After having risen in rank from No. 16 to No. 9 in 2012 and again to No. 6 in 2013, the Carroll School of Management (CSOM) has been ranked the fourth best undergraduate business school in the U.S. by Bloomberg Businessweek.
The ranking is based on calculations from student surveys, employer surveys, MBA feeder school rankings, academic quality, student-faculty ratios, and median starting salaries for 132 national undergraduate business programs. According to Bloomberg, the only other schools to precede the University are the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business, the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce, and Cornell University’s Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management.
Although 152 colleges and universities were invited to participate in this year’s rankings, 13 submitted too few student responses, six were discounted for submitting too few employer surveys, and one failed to provide required data, resulting in 132 total programs evaluated.
The criteria for Bloomberg’s ranking algorithm are weighted differently, with approximately 30 percent of the ranking dependent on the results from student surveys over the past three years; 30 percent on academic quality; 20 percent on recruiter rankings; 10 percent on the university’s MBA feeder school ranking; and 10 percent on the starting salaries of graduate students.
For the student surveys that comprise 30 percent of the ranking, Bloomberg distributed 91,603 44-question student assessments to graduating seniors-28,842 of whom submitted responses-on topics regarding academic quality, facilities quality, and career services, among others, and graded on a one-to-five scale. Fifty percent of the overall student assessment ranking is based on 2014 responses, 25 percent on 2013 responses, and the remaining 25 percent on 2012 responses. Bloomberg then averages the scores for each year and uses them as an estimate for student valuation of overall quality.
The academic quality portion of the ranking, which accounts for another 30 percent, is based on five measures: average SAT score for the most recent entering class; the ratio of full-time students to full-time faculty; average class size in core classes; percentage of students with business-related internships; and the average number of hours students spend preparing for class per week. All of the metrics used in the calculation were either reported directly by the school or by students.
To account for employer opinion in its rankings, Bloomberg partnered with Cambria Consulting to gather data from 301 of 922 contacted employers to identify preferred schools for recruiting in the last five years and to assess the quality of graduates. Similar to the student surveys, the 2014 employer assessments were measured over the last three years, with 50 percent of the score based on 2014 results, 25 percent on 2013 results, and 25 percent on 2012 results.
The MBA feeder school portion of the ranking-which accounted for 10 percent of the overall ranking-was designed to determine which schools send the most undergraduates to top MBA programs and is based on surveys completed by MBA students in 2008, 2010, and 2012.
This year’s ranking also comes just months prior to the beginning of CSOM’s inaugural Summer Management Catalyst Program-a 10-week business program running from May to July designed for non-CSOM students to gain an understanding of business practices, and slated to accept about 45 students for the first summer. The program was created for students with interests in business, but who may not be able to enroll in management school courses during the academic year due to increasingly limited student capacity in CSOM.
