to them. Their answers
determined each index’s weighting.
Combining that information with
results of our other surveys and
compensation data, we calculated
the overall rankings.
We canvassed 9,016 students,
and a total of 14,925 alumni took our
survey. The number of participating
recruiters at business schools
was 985.
All schools submitted
employment data for the class of
2018 following standards set by the
MBA Career Services & Employer
Alliance, a trade group foundedin 1994 to collect consistent,
comparable, peer-reviewed data.
Schools were then given surveys
to send to students who graduated
from Oct. 1, 2018, to Sept. 30,
2019; alumni who graduated from
Oct. 1, 2010, to Sept. 30, 2013; and
employers that recruited graduates
for full-time positions in 2017 and- Schools had to abide by
Bloomberg’s Code of Ethics, meant
to ensure that all respondents
participate voluntarily, without bias
or pressure from school officials or
their peers.
We set minimum thresholds for
response rates based on the size
of a school’s graduating and alumni
classes, as well as for employment
data; schools that didn’t meet these
thresholds were eliminated.
�Caleb Solomon
Methodology
Rank SchoolCompensation
rankChange
in rank
2018-19