Lesser-Known B-Schools Catapult to Top in MBA Recruiter Survey

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- When you want to know the quality of a school’s MBA grads, ask the people who hire them. We did. The answers aren’t all the usual suspects.

Yes, Stanford, Yale, and INSEAD score well, but so do lesser-known schools such as IMD, University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, and Georgia Tech.

These results come from a deep data dive into our 2019-20 Best B-Schools Ranking. As part of the ranking, Bloomberg Businessweek last year surveyed 985 employers around the world who recruit MBAs (survey details below). We highlighted four questions for a Quarterly Recruiters Update.

Survey Results

If you want doors to open wide because of the sheen of your MBA, head to Lausanne, Switzerland; Cambridge, Mass.; Palo Alto, Calif.; Seattle; or Philadelphia. They’re home to, respectively, IMD, Harvard, Stanford, Foster, and Wharton, tops in the minds of recruiters for schools with the best brands.

If creativity and innovation lead your list, Georgetown’s McDonough School of Business tops recruiters’ in our survey. Foster, Brigham Young’s Marriott School of Business, Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business, and Virginia’s Darden School of Business round out the top five.

If you seek a pool of quality, diverse grads, look first to INSEAD, with its long-standing large campuses in Fontainebleau, France, and Singapore, and its recently opened San Francisco innovation hub. The rest of the top five are IMD, London Business School, Georgetown, and Foster.

If the skills of entrepreneurship are what you value most, look to the U.S. West Coast, where Foster and Stanford come in Nos. 1 and 2, respectively. Then head east, to Maryland’s Smith School of Business, Georgia Tech, and Georgetown.

How This Works: Bloomberg Businessweek ranked 131 business schools around the world in 2019. Results were based on survey responses from graduating students, alumni, and recruiters, as well as employment data from each school. For our Quarterly Recruiters Update, we focused on the 2,863 surveys filled out by recruiters last year. We then selected our top-tier schools globally, ranked 1 to 30, and sorted results to see how recruiters view the best of the best. We highlighted four questions. A score of 1 is the lowest possible, 7 is the highest.

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